Hard-Wired
This review argues that Nicholas Wright’s Warhead overlooks scientific evidence about the reciprocal relationship between warfare and neurobiology: studies find lasting changes in brain regions associated with memory, motivation, threat perception, and trauma among soldiers and civilian survivors, while cognitive rigidity, impulsivity, and differences in the prefrontal cortex are linked to vulnerability to extremist or authoritarian ideologies. It criticizes the book’s cheerful, admiring treatment of war and its proposal that democracies exploit “survival-grade neural machinery” to win conflicts, concluding that brain science instead shows the brain to be malleable and demonstrates that war diminishes human capacities and profoundly alters individual bodies.