Behave

Introduction: The Behavior

• Sapolsky’s Fantasy

• Central Point: We don’t hate violence, we hate the wrong kind of violence

Introduction: The Behavior

• The book explores the biology of violence, aggression, and competition, as well as, the biology of cooperation, affiliation, reconciliation, empathy, and altruism

• Sapolsky has led a duel career: neurobiology and primatology

• Behavior has multiple levels of causality

One Second Before

• This brings you to the area of the brain called the amygdala.

• However, behavior cannot be all boiled down to one thing or brain region.

One Second Before

• “The notion that ‘if a neuroscientist can demonstrate it, we know that the person’s problem is for real’ has a corollary—the fancier the neurobiology utilized, the more reliable the verification.”

• While neurobiology is impressive, the brain is not where a behavior “begins.”

Seconds to Minutes Before

• To understand what was happening seconds before, we have to step back a little bit.

Seconds to Minutes Before

• There is subliminal and unconscious cuing.

• Over the course of seconds sensory cues can shape your behavior unconsciously.

• “Ultimately in the moments just before we decide upon some of our most consequential acts, we are less rational and autonomous decision makers than we like to think.”

Hours to Days Before

• Again we have to take another step back to hours to days before a behavior and enter the realm of the hormones.

• Testosterone has far less to do with aggression than most assume. Other factors include Oxytocin and vasopressin, estrogen, and progesterone.

Hours to Days Before

• “Over the course of minutes to hours, hormonal effects are predominantly contigent and facilitative. Hormones don’t determine, command, cause, or invent behaviors. Instead they make us more sensitive to the social triggers of emotionally laden behaviors and exaggerate our preexisting tendencies in those domains.”

Days to Months Before

• This is the realm of neuro-plasticity.

Days to Months Before

• Neuro plasticity makes the functional malleability of the brain tangible, it makes it “scientifically demonstrated” that brains change.

Adolescence

• At this point in your life all of your brain is pretty much going at full blast…

• Except the frontal cortex. (Which doesn’t mature fully until you are around 25.)

• Adolescence and early adulthood are the years where environment and experience will shape your frontal cortex into the version you will have as an adult.

Adolescence

• “From birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are."

Back to the Womb, Back to an Egg

• The time in the womb is when your brain is being constructed but experience is also important.

Back to the Womb, Back to an Egg

• Pushing back further to when you were just a fertilized egg we are in the realm of genes.

• But genes work differently in different environments.

Centuries to Millennia Before

• Explore where we are and how we most likely got here.

• This is the realm of inherited culture.

Centuries to Millennia Before

• This takes us back to millions of years for Sapolsky to the evolution of genes.

• This concludes the first part of his book. What we have landed at thus far is this: A behavior has occurred; what happened in everything from a second to a million years ealier that helps explain why it happened?

A Few Themes

• To understand things, you must incorporate neurons and hormones and early development and genes, etc., etc.

A Few Themes

• These aren’t separate categories—there are few clear-cut causal agents, so don’t count on there being the brain region, the gene, the cultural influence, or the single anything that explains a behavior.

• In other words, behavior is really simple.

The Criminal Justice System & Free Will

• What about the Witches?

• As we learn more about science, we have begun to treat people for their symptom, not punish them.

The Criminal Justice System & Free Will

• Three Perspectives on free will: We have complete free will in our behavior, we have none, somewhere in between.

Sapolsky’s Conclusion on Free Will

• If you believe that starting tonight, at midnight, something will happen and science will stop, that there will be no new publications, findings, or knowledge relevant to this book, that we now know everything there is, then it is clear what one’s stance should be—there are some rare domains where extremes of biological dysfunction cause involuntary changes in behavior, and we’re not great at predicting who undergoes such changes. In other words, the homunculus is alive and well.

Sapolsky’s Conclusion on Free Will

• But if you believe that there will be the accrual of any more knowledge, you’ve just committed to either the view that any evidence for free will ultimately will be eliminated or the view that, at the very least, the homunculus will be jammed into ever tinier places.

What Does This Mean For Us?

• Explaining the unexplainable.

What Does This Mean For Us?

• The role of luck.