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a b Brown, Patricia Leigh (April 19, 2001). "AT HOME WITH: DR. ROBERT M. SAPOLSKY; Family Man With a Foot In the Veld". The New York Times . Retrieved August 25, 2014. Humans, like many other animals, instinctively want to fit in. We want to be part of the in-group, so we obey our culture’s rules, follow its beliefs, and expect others to do the same. Realizing that we’re not matching the people around us can cause serious anxiety—just imagine showing up to a fancy party in jeans and a t-shirt. Finding out there everyone disagrees with you activate something in your mind that tells you that you’re different and that being different = being wrong. The greater the activation of the circuit the greater the likelihood of changing answers to confirm. This has to do with engagement in the emotional the vmPFC.
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. We’ll start by examining the “natural” causes of behavior: that is, biology and evolution. First we’ll discuss the structure of the brain and some of its major functions, then we’ll move on to how hormones influence what we do, and finally we’ll look at some behavioral patterns that have been encoded in us through countless generations of evolution.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 more gender-equal the country the less of a discrepancy in maths scores. In other words, culture matters. In one study conservatives and liberals when asked about the causes of poverty with candid toward personal attributions such as lazy, but only if they are to make snap judgements. Give a more time liberals shifted towards situation or explanations however conservatives start with their gut and stay with their gut, liberals go from gut to head. What do children need from their mother’s? Love want affection responsiveness stimulation consistency and reliability. In their absence you get anxiety depression. 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/...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. The bystander effect: The more people present during an emergency the less likely anyone is to help. This is because we think that there’s lots of other people around so someone else will step forward. The bystander effect does occurring on dangerous situations, where the price of stepping forward is inconvenience.
Cue ‘Married With Children’ theme song. We aren’t classically monogamous or polygamous. As everyone from poets to divorce attorneys can a test, we are by Nature profoundly confused, mildly polygamist floating somewhere in between. Oxytocin, the love hormone, makes us more prosocial to us and worse to everyone else. In other words, oxytocin is dramatically dependent on context, who you are, your environment, and who that person is. 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]Shortform note: Many researchers today—including Sapolsky— no longer recognize a clear divide between our genetics and our environments when it comes to behavior. Rather, as we’ll see in this guide, just about everything is the result of interactions between nature and nurture. In other words, there’s no such thing as a gene that forces us to act a certain way. At most, one could say that genes predispose us to certain behaviors.) The Structure of the Brain Science writer Robert Sapolsky to speak about coping with stress April 10". Middlebury. December 17, 2009 . Retrieved March 31, 2020. He also endorses the results of Implicit Association and stereotype threat tests far too strongly. I don't know enough about neuroscience or endocrinology or ethology to make a similar recommendation for the other chapters. But the " Gell-Mann amnesia" effect sadly suggests that we should (partially) discount everything else in here, primates aside; evidence of credulity in one domain is evidence for others. Air rage is more likely if coach passengers have to pass through first class. Probably not. http://www.pnas.org/content/113/47/E7... and http://andrewgelman.com/?s=air+rage I have tremendous respect for Mr. Sapolsky, since I first watched one of his lecture series from The Teaching Company. He has my eternal gratitude for introducing me to the term Glucocorticoids, which I then tried to use a few times a day, every day, for an entire year. An experiment that was cut tragically short after a fateful dinner encounter in which, my father, who had been a mopey navel gazer for some time due to a complicated business decision, confided in me his troubles, to which I replied with as much gravitas as I could summon; “It could be your Glucocorticoids.”
These issues have percolated through the mainstream. Just last week, the NYTimes had a great feature about the replication crisis, told through the story of Amy Cuddy (whose work is also cited uncritically in Behave): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/ma... Along the way there are many counterintuitive ideas and stern lessons. Empathy – feeling someone’s pain – is not as likely to lead to useful action as dispassionate sympathy, or “cold-blooded kindness”. Income inequality is concretely causally bad for the health of the poorer. There is a well-established link between rightwing authoritarianism and lower IQ. Genes are not destiny, and they are not “selfish” a la Dawkins; “we haven’t evolved to be ‘selfish’ or ‘altruistic’ or anything else – we’ve evolved to be particular ways in particular settings”. (According to one astonishing survey, 46% of women would save their own dog rather than a foreign tourist if both were menaced by a runaway bus. The evolutionary explanation is that they feel more “kinship” with the dog.) In general, if our worst behaviours are “the product of our biology”, so are our best ones. That Sapolsky’s heart is evidently in the right place makes it easy to discount certain hippyish outbursts such as that the invention of agriculture “was one of the all-time human blunders”, since it led to sedentary living and social hierarchy. Sure, but it also led to wine, science and books, which I’d suggest on balance makes it rather a good thing. It remains debatable whether strict determinism is compatible with Sapolsky’s final message of hope for humanity
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Sapolsky’s organizing principle of serving up mountains of research progress according to different timescales that precede particular behaviors is a very helpful approach. Looking at events a second before a behavior taps into automated and unconscious processes in the brain; seconds before brings in higher neural systems associated with conscious actions; hours to days before is the realm of hormonal influences; days to months before the impact of things like chronic stress and adaptations of neuroplasticity; years and decades before includes the shaping of culture and individual development; and centuries to millennia before the processes of evolution. You’ll be busting at the seams by the time you get through this program. He is so skilled at introducing humor and commonsense translations to the concepts presented you will be amazed in your ability to follow his presentation and never fall asleep. If some of the presentation doesn’t quite sink in, he excels in summary take-home messages at the end of each chapter and provision of frequent links among the chapters. It remains debatable, though, whether strict determinism is compatible with Sapolsky’s final message of hope for humanity, as he tells inspiring stories about moral heroism in history – the helicopter officer who stopped the My Lai massacre, the Christmas Day football match during the first world war. Sapolsky is on the side of Steven Pinker’s argument, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, that humanity is overall getting less violent and nasty, and points to some lessons from the “social plasticity” demonstrated in troops of baboons, one of Sapolsky’s own specialities. He thus sets himself against conservative pessimism about brutish human nature. “Anyone who says that our worst behaviours are inevitable knows too little about primates, including us.”
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