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At least three times a day, your body uses the logic of the toad,
holding on to its reserves until it senses the arrival of fresh resources.
The body uses the same strategy when you go on a diet. It senses that
the food supply is disappearing, assumes that you may be forced to
make it through the next few months with almost nothing to eat, and
slows your metabolism to build a stockpile.182 Since it holds onto the
energy tucked away in your fatty tissue like a miser clutching his
money, you have trouble losing weight.
These food strategies are controlled by a part of the brain known
as the hypothalamus.183 What other responsibility does the
hypothalamus handle? Anger and the urge to attack. Cats whose
anterior hypothalamus is electrically stimulated will maul a rat.
What's more, like Mongols setting off joyfully on a raid, these cats will
learn to navigate a maze simply for the pleasure of pouncing on a
rodent placed at the labyrinth's end.184
Like the toad, human cultures in periods of hopelessness go into
dormant passivity. The untouchables in India seldom attempted to
overthrow the system that held them in miserable subjugation. They
were resigned to their lot.
But give a social group a jolt of resources, and suddenly it is
infused with energy, optimism and restlessness. Servants feel ready to
grab the knife with which they had been cutting the meat for the
master and put it to the master's throat. Nations that had been
wallowing passively in the slough of despond look for an opponent to
bash in the hope of gaining fresh territory.
The Arabs, for example, stayed dormant until oil wealth hit them
in the early '70s. Then their terrorists assaulted the west.185 Their
murderous exuberance was the product of a chemical cocktail, a
biological potion dosed with testosterone.
The lesson is simple. Defeat makes superorganisms sleepy. So
does poverty. But a military win or a shower of new wealth rouses
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