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 . . . 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."

Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst is a comprehensive overview of ways to think about the causal mechanisms involved in human behavior. This is of course a massive subject that is still poorly understood despite large strides made in the lace century. Robert Sapolsky tackles the root causes of behavior through multiple lenses to give the reader a sense of how our minds work. This book is not easy and the material it covers is from many technical subjects which are then interwoven. But for the interested reader this is a pretty remarkable achievement as one gets an overview of human nature from a combinatorial lens of primatology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, biochemistry, psychology among other subjects. Such an attempt would seem impossible for almost any author, but this book largely achieves its goals. Behave is split into 17 chapters in which each chapter effectively thinks about behavior on a longer time scale, starting with immediately before to getting to evolutionary origin. The author starts by posing questions on how our behavior originates. The first 5 chapters highlight this point and the author discusses topics from how the neuroscience of decisions works to how our the neural architecture is laid through our experiences. There is a lot of technical material which can be tough to follow, but there is an appendix which helps clarify the subject for those less familiar. Nonetheless Chapter 2 discusses the various parts of the brain and aspects of their evolution and has a lot of detail but is a core reference chapter for later in the book. The author then starts getting into hormones and regulation and how they impact our actions, there is a lot of discussion of myths and facts and one gets a sense of how complex the interactions are. The author discusses the adolescent brain and how it is still very much in development. Ideas like how accountable are youths get's discussed, these kinds of questions are posed and re-discussed throughout. The author discusses how the environment can influence behavior and some epigenetic ideas are discussed along side general brain development. The author discusses the basis of our political nature as well, in particular how people categorize other people and have internal Us vs Them delineations. How we frame who is an us and who is a them though is extremely variable and our characterization of groups is deemed to be largely constructed rather than innate. The author discusses how different societies have different levels of social interactions and consequentially how different people think about interacting with strangers depends heavily on how much social capital their respective societies have. The author discusses hierarchies and brings in his primatology expertise and discusses how different ape families manage their hierarchies and stress associated with such systems. Human hierarchical systems are discussed in this contexts and the author highlights that our current capitalistic hierarchical society is all new relative to hunter gatherer systems. The author discusses our systems of morality and where they originate; the author looks at cases of high generosity and discusses what parts of the brain were involved. There are lots of interesting facts to be read in these chapters, really fascinating material. The author discusses things like empathy and sympathy and how too much empathy gets in the way of prudent action. It is the dispassionate observer who ends up being more helpful on average. The author revisits the criminal justice system and discusses the deep flaws in how we might be thinking of right and wrong and responsibility; there are useful ideas to consider when thinking about policy. The author ends up by discussing our propensity for violence and war overtime. There are some great anecdotal stories from recent world wars on reconciliation as well as front line behavior when people weren't considering the enemy a them. Behave is a pretty remarkable book. It is a combination of material from so many subjects, all of which are non-trivial, and it is put together remarkably well. For those interested in how people can behave, where our behavior comes from, what time scales are involved in our propensities and how flexible our responses are this is a must read. One should get a sense of optimism from this, despite science's progress on understanding behavior, we are nowhere close to claiming we have strong causal mechanisms that took a person from point a to b. There are correlated variables and we have some indication on where propensities come from but one still has room for individualism in this book. Very informative, very impressive.

Sapolsky investigates what science tells us about human (and animal) moral behavior. He was a longtime researcher of baboons, and his books about them are funny, fascinating, and moving. This book is not easy to read, and will probably repay rereading. It includes much information about the incredibly complex workings of mammalian and human brains. Sapolsky makes it plain that investigating the interface between genes, the brain, and actual behavior is anything but simple. Like other researchers, he believes that many moral decisions are not mediated much through the prefrontal cortex, the logical, planning area of the brain, an area highly developed in human beings. Routing moral feelings through the cortex rather than the immediate emotions is not easy and requires practice. Good child rearing can help a great deal. One interesting takeaway that particularly struck me is the dualistic function of the hormone oxytosin, which is activated in intimate relations, especially between mothers and babies. One might believe that a rush of oxytosin would lead to warm loving feelings in general, a support to moral feeling. But not so. On the contrary, the warmth of intimate feelings is paralleled by suspicion and even hostility toward non-intimates. This makes sense, if one function is to enable mothers to nurture, love and defend their young. Watch out for mama bear! One reflection for me from Sapolsky's work is its relation to current politics. Research on the supporters of Donald Trump shows that they have extremely warm feelings for those they recognize as members of their community. But this is often combined with suspicion, dislike, and fear of "outsiders," of different ethnicity, race, or background. This book shows how valuable, how difficult, and how absolutely necessary it is to employ hard scientific research to the task of understanding human behavior and human values.

I have no quibble with the 5 star reviews so far. I want to caution you about what you are getting into. You can learn a lot about how and why we “behave” just from the organizing model he employs to sequence the chapters in the book. This is also the recurring analytical framework he uses to present each chapter introduced on page 6: A behavior has just occurred. Why did it happen? We can learn a lot by zooming out through the time sequence preceding this event. What went on in your brain seconds before that behavior? (Chapter2) What sensory stimuli (sight, sound, smell, etc.) activated those brain processes in the seconds and minutes just before? (Chapter3) What hormones were activated hours and days before the stimulus that primed the sensory receptors? (Chapter4) What features in the environment in the prior weeks and years changed the structure and functions of those hormones and environmental stimuli? (Chapter 5) What nurturing events during childhood development (Chapter 6), fetal development (Chapter 7), and genetic makeup (Chapter 8) influenced the prior chain of factors that produced that behavior? What external cultural factors (Chapter 9) and ecological factors (Chapter 10) shaped that culture? This "zoom out" approach is much more insightful than "zooming in" by disciplinary perspectives. This is Sapolsky's most valuable insight. This approach integrates the views of varying academic disciplines and helps readers integrate information from prior sources. I bought Behave on the day it was released, based primarily on an effusive recommendation in the Wall Street Journal that day. Now that I have read the book, I cannot highly recommend it myself. By coincidence, I was about half way through Johnathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis when Behave arrived. In the first few pages, I could see the overlap. My advice is to read Haidt’s version because he makes all the same essential points in 1/3 as many pages, using many of the same arguments and sources, takes a more balanced approach, seems to be politically neutral, and is easier to read by a logarithmic magnitude. And the same wisdom is half the price. Sapolsky is a biologist who writes like a biologist. Although many of his numerous footnotes are witty and/or informative, his basic style is to (1) set up a strawman argument he wants to refute, (2) provide 20 to 30 pages to extremely dense biologist minutia, and then, voila! (3) states his main point in one nicely pithy sentence. The problem is, as the old joke goes, you have to be a persistent and patient optimist to find the pony in this pile of … biologist dogma. On many occasions, I was unable to see the value of slogging through the ever-mounting stack of evidence cited in numerous research details that are presented over 20-30 pages to make a sub-point or to take a snipe at some other scientific discipline. Haidt makes many of the same points in 1/10 the space. The points only Sapolsky makes, you will little note nor long remember, as one practitioner of pithiness observed. Proof that Saplosky has the ability to present dense material in a shorter space are the excellence shorter appendices on Neuroscience 101 (28 pages), The Basics of Endocrinology (4 pages), Protein Basics (7 pages). Contrast these with his 51 pages of Notes, which the publisher chose to present in 4- point type to keep them under 100 pages at 10-point type. There are important signals in these comparisons. Also, from the outset, I was put off by a sixth sense that his not-so-hidden agenda was to convert us unwashed masses to his neo-progressive worldview through deep Baptism in the Holy waters of contemporary biological doctrine which largely follows the scientism philosophy. My best advice: Put Behave in your bookcase or on your desk as a totem of your intellectual adventures and read Haidt so you can answer questions about what you got out of reading Behave. Thus applying the key message in Behave.

It took me twelve days to read this book. I'm a Chilean reader so my English is no native and it's hard for me to understand everything, but this book deserved to retry any time I couldn't catch the entire meaning of a sentence or an idea. Robert Sapolsky writes as a lecturer. The reader is seated in the classroom and he's the professor who talks, so you feel very comfortable listening him and, more than that, you feel welcome by him. He's so natural and informal that you feel that a distance has been abolished, and this is just what is needed to capture the very essence of this tremendous achievement. The book is about "us" and "them," and how our biology has modeled us to to replicate and to live this duality as an inexorable destiny. That's the reason why Sapolsky in a very smart design of the book dedicates the thirteen first (out of seventeen) chapters in describing to you how does our brains (and by extension our biology) to produce a human being with all that it means. And it means a lot. More than I can say here. Thus, the first thirteen chapters of the book leave you with the sensation that we are all design to be just the way we are. So nothing to be much optimistic here. There's (for me at least) a tipping point in the book that synthesizes everything. It is in page 448 and shows you a graph that plots the "proportion of rulings in favor of the prisoners by ordinal position [i.e., the order in which they were heard by the judge]," with "points [indicating] the first decision in each of the three decisions sessions." Well, the thing is that "in a study of more than 1,100 judicial rulings, prisoners were granted parole at about a 60 percent rate when judges had recently eaten, and at essentially a 0 percent rate just before judges ate... Justice may be blind, but she's sure sensitive to her stomach gurgling." Well, there you are. And this is just one example, there are dozens before and after indicating how sensible we are to the environment, the internal and the external one, something that Sapolsky summarize at the end of the book: "...we haven't evolved to be "selfish" or "altruistic" or anything else--we've evolved to be particular ways in particular settings. Context, context, context." As long as you read you think that the book was written to let you know how remarkably open AND close is our nature, in such a way that we are condemned to suffer our tremendous limitations: there is no way out (or in). Yes, as Sapolsky says, it's complicated. In fact, that could have been the title of the book. But that would have lessened the final chapters which are like the cracks in the wall through which a silver lining filters. The thing is that you didn't expect what Sapolsky tells you there. This is not a detectives novel so what's the point in not commenting what's there for everyone of us? Well, I guess that the point is I shouldn't deprive you of discovering by yourself as I did. Yes, I'm talking here of the pleasure that renders the experience of something that sounds (even in a scientific manner) like a revelation. And that is: at the end of the book you see... I'm sure that other reviewers have revealed everything in order to criticize some points here and there. I guess that could be several, but to me that's not the point. The point is that Behave has not been written to convince you, not at all. Behave has been written to show you. Behave is not a book is a window as I suppose any great book is. As I said, I'm Chilean and here, in my country, are hundreds of political prisoners that haven't the minimal chance of being paroled. Not even that light ray that could traverse a crack in a wall. Not even that. They have no chance. Unfortunately this book is not going to be translated to Spanish. And if it is, it's not going to arrive to our commercial and poor (intellectually speaking) bookstores. My country is a very quiet one compared with the rest of the world. Nobody even notice it, so quiet it is. We are like Switzerland bur without the money. And with the political prisoners they don't have. Sapolsky it's not going to change nothing, but that's not the point, I insist: the point is that things are going to change anyway because history tells so. The thing is that we could do something to hurry the future. I don't know how. Sapolsky either. And what about you? Read this book if you are interested into thinking how does it feel not to be the good guy you think you are most of the time. In a sentence: how does it feel to be human. And it feels good. Five highly deserved stars.

Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst, by Robert Sapolsky, explains — within the limits of current scientific knowledge — why we do the things we do, good and (especially) bad. It’s a long, thoughtful and fascinating journey that weaves together all the latest thinking in neurobiology, endocrinology, genetics and epigenetics, culture, ecology and more. The book, at 800 pages, is far too immense to encapsulate in a review, but suffice it to say, we humans are far more complex and far less in control of our own actions and behaviors than we care to admit. And our biology — with all its messy shortcomings and quirks — is perfectly reflected in (and a driving force behind) our personal ideologies and idiosyncrasies, and our culture. And that is both alarming (because of how it allows us to treat others) and comforting (because it is ultimately understandable and able to be changed). Sapolsky has a rare combination of deep knowledge and a conversational, at times humorous, writing style that brings the topic to life in a truly memorable way. A few nuggets from the goldmine: “…genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead, they are about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, potentials, and vulnerabilities.” “…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.” “Trust requires reciprocity, and reciprocity requires equality, whereas hierarchy is about domination and asymmetry.” “Poverty is not a predictor of crime as much as poverty amid plenty is.” “In terms of caustic, scarring impact on minds and bodies, nothing in the history of animals being crappy to one another about status differences comes within light-years of our invention of poverty.” “…we judge ourselves by our internal motives and everyone else by their external actions.” Sapolsky’s insights into culture, racism, xenophobia and our legal system based on the science of behavior are especially timely and relevant, ending the book on a somewhat optimistic note that we can, should and MUST look beyond the limits of our biology to create a culture that functions for the good of all. “Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try.” Reading this book is a great first step.

What I enjoyed most about Dr. Sapolsky's wonderful book on human behavior is the clarity with which he has written it. He has taken into account various fields isuch as neuroscience, endocrinology and evolutionary biology (and many others) and made them comprehensible and palatable to anyone interested in challenging their intellect who is not an expert in any of the fields. That being said, this is not an easy read. (I.E. I wouldn't recommend it to someone who does not have a serious interest in charting through an 800 page exploratory composition on the biological and neurological reasons in which humans live and behave the way they do.) Nevertheless, having only read minimally into neurological processes before, this book has broadened my understanding of human behavior substantially and with great educational value. The first chapter, though long-winded as Dr. Sapolsky admits from the outset, is both comprehensive and fascinating in explaining the fundamental biological structure of the brain and detailing specifics about each part (i.e. the amygdala, pre-frontal cortex, hippo campus, etc.) Lasty, I will say this: Dr. Sapolsky is a gifted writer. His ability to inject humor into complex paragraphs (especially in the footnotes) makes the reading of such a large text very enjoyable and worth conversing about with anyone you may find who has an interest in the topic. I look forward to going back through his bibliography and to any future works his brain is currently making him write.

Please read this book! We are capable of both far worse than we want to believe and can do more to change the world for the better than we tend to think we're able; and in both cases it's because of things we don't know, can't explain or don't want to control. But the more we try to expand the tiny sliver of knowledge we do have, with respect for how small that sliver is; and the more awareness we can have that the world around us and our biology drive much more of what we do in any moment than our conscious intellect, emotions or "free will" do - the more hope we have of doing more to change the world with the little bit of actual influence we possess. There is infinitely more that we'll never know than any of us ever can know. Life, and even more so we as humans, are complicated beyond comprehension. Many times over this book made that abundantly clear. More often than not, those lessons made me question the certainty of what I believe (or thought I knew as fact) about me, people, relationships, politics, economics, race, religion, God, culture, civilization, war, peace and any other slice of life I can think of. Robert Sapolsky, with humility and great respect for the limitations of science, has written a truly world view changing book that is as well written as the science he has aggregated is fascinating and eye-opening. He artfully conveys meaningful, relevant understanding and context for the hopelessly complex topic of what drives human behavior. A review that led me to this book described it as one of the best works of non-fiction the reviewer had read, and it is hands down the same for me. It is also likely to prove one of the most meaningful and important books I ever will read because of how fundamentally it has me re-thinking, well, everything.