Show an infant a picture of someone repeatedly she looks at it less each time. Not sure different face if she can’t tell the two apart she barely glances at it. But if it’s recognised as being you there’s excitement and longer looking. We naturally seek novelty. As a child, Sapolsky became both fascinated and horrified with the atrocities of the Holocaust, and strove to understand the science behind how people could do such terrible things. That fascination grew into a lifelong study of science and people and led directly to this book. The dopaminergic system is about reward (which is why our smartphones can be so addictive). Blunted dopamine receptors is the inability to feel pleasure which can lead to depression.

A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books: Sapolsky agrees with the thesis that our lives have improved, this is a debate of nuance - “Anyone who says that our worst behaviors are inevitable knows too little about primates, including us.”] Sapolsky describes himself as an atheist. [7] [8] He said in his acceptance speech for the Emperor Has No Clothes Award, "I was raised in an Orthodox household, and I was raised devoutly religious up until around age 13 or so. In my adolescent years, one of the defining actions in my life was breaking away from all religious belief whatsoever." [9] Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, up, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. Culture is on the list of explanatory factors for behaviour. While I am definitely not at the level of some autodidacts I know, during a typical year I read about 40 books, listen to about 20 audiobooks, listen to at least 500 podcast episodes, read countless blog posts and have over 100 conversations on my podcast with thought leaders in their field.

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Shwartz, Mark (March 7, 2007). "Robert Sapolsky discusses physiological effects of stress". News. Stanford University . Retrieved October 13, 2012. Yet the question remains: if human beings are simply reactive robots, slaves to natural law who are causally buffeted by a zillion factors of biology and circumstance, why would we have any say in whether things get better? Either they will or they won’t, but on this magisterial account it seems that we can’t really choose to do anything about it. Robert Sapolsky invokes interest and curiosity right from the start - talking about how we are very conflicted in our beliefs – especially we condemn many acts of violence, but do support others. I have to admit I have many conflicts I am unable to resolve myself – such as the fact that I find very impressive the progress that science has made as detailed in this book, and yet I am very pained that much of this has come with cruel experiments on animals.

Sapolsky, Robert M (1990). "Stress in the Wild". Scientific American. 262 (1): 106–13. Bibcode: 1990SciAm.262a.116S. doi: 10.1038/scientificamerican0190-116. JSTOR 24996650. PMID 2294581. People take hurricanes more seriously when they are named after men. Another study that has come in for a pile of criticism: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/... There’s the brain-you’re on synapses neurotransmitter receptors brains Pacific transcription factors epigenetic effects dreams transpositions during your agenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment the genes and hormones whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian and whether they witnessed violence in childhood and when they had breakfast. It’s the whole shebang. Basically, I don't want to go anywhere near these debates. For our purposes we'll rely on an intuitive definition of culture emphasised by Frans de Waal: culture is how we do and think about things. The first third of the book is so dense with anatomical and biochemical detail that I just hated it. Then, with a physical floor laid for the discussion, the themes turn to all the theoretical, social, legal, psychological, and religious issues of our times, with all due precautions against the temptations of over-determinism.The basic theme is that humanity (and we who comprise it) are capable of great good and great harm. There is a lot that underlies human thoughts, decision-making and actions that Sapolsky uncovers for us. Some of you may, like me, become a little uneasy reading this if your mind wanders into questions of friendship, race, religion, anger, love, passion, and the arc of civilization. If you’re ever a defendant in court, try and get a sitting after the judge has returned from lunch. Hungry people are less charitable. In a study of more than 1100 judicial ruling prisoners were granted parole at about a 60% rate when judge’s had recently eaten and at essentially a 0% rate just before judge’s 8. The author hits a popular vein in his chapter on adolescence. The late maturation of the prefrontal cortex and its function to in reigning in excessive emotionality or impulsive behaviors is held to represent a biological foundation for the folly of youth. I’m not sure what benefits we get in how to treat teenagers wisely with this knowledge over the standard psychological consideration of them as being immature. We are not far from McLean’s model of the Triune Brain, with the neocortex in primates an evolutionary wonder that is seen as riding herd on the unruly mammalian limbic system and lizard-brain of the brainstem like Freud’s Superego over the Id. And emphasizing to parents and teachers the risks of teens’ late development of executive brain functions practically puts them in the category of the brain-damaged. Still, it was fun to experience how eloquent Sapolsky gets on the subject: Fascinatingly over the last century Scandinavian countries develop their and latent and far-reaching system of government to support people social needs, religiosity their plummeted dramatically; today only a small minority of Scandinavian set the value religious. So really geocity may not be as robust in the future as one would think. As secular institutions become better caring for people’s need religiosity the clients. Probably more important, this is a good demonstration their religion sure isn’t the only route for highly inclusive in group prosociality. If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast, while the frontal cortex is still working out the assembly instructions, we’ve just explained why adolescents are so frustrating, great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive, self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible, and world-changing.

Springer, Michael (August 22, 2012). "Do Yourself a Favor and Watch Stress: Portrait of a Killer (with Stanford Biologist Robert Sapolsky)". openculture.com . Retrieved February 8, 2020. To blunt the negative effects of the amygdala, slow down and let your prefrontal cortex catch up! This will be familiar to readers of Daniel Kahneman’s work on systems 1 and 2 thinking. Honorary FFRF Board Announced". ffrf.org. Archived from the original on December 17, 2010 . Retrieved February 15, 2010.After a while the book gets a clearly and overtly political inclination (stay tuned). I don’t really have a problem with that – it’s just not quite what I expected. Sapolsky pulls no punches here: he is a liberal leftist. Hey, I am too – I should dig it! And in some ways it’s hard for me to give this only 3 stars, as in the end I find myself agreeing with him on most accounts, and also share his rather pessimistic and depressing worldview that is felt throughout the book (except for in the final part, but even this optimism feels kind of half-hearted to me). But this aspect of the book makes it more jumbled, it becomes unclear where he’s taking you, and what I initially thought would be a fairly straight-forward book about human behaviour became something of a political statement, with, among other things, Sapolsky’s opinions on the current state of prisons in the US (and elsewhere) and the desperate need for reform. On top of all that, the book is stuffed with (littered with, perhaps?) fascinating case studies, including obligatory discussions of the Asch conformity experiments, the Milgram Experiment, and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Throughout the book Sapolsky is critical of the science behind the studies, and sometimes admits that studies he cites have not yet been replicated – so this is good, it’s clear that as a scientist Sapolsky is great, and I expected no less from one of my favourite authors. The problem is just that there are so many of these case studies, not all of them are even relevant (see above about digressions and footnotes!).

As such, I hope to bring you a lot of value by doing these books summaries, which will also be available on my podcast. During the filming of the movie Planet of the Apes during lunch time the people playing chips and those playing gorillas eat in separate groups. The claim that a person chose her action does not conflict with the claim that some neural processes or state caused it; it simply redescribes it. Be careful when our enemies are made to remind us of maggots and cancer and shit. But also beware when it is our empathic intuitions, rather than hateful ones, that are manipulated by those who use us for their own goals.

Vasquez, Alejandra; etal. (April 27, 2017). "Bugs and bodies: The talks of Session 8 of TED2017". TED Blog: Further reading on ideas worth spreading . Retrieved September 5, 2023. This is a big book, and one for which I should have taken notes. But I did not. Since there is a wealth of important information, I expect I will have to revisit the book again – when I feel I am forgetting its contents. We reach our best long-term strategic consequentialist decisions when we engage both reason and intuition, amygdala and dlPFC. Data + gut = best decisions. I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I still found all these red flags. There are surely many I've missed. At the same time, because I'm not an expert, I can be convinced that the replication crisis isn't that big a deal. But Sapolsky doesn't even try. Unfortunately, that makes me call into question Sapolsky's authority and credibility as a guide to this literature. It's a doubt that poisoned the whole book for me, including his tour of literatures far removed from the ones above. This is so depressing—are we hardwired to fear the face of someone from another race, to process their face less as a face, to feel less empathy? No. For starters there’s tremendous individual variation …Moreover, subtle manipulations rapidly change the amygdaloid response to the face of an Other.