Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

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 . . . EpilogueSo 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, CultureSapolsky 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 IcelandEpilogue 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 ThemEpilogue 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."

Sapolsky is witty, intelligent and quite knowledgeable of his subject matter. I never understood what was meant by "identifying with the mind" or why "free will is an illusion". I also didn't understand what amygdala hijack was either even though I had heard about it a lot. All of this is explained and more. The connection between us humans and other animals was profoundly moving and I loved the last half of the book as Sapolsky explains major themes of human behavior such as compassion, empathy, hate, aggression, peace, war and many others and helps us understand what is happening within our brains that drives these behaviors.I found the reviews by obvious conservatives (most of the 1 & 2 star folks) quite funny. Clearly they didn't read the entire book. Because one thing Sapolsky notes over and over and over....the brain is PLASTIC. It can change depending on how much we "feed" it new information. So even when he notes that conservatives tend toward stupidity, he explains what is happening within their brains that dictates this. And it's important to note they were not born this way, but became this way in response to their environment, mostly to the fear of not surviving. (One thing you really get from this book is how survival is a fundamental driver of ALL our behavior). As a result they spend too much time thinking from the limited limbic system (amygdala) and too little time activating and expanding their knowledge within the prefrontal cortex. They are literally continually activating their threat response and all their choices are fear-based. Emotional regulation/mindfulness is the key to overcoming this and it's sad they don't see this. So much unnecessary suffering.This was a really long book and took me months to finish. But was really so much worth the effort. I highly recommend this book to all humans.

Me gustó mucho muy buen libro solo lo usé para leer y aprender más 💯/💯

I love love love this book👍 one hundred percent worth buying.

Highly recommend this author and this book on what influences / causes human behaviours.

Item was almost perfect if it wasn’t for a little flow at the lower corner of the front cover (which I don’t think was due to delivery for the way it was well packaged).

Fair warning: this book is not for everyone. It’s over 1000 pages long, extremely complicated, full of qualifications and nuances, frequently transitions from one topic to the next, and makes you forget almost as much as it makes you learn. But if you can see it all the way to the end, you deserve to feel proud. This book is an encyclopaedic crash course in neuroscience, sociobiology, philosophy and human morality all rolled into one massive treatise seeking to answer the question: do we humans take decisions of our own free will or does our biology and genealogy do it for us? Are we even responsible for our best and worst behaviours; how can we enhance the former and suppress the latter? Predictably, there is no easy answer but Sapolsky provides both the templates and the catalysts to help answer the question as objectively as possible.His erudition, width and depth of knowledge - and the welcome doses of riotous humour - make him as good an author as he is scientist. One wished he did not complicate every issue with a near-infinite supply of opposing, qualifying and modifying examples - even when they are not always central to the theme under discussion - as it leaves one reeling at the end as to what conclusion to actually draw. It does become clearer as you progress but the process would be more friction-less if the author just recognised that most of us (lay people) can’t actually swim underwater. That apart, this is just a delightful book - full of powerful examples, glittering pearls of knowledge, and those indescribably joyous explanations when something you have always ‘known’ turns out to have a deep, scientific basis. It is also a somewhat encouraging book, as far as the future of our species is concerned, as Sapolosky tries to show that over the centuries and millennia of human existence our best behaviours are becoming more common and ubiquitous and our worst ones a little less so.It cannot be ignored however, that global events over the last 5-7 years, since this book was written, are proving somewhat contrary to this premise. There are wars in several regions of the planet, time-honoured institutions like the UN, WTO, ICJ underpinning the practices of so-called “anonymous pro-sociality” are crumbling, Us-Them dichotomies are widening, we seem to be losing the fight against climate change, and so on. Hopefully, some of them will prove to be just temporary wrinkles in an otherwise upward path. If not, Dr Sapolsky will have to produce a revised edition!