Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

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Based on the physiological oxytocinergic loop extended to sociality, music is grounded on cooperation and affiliation. Sure, but it also led to wine, science and books, which I’d suggest on balance makes it rather a good thing. Interestingly enough, Sapolsky found that otherwise liberal thinkers are likely to make conservative decisions when cognitive load is high.

For nearly 600 pages, barring the odd mention of the “cognitive” aspects of human action, Sapolsky sidelines the question of what place conscious reasoning has in determining behaviour, among all the neurochemical, hormonal, developmental and evolutionary factors he has been discussing.Sexual selection is a prominent theory, claiming that music evolved as an honest signal of cognitive, motor, and cooperative skills, thus an index of good genes positively valued by females. That process of completely breaking to the point now where I have no religion, have no spirituality, I'm utterly atheist, and in passing it is probably the thing I most regret in my life but is something I appear not to be able to change the process of getting to that point I view in retrospect as one of the most defining things in my life, the process of turning into that person from who I was. We know that feelings and emotions are based on biochemical substances, and we know that our behaviour is largely controlled by neurotransmitters in our brain and limbic system. This book explains human behavior not just with neurons and hormones, but also through psychology, evolution, culture and history.

The likelihood of its outburst is mediated by several factors including the activity of serotonin and other neurotransmitters that regulate reactive aggression through the corticolimbic circuit. Even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with affective communication, social attachment, and parental care. 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.In this context, he has noted similarities between obsessive-compulsive behavior and religious rituals. When correcting for duration as well as total world population the top 10 most violent wars now include World War 2, World War 1, the Russian Civil War now and another 20th Century event that didn’t even make Pinker’s original list, the Rwandan genocide.

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. You want study chimps and children observing adult human repeatedly accessing a treat inside a puzzle box. His governing question is: what explains the fact that humans can massacre one another but also perform spectacular acts of altruistic kindness? The ontogeny of human empathy is better understood with reference to the evolutionary history of the social brain.i109927886 |b1270001482444 |dgugnf |g- |m231120 |h19 |x2 |t2 |i8 |j300 |k170505 |n08-20-2023 20:34 |o- |a612. Reactive aggression is a response to salient threats that may have evolved as a strategy for survival. 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.