Sapolsky, Robert. Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality, 2nd Edition. The dlPFC is the decider of deciders, the most rational, cognitive, utilitarian, unsentimental part of the PFC. …In contrast to the dlPFC, there’s the ventral part of the PFC, particularly the ventromedial PFC (vmPFC). …This is ..an honorary member of the limbic system because of its interconnections with it. Logically, the vmPFC is all about the impact of emotion on decision making. And many of our best and worst behaviors involve interactions of the vmPFC with the limbic system and the dlPFC.

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.” When people cheat or do bad things they often wash their hand or have a shower to feel better afterwards. Washing decreases and emotional arousal as it decreases the diameter of subjects pupils.Washing your hands to absolve yourself of your sins is known as the Macbeth effect.

Frequently Asked Questions

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. Poole, Steven (June 9, 2017). "Behave by Robert Sapolsky review – why do we do what we do?". The Guardian.

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. Science writer Robert Sapolsky to speak about coping with stress April 10". Middlebury. December 17, 2009 . Retrieved March 31, 2020. Agora, mais de 20 anos depois, ele aproveita toda a experiência na área para escrever uma obra excelente. Um livro gigante, daquelas obras que descreve compreensivamente a área e vem amarrando as pontas de décadas de estudos, integrando como nos comportamos de mamíferos a primatas, de sociedades aos neurotransmissores no cérebro. De forma leve, bem-humorada, auto-crítica e fácil de acompanhar. Comparo ele tranquilamente com Sapiens, Aço Armas e outros na linha. Uma delícia de ler. 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.Note that, while our genetics do have some bearing on our actions, Sapolsky believes the nature part of the nature versus nurture debate has less impact than many people believe. millisecond exposure to the face of someone from another race activate the amygdala. Similarly the brain groups Faces by gender or social status at roughly the same speed. People preferentially allocate resources to Anonymous in group individuals. Arbitrary conspicuous genetically based trades.

It’s a common view, though by no means the overwhelming philosophical consensus. Notably, he prefers to cite mainly neuroscientists and legal scholars. Sapolsky ends the chapter with a display of his pleasingly undogmatic spirit, confessing that he finds it impossible actually to live his life as though he does not have free will. It’s perhaps worth noting, too, that one study he does not mention here (by Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler in 2008) implies that the idea we have free will, whether true or not, is a crucial placebo idea for a well-functioning society: in the experiment, subjects convinced they didn’t have free will were more likely to act unethically. Sapolsky’s accomplishment yields an expansion of what we mean by the biological basis of behavior, enough knowledge of brain systems to make you dangerous, and a better appreciation of the interplay between cognitive and emotional contributions to our actions. You will come away with a better appreciation of human evolution, an informed perspective on whether our hunter-gatherer ancestors were more aligned with a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog character or of an Edenic Rousseau types. In the end, he mounts an assault on the need for a concept of free will, arguing that it is equivalent to putting a homunculus in the driver’s seat above the material universe. His mantra is for a multifactorial and hierarchical array of causes behind behavior. In the end it will be easy to conclude that the extreme complexity of the brain limits the gains in explanatory power from any simplistic reductionist plan. I this vein, I liked the quote from Hilary Bok: 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. Hopefully, the new science of unconscious biases among juries and judges can also be applied to help mitigate some of the excess manipulations of the prosecutors and defense lawyers. For example, research showing that sentences rendered by judges tend to be more severe when they are hungry (i.e. right before lunch). And all members of society (and jury members) must somehow be on guard for subterranean perceptions like the following: 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.Bad barrel theory: the issue is not how a few bad Apples can ruin the whole barrel it’s how about barrel can turn any apple bad. Of the almost 27,000 single load Musket recovered from the field at the Battle of Gettysburg almost 24,000 of them were loaded and unfired; 12,000 loaded multiple times. In the heat of the the battle most men would load, tend to wounded soldiers, run away or wonder in a daze. Similarly in World War 2 only 15 to 20% of Rifleman ever filed their guns. When they did fire it was for their comrades, not for the cause.

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. Identification with a group matters: Asian American women who took a math test and were primed to think about their being women performed worse at math than men but when they were primed to think about being Asian beforehand they performed better. This is an outstanding and monumental synthesis on the causes of behavior by a talented researcher and teacher. He excels in making the science of the brain and behavior accessible to a wide audience without oversimplification. The goal is to provide a handle on how to account for the origins of the most admirable and most despicable of human actions, i.e. the roots of empathy and altruism on the one hand and violence, war, and genocide on the other.This book is a masterful distillation of academic research on social behavior. It's creatively organized, clearly written, and always fascinating. I listened on audiobook, but will probably buy a physical copy for reference. 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.