Behave : the biology of humans at our best and worst / Robert M. Sapolsky.
Sapolsky, Robert M., author.
2017
QP351 .S27 2017 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection

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Title Behave : the biology of humans at our best and worst / Robert M. Sapolsky.
Author Sapolsky, Robert M., author.
ISBN 9781594205071 (hardcover)
1594205078 (hardcover)
9780735222786 (electronic book)
Published New York, New York : Penguin Press, 2017.
Copyright ©2017
Language English
Description 790 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Call Number QP351 .S27 2017
Dewey Decimal Classification 612.8
Summary Why do we do the things we do? Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky attempts to answer that question as fully as possible, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky starts by examining the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy. The first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A behavior occurs -- whether an example of humans at our best, worst, or somewhere in between. What went on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system? By now he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened. Sapolsky keeps going: How was that behavior influenced by structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months, by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back to his or her genetic makeup? Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than one individual. How did culture shape that individual's group, what ecological factors millennia old formed that culture? And on and on, back to evolutionary factors millions of years old.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references (pages 721-773) and index.
Available in Other Form Behave
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Introduction
The behavior
One second before
Seconds to minutes before
Hours to days before
Days to months before
Adolescence; or, Dude, where's my frontal cortex?
Back to the crib, back to the womb
Back to when you were just a fertilized egg
Centuries to millennia before
The evolution of behavior
Us versus them
Hierarchy, obedience, and resistance
Morality and doing the right thing, once you've figured out what that is
Feeling someone's pain, understanding someone's pain, alleviating someone's pain
Metaphors we kill by
Biology, the criminal justice system, and (oh, why not?) free will
War and peace
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix 1: Neuroscience 101
Appendix 2: The basics of endocrinology
Appendix 3: Protein basics.

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