Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

Behave is a sweeping and in depth accounting of the neurobiology of humans. It covers everthing! The Chapters start with The Behavior, One Second Before, Second to Minutes Before, . . . Centuries to Millenia Before . . . Us Versus Them . . . Morality . . . Epilogue

So many big topics are covered in this book! I’ve picked some themes that resonated with my current understanding of what it is to be human. These are represented by some scant notes of mine clearly labeled as [jch note:s]. All quoted text is verbatum from the book, with p.Page number.

Resonating Themes: It’s complicated! (Addressing Nature v. Nurture), Us v. Them, Autopilot (Free Will?) Brain Science, Income Inequality, Moral Foundations, Culture

Sapolsky is a great writer! The text is clearly presented by someone with a firm grasp on the tree of knowledge and how to pass it on. There are many noted os a personal nature, usually with a wonderful sense of humor. And there are many, many wonderful references such as “untruthiness”.

It’s Complicated! – That’s the theme of the book.

p.248 “This is summarized wonderfully by the neurobiologist Donald Hebb: “It is no more appropriate to say things like characteristic A is more influenced by nature than nurture than . . . to say that the area of a rectangle is more influenced by its length than its width.” It’s appropriate to figure out if lengths or widths explain more of the variability in a population of rectangles. But not in individual ones.”

Epilogue Bullet: ” Genes aren’t about inevitabilities; they’re about potentials and vulnerabilities. And they don’t determine anything on their own. Gene/ environment interactions are everywhere. Evolution is most consequential when altering regulation of genes, rather than genes themselves.”

Epilogue Bullet: ” Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience; that’s how we learn—context, context, context.”

Epilogue Bullet: ” We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don’t know a thing about.”

p.267 Figure from Cluture Gender and Math ( Luigi Guiso et al. ) showing girls better at math in Iceland

Epilogue Bullet: ” Brains and cultures coevolve.”
p.92 “Words have power. They can save, cure, uplift, devastate, deflate, and kill. And unconscious priming with words influences pro-and antisocial behaviors.”

p.97 culture shapes what we see “Thus, culture literally shapes how and where you look at the world.”

Us versus Them

Epilogue Bullet: ” We implicitly divide the world into Us and Them, and prefer the former. We are easily manipulated, even subliminally and within seconds, as to who counts as each.”
Epilogue Bullet: ” Be dubious about someone who suggests that other types of people are like little crawly, infectious things.”

p.388 IAT “Rapid, automatic biases against a Them can be demonstrated with the fiendishly clever Implicit Association Test (IAT). 3 Suppose you are unconsciously prejudiced against trolls. To simplify the IAT enormously: A computer screen flashes either pictures of humans or trolls or words with positive connotations (e.g., “honest”) or negative ones (“ deceitful”). Sometimes the rule is “If you see a human or a positive term, press the red button; if it’s a troll or a negative term, press the blue button.” And sometimes it’s “Human or negative term, press red; troll or positive term, press blue.” Because of your antitroll bias, pairing a troll with a positive term, or a human with a negative, is discordant and slightly distracting. Thus you pause for a few milliseconds before pressing a button.”

p.629 “The core of that thought is Susan Fiske’s demonstration that automatic other-race-face amygdala responses can be undone when subjects think of that face as belonging to a person, not a Them. The ability to individuate even monolithic and deindividuated monsters can be remarkable.”

Epilogue Bullet: ” When humans invented socioeconomic status, they invented a way to subordinate like nothing that hierarchical primates had ever seen before.”

p.144 “There’s wonderful context dependency to these effects. When a rat secretes tons of glucocorticoids because it’s terrified, dendrites atrophy in the hippocampus. However, if it secretes the same amount by voluntarily running on a running wheel, dendrites expand. Whether the amygdala is also activated seems to determine whether the hippocampus interprets the glucocorticoids as good or bad stress.”

Extremely interesting and insightful read!

This is nothing less than an attempt to integrate the bases of human conduct from all of Tinbergen’s four perspectives(mechanism, adaptive value, ontogeny, phylogeny). The writing is creative and entertaining as are his lectures. There is adequate sourcing for follow up if so inclined. The book itself is of doorstop magnitude–you will need all summer. That said a most worthy read by a an always engaging author on perhaps the most important topic in the world.

The explanations of the multilayered background to behaviour was very interestingand the comparison with other animals including primates valuable. But how to apply the knowledge for practical purposes was hard to fathom. In fact the message seemed to be – this is how it works but if you try to change something based on this you will probably get unintended consequences. Wise advice, but knowledgable change must be better than ignirant change.

 Es un libro maravilloso siento que ahora puedo explicar con presión muchas de mis conductas y entender a los demás, cualquier persona que tenga la oportunidad debería leerlo.