My considered opinion, at this time, for what it’s worth, is that humanity is on a teeter-totter of doom versus prosperity. Recent advances in neuroanatomy and
physiology, focusing on the habenula bring me to the conclusion that given the negative bias of the habenula and its function of preserving the individual our destiny is quite bleak unless and until we find a way to calm the habenula in a large portion of the population.
Parapharsed comment: o help people dealing with fear and withdrawal, based on IPNB, we need to build safe, connected environments. Since the part of the brain that reacts to bad experiences pushes people to avoid things, we need to focus on good relationships that break that pattern.
This means making sure people feel genuinely seen and heard. We need communities that lower stress, built on trust and fairness. Good, reliable relationships—friends, groups, shared activities—can help people and whole communities move away from fear.
Also, we need policies and social rules that are fair, reduce harm, and encourage working together. The nervous system heals through stable relationships, not just by individual effort. Basically, fix the surroundings, and the brain will find its way back to normal.
Response: you for the engagement.
I suppose the problem is, or what I am pointing out is, that this little organ in our brian, the habenula, is essential to our survival. That survival, first and foremost depends on the individual
surviving so it can go on to make more organisms. That being the case it has a “negative” bias. It is a calculus. Organisms, on average, need to forgo engagement more often than not in the belief they will survive longer doing so, evolutions' acknowledgment that that world is dangerous. You might die out there!
It seems that that creates a system of 2 steps forward and one back. And maybe it is not even that weight to the positive. The question is, is that positive enough for us to survive?
But is it really a net positive? How do you get a net positive from a system that starts with a negative bias and doesn’t that translate to a negative bias for the group? How do you get a positive from that negative? If you look at human evolution it seems you can. It seems we have made progress. But it seems, of late, that about every 80 years we try to blow it all up (Tomkins’s nuclear script.)
It may be that the drive to procreate is enough positivity to leak through to foster attachment. But then the problem is didn’t that develop for groups of a few hundred where everyone knew each other? The positive and negative were more balanced. The negative concerned with the external more than the internal? I am not an anthropologist.
I doubt there has been much or any evolution at the level of the habenula to push it more toward the positive.
All your suggestions are exactly what we need. But if we are so weighted as a group toward question how do we create enough positive institutions?
You're pointing out a fundamental evolutionary tension: the habenula’s role in avoiding failure and threat is crucial for individual survival, yet human progress relies on overcoming avoidance to engage, connect, and build societies. This raises the question of whether our collective trajectory is a true net positive or if we're just inching forward while constantly battling a deeply ingrained negativity bias.
Your reference to Tomkins’ nuclear script is interesting—this cyclical self-destruction pattern suggests that even as we build civilizations, the underlying mechanisms of avoidance and fear remain powerful enough to periodically unravel stability. It does seem that attachment, driven by the need to reproduce and nurture offspring, provides enough of a counterweight to push toward social cohesion. But as you note, this worked best in small groups where the balance between external threats and internal cooperation was different from today’s world of massive, impersonal societies.
If the habenula hasn’t undergone significant evolutionary shifts toward a more positive bias, then the challenge is less about "fixing" the individual brain and more about creating environments that dampen excessive threat responses. The IPNB (Interpersonal Neurobiology) approach recognizes this by emphasizing safety, predictability, and connection—strategies that, in theory, could help recalibrate a system wired to expect failure more often than success. But the fundamental question remains: can we create environments stable enough to override a mechanism designed for a harsher, more immediate survival landscape?
Maybe the best we can do is engineer social conditions that allow for a slow recalibration over generations, rather than expecting the habenula to fundamentally change. That might explain why progress feels so uneven—two steps forward, one step back—because we’re constantly wrestling with an ancient survival calculus that doesn’t easily yield to modern social aspirations.
