Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky

Rota Kalniņa

2022-06-09

grāmata

It’s complicated

Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst is a book that looks at the human behaviour interdiscpilinary, and from various scientific perspectives. First part of the book focuses on the know-how of how our mins and bodies work. The second part dives into more complex questions about what to do with that information. What to do then? Well, it depends on the context.

What occured in the prior timeframe that triggered that behaviour?

A second: nervous system (neurobiology)
Seconds to minutes: sensory stimuli (ethology)
Hours to days: acute actions and hormones
Days to months: learning (neuroplasticity)
Years: development in early life (epigenetics and genetics)
Centuries to millenia: culture (anthropoloy)
Millions of years: evolution (sociobiology - evolution of social behavior)

The big insights of the book

The context and meaning of a behavior are usually more interesting and complex than the mechanics of it.
To understand things, you must incorporate neurons and hormones and early development and genes and … ..
There is no single anything that explains a behavior. Biology is about predispositions if/then clauses, context dependencies and exacerbation or diminution of preexisting tendencies.
Biological factors (e.g. hormones) don’t so much cause a behavior as modulate and sensitize, lowering thresholds for environmental stimuli to cause it.
Genes aren’t about inevitabilities; they’re about potentials and vulnerabilities. And they don’t determine anything on their own. Gene/environment interactions are everywhere. Evolution is most consequential when altering regulation of genes, rather than genes themselves.
You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.

The nervous system

Science field in spotlight - neurobiology, the science of neuron and brain biology. Emphasis on:

amygdala: the hub of fear, aggression and arousal
frontal cortex: regulation and restraint of behaviour
dopaminergic system: the hub of reward, anticipation and motivation

The frontal cortex and its parts

The PFC (pre-frontal cortex) is essential for categorical thinking, for organizing and thinking about bits of information with different labels.
Just like “the map” for neural algorythms.

The PFC tracks rules and is overall taxing. … Willpower is more than a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource.
Use it wisely!

A shockingly large percentage of people incarcerated for violent crimes have a history of concussive trauma to the frontal cortex.

There are 2 crucial parts of PFC, namely:

dlPFC: the decider, most rational, cognitive and unsentimental part of the PFC. This has evolved the last and matures the last (at about 25 years). It’s job is to “do the harder thing”.
vmPFC: all about the impact of emotions on decision making. It interacts with our gut and gives “the gut feeling”.

Withour a vmPFC, you may know the meaning of negative feedback, but you don’t know the feeling of it in your gut and thus don’t shift behaviour.

A subject plays a game with two other people and is manipulated into feeling that she is being left out. This activates her amygdala, periaqueductal gray (that ancient brain region that helps process physical pain), anterior cingulate, and insula, an anatomical picture of anger, anxiety, pain, disugst, sadness. Soon afterward her PFC activates as rationalizations kick in - “This is just a stupid game; I have friends; my dog loves me.” And the amygdala et al. quiet down. And what if you do the same to someone whose frontal cortex is not fully functional? The amygdala is increasinlgy activated; the person feels increasingly distressed. What neourological disease is involved? None. This is a typical teenager.

It’s great if your frontal cortex lets you avoid temptation, allowing you to do the harder, better thing. But it’s usually more effective of doing that better thing has become so automatic that it isn’t hard. And it’s often easiest to avoid temptation with distraction and reappraisal rather than willpower.

Dopaminergic system and other neurotransmitters

mesolimbic/mesocortical dopamine system

Dopamine system codes for discrepancy from expectation - get what you expected, and there’s a steady-state dribble of dopamine. Get more reward and/or sooner than expected, and there’s a big burst. Get less and/or later - a decrease.
This system is involved in habit making - the more precisely you expect dopamine, the more average it becomes.

Dopamine is not about the happiness od reward. It’s about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occuring.
If you have a habit, you get your dopamine before the action has happened or after (delayed gratification).

Decreasing serotonin signaling increases behavioral and cognitive impulsivity.

Often we’re more about the anticipation and pursuit of pleasure than about the experience of it.

Sensory stimuli

Science field in spotlight - ethology, the science of interviewing an animal in its own language.

Nineteenth-century parsons went into nature to collect butterflies, revel in the variety of wing colors, and marvel at what God had wrought. Twentieth-century ethologists went into nature to collect behavior, revel in its variety, and marvel at what evolution had wrought.

In the moments just before we decide upon some of our most consequential acts, we are less rational and autonomous decision makers than we like to think.
**

We aren’t chimps, we aren’t bonobos. We’re not a classic pair-bonding species or a tournament species. We’ve evolved to be somewhere in between in these and other categories that are clear-cut in other animals. It makes us a muc more melleable and resilient species. It also makes our socia lives much more confusing and messy, filled with imperfection and wrong turns.

Hormonal system

Science field in spotlight - endocrinology, the science of hormonal system. Emphasis on:

testosterone
oxytocin
stress

Hormones don’t determine, command, cause, or invent behaviors. Instead they make us more sensitive to the social triggers of emotionally laden behavios and exaggerate our preexisting tendencies in those domains.

Testosterone

A hormone widely accused for aggressive behavior. Mostly in human males.

Testosterone prompts whatever behaviors are needed to maintain status.

Testosterone has far less to do with aggression than most assume. Within the normal range, individual differences in testosterone levels don’t predict who will be aggressive. … Testosterone doen not “invent” aggression. It makes us more sensitive to triggers of aggression.

The rise in testosterone during status challenge does not neccessarily increase aggression; it increases whatever is needed to maintain status.

Oxytocin and vasopressin

“A marketing dream”, the fluffy, cute hormone.

Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us (“our group”) and worse to everyone else.

Hormone levels are extremely dynamic, with hundredfold changes in some within hours - no male’s testes ever had to navigate the endocrinology of ovulating or childbirth.

One must debunk the myth that females are always nice and affiliative (unless, of course, they’re aggressively protecting their babies, whic is cool and inspirational).

Stress

You can’t understand aggression without understanding fear (and what the amygdala has to do with both)
“Fight or flight”

Stress response rapidly mobilizes energy into circulation from storage sites in your body. Furthermore, heart rate and blood pressure increase, delivering that circulating energy to exercising muscles faster. Moreover, during stress, long-term building projects - growth, tissue repair, and reproduction - are postponed until after the crisis; after all, if a lion is chasing you, you have better things to do with your energy than, say, thicken your uterine walls.

During sustained stress, the amygdala processes emotional sensory information more repidly and less accurately, dominates hippocampal function, and dsirupts frontocortical function; we’re more fearful, our thinking is muddled, and we assess risks poortly and and act impulisvely out of habit**, rather than incorporating new data.

Plasticity and learning

This is the essence of learning: The lecturer says something, and it goes in one ear and out the other. The factoid is repeated; same thing. It’s repeated enough times and = aha! - the lightbulb goes on and suddenly you get it. At a synaptic level, the axon terminal having to repeatedly release glutamate is the lecturer droning on repetitively; the moment when the postsynaptic threshold is passed and the NMDA receptors first activate is the dendritic spine finally getting it.

Musicions, who have large auditory cortical representation of musical sounds than do nonmusicians, particulary for the sound of their own instrument, as well as for detecting pitch in speech; the younger the person begins being a musician, the stronger the remapping.

Hippocampal neurogenesis, for example, is enhanced by learning, exercise, estrogen, antidepressants, environmental enrichment, and brain injury and inhibited by various stressors.

Experience, health, and hormone fluctuations can change the size of parts of the brain in a matter of months.

While it’s cool that there’s so much plasticity in the brain, it’s no surprise - it has to work that way.

Cognitive and moral development

Childhood adversity can scar everything from our DNA to our cultures, and effects can be lifelong, even multigenerational. However, more adverse consequences can be reversed than used to be thought. But the longer you wait to intervene, the harder it will be.

The final brain region to fully mature is the frontal cortex, not going fully online until the midtwenties. … the later a particular brain region matures, the less it is shaped by genes and more by environment.

Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development:

Sensorimotor stage (0-24 months)
Throught concerns only what the child can directly sense and explore. DUring this stage, typically at around 8 months, children develop “object permanence”, understanding that even if they can’t see an object, it still exists - the infant can generate a mental image of something no longer there.
Preoperational stage (~2-7 years)
The cild can maintain ideas about how the world wo**rks without explicit examples in front of him. Thoughts are increasingly symbolic; imaginary play abounds. However, reasoning is intuitive - no logic, no cause and effect. This is when kids can’t yet demonstrate “conservation of volume”. Identical beakers A and B are filled with equal amounts of water. Pour the contents of beaker B into beaker C, which is taller and thinner. ASk the child, “What has more water, A or C?” Kids in the preoperational stage use incorrect folk intuition - the awter in line C is higher than that in A; it must contaion more water.
Concrete operational stage (7-12 years)
Kids think logically, no longer falling for that different-shaped-beakers nonsense. However, generalizing logic from specific cases is iffy. As is abstract thinking - for example, proverbs are interpreted literally (“‘Birds of a feather flock together’ means that similar birds form flocks”).
Formal operational stage (adolescence onward)
Approaching adult levels of abstraction, reasoning, and metacognition.

Theory of Mind - understanging that other people have different thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge than they. You get it around 2 and it gets more elaborate by time.

Preconventional reasoning
ego-oriented - obedience and self-interest: what’s in it for me?
typically kids at age 8-10
Conventional reasoning
relational - about your interactions with others and their consequences.
most adolescents and adults are at this level.
Postconventional reasoning
egoistic - rules and their application come from within and reflect conscience, where a transgression exacts the ultimate cost - having to live with yourself afterward.
hardly anyone consistenlty stays here.

This is so wrong - foolishly pick a poor family to be born into, and by kndergarden, the odds of your succeeding at life’s mashmallow tests are already stacked against you.
The familty you are born in matters

Parenting styles

Each style produces adults with that same approach; preferences of style vary by culture. We view the the Authoritative as the best. But social skills kids learn moslty from their peers.

Responsiveness\Demand	low	high
high	Permissive	Authoritative
low	Neglectful	Authoritarian

Genes

genes are regulated by the environment with environment consisting everything from events inside the cell to the universe.

A gene’s influence on average value of a trait (i.e. whether it is inherited) differs from its influence on variability of that trait across individuals (its heritability).

Genes matter. But often the percieved importance is inflated:

[Twin studies] show that genetics plays a major role in a gamut of domains of behavior, including IQ and its subcomponents (i.e. verbal ability, and spatial ability)), schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, autism, attention-deficit disorder, compulsive gambling, and alcoholism.
Nearly as strong genetic influences were shown for personality measures related to extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience (knowng as the “Big Five” personality traits). Likewise with genetic influences on degree of religiosity, attitude toward authority, attitute toward homosexuality, and propensities toward cooperation and risk taking in games.

Genes are nearly irrelevant to cognitive development if you’re growing upin awful poverty - poverty’s adverse effects trump the genetics.

Genes effects are supremely context dependent. Ask not what a gene does. Ask what it does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes.

Culture

Culture has many definitions, this book takes it simple: how we do and think about things, transmitted by nongenetic means.

Here are some classifications:

Collectivism vs individualism: who is more important - Me or Us?
Pastoralism vs agriculture: are your belongings easy to steal
Stratified vs egalitarian: how unequally resources are distributed

Other important aspects that matter:

Social capital
Socioeconomic status
Population metrics, like size, density and heterogenity

Ecosystems majorly shape culture - but then that culture can be exported and persistent in radically different places for millenia. … most earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between adn thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists.

The more income inequality in a community (more frequently the poor have their noses rubbed in their low status) - the steeper the health gradient. Lots of inequality in a community makes for low social capital and the most direct cause of the poor health.

Collectivism vs individualism

The most studied are the differences between East Asians (highly collectivist) and Americans (highly individualist) societies.

A high incidence of 7R, associated with impulsivity and novelty seeking, is the legacy of humans who made the greatest migrations in human history. In East Asians this gene is practically non-existent.

In most studied cultural contrasts, we see clustering of ecological factors, modes of production, cultural differences, and dofferences in endocrinology, neurobiology, and gene frequencies. Cultural contrasts appear in likely ways - morality, empathy, chlid-rearing practices, competition, cooperation, definitions of happiness.

Pastoralists and southerners - cultures of honor

Pastoralists emerge in dry, hardscrabble, wide-open environments too tough for agriculture. They are monotheists (while rain forest dwellers are atypically polytheistic), and highly militarized.

Pastoralist cultures (like the South in US) have high rates of particluar kind of violence - slights of honor in rural settings, between people who know each other. (He flirted with my wife so I shot him.)

Honor killings

Family (blood relatives) saves their honor by killing the “bad” familiy member themselves, usually by the hands of an underaged brother, to minimize penalties.

Victims are usually young women of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities.

Most common crimes - a woman resisting being the property of her male relatives:

refusing an arranged marriage
seeking to divorce an abusive spouse/spouse they were forcibly married as a child
seeking education
resisting constraining religious orthodoxy (like covering their head)
interacting with an unapproved male
infidelity
religious conversion
being raped
homosexuality (for male honor killing)

Stratified versus egalitarian cultures

Hunter-gatherers moslty egalitarian;
Inequalities emerge when there is stuff to split up.

Social capital is the collective quantity of resources such as trust, reciprocity, and cooperation.

With 2 simple questions you learn a ton about community’s social capital:

Can people usually be trusted?
If yes: - fewer locks, people watching out for on another’s kids and intervening in situations when one could look away
How many organizations someone participates in?
A community with high levels of such participation is one where people feel efficacious, where institutions work transparently enough that people believe they can effect change.

People who feel helpless don’t join organizations.

Socioeconomic status (SES)/health gradient:

In culture after culture, the poorer you are, the worse your health, the higher the incidence and impact of numerous diseases, and the shorter your life expectancy.

It’s not so much being poor that predicts poor health. It’s feeling poor.

“How do you feel you’re doing financially when you compare yourself with other people?”

Your answer to that question is at least as good a predictor of health as is objective SES.

Which comes first - poverty or poor health?

Overwhelmingly poverty. Developming in a low-SES womb makes poor health as an adult more likely.

Population size/density/heterogenity

Peace does not depend on integrated coexistence, but rather on well defined topography and political boundaries separating groups, allowing for partial autonomy within a single country. (patterns and clarity of fragmentation)

Global warming won’t do good things to global conflict. For starters, warmer temperatures rile people up - in cities during the summers, for every three degree increase in temperature, there was a 4% increase in interpersonal violence and 14% in group violence.

Evolution of behaviour

Evolution rests on 3 steps:

certain biological traits are inherited by genetic means
mutations and gene recombination produce variation in those traits
some of those variants confer more fitness than others

Given those conditions, over time the frequency of more fit gene variants increases in a population.

Brains and cultures coevolve.

Common misconceptions

Evolution favors survival of the fittest.

No, instead it is about reproduction, passing on copies of genes

Evolution can select for preadaptations - neutral traits that prove useful in the future.

This doesn’t happen, selection is for traits pertinent to the present.

Living species are somehow better adapted than extinct species

Extinct species were just as well adapted, until environmental conditions changed sufficiently to do them inl the same awaits us.

Evolution directionally selects for greater complexity.

Yes, average complexity has increased. Nonetheless, there are still simple organisms evolving and not increasing their complexity.

Evolution is “just a theory”

Well, it is pretty proven by numerous examples, fossil molecular, geographic evidence and unintelligent design (leftovers from features we do not use anymore).

2 ways of trait sculpting

Sexual selection - traits that attract members of the opposite sex;
Natural selection - traits that enhance the passing on of copies of genes through any other route (good health, foraging skills, predator avoidance).

These processes can work in opposition.

Parent-Offspring Conflict

Should female give her child great nutrition, guaranteering his survival, but at the cost of nutrition for her other children (current or future)?

Baboon moms evolved to wean their kids at the age where they can feed themselves (so they can ovulate), and baboon kids evolved to try to delay that day.

Mother-fetus conflict:

Fetus wants maximal nutrition from Mom, who cares if that impacts her future reproductive potential?

Mom wants to balance current and future reproductive prospects.

So, there’s a metabolic struggle involving insulin (the pancreatic hormone secrteted when blood glucose levels rise, which triggers glucose entry into target cells). The fetus releases a hormone that makes Mom’s cells unresponsive to insulin, as well as an enzyme that degrades Mom’s insulin. Thus Mom absorbs less glucose from her bloodstream, leaving more for the fetus.

Monogamy vs Polygamy from gene perspective

Measure after measure, it’s the same. We aren’t classically monogamous or polygamous. As everyone from poets to divorce attorneys can attest, we are by nature profoundly confused - mildly polygamous, floating somewhere in between.

Men are roughly 10% taller and 20% heavier than women, need 20% more calories, and have life span 6% shorter.

Us versus Them

Us: prosocial behavior
Them: antisocial behavior

Thems come in different flavors - threatening and angry, disgusting and repellent, primitive and undifferentiated.

Warmth\Competence	low	high
high	Pity	Pride
low	Disgust	Envy

How to mitigate the negative effects of Them’ing?
Provoke empathy towards an individual member of Thems.

We implicitly divide the world into Us and Them, and prefer Us. We are easily manipulated, even sublminally and within seconds, as to who counts as each.

“Me” versus “Us” (being prosocial within your group) is easier than “Us” versus “Them” (prosociality between groups).

Hierarchy, obedience, and resistance

Only humans (occasionally) choose the hierarchy and leaders.

Contemporary studies show that the worst stress-related health typically occurs in middle management, with its killer kombo of high work demands but little autonomy - responsibility without control.

When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world.

Our brains (neocortex and frontal cortex) have co-eolved with the social complexity of status differences. It takes a lot of brainpower to make sense of the subtleties of dominance relations.
Navigating status differences is most challenging when it comes to attaining and maintaining high rank, this requires cognitive mastery of Theory of Mind and perspective taking, of manipulation, intimidation, and deceit, and of impulse control and emotional regulation.
The biographies of our most successful members are built arounbd what provocations are ignored during occasions where the frontal cortex kept a level head.

We’re really out there as a species in that sometimes our high-status individuals don’t merely plunder and instead actually lead, acctually attempt to facilitate the common good.
We’ve even developed bottom-up mechanisms for collectively choosing such leaders on occasion.
A magnificent achievement.
Which we then soil by having our choosing of leaders be shaped by implicit, automatic factors more suitable for 5-year-olds deciding who should caption their boat on a voyage with the Teletubbies to Candyland.

Political stance

Of course, this is US politics talk.

Intellectual style

Conservatives start gut (feeling) and stay gut; liberals go from gut to head (frontal cortex).

Moral cognition

Jonathan Haidt six foundations of morality:

Moral goals	political stance
care vs harm	Liberal
fairness vs cheating	Liberal
liberty vs oppression	Liberal
loyalty vs betrayal	Conservative
authority vs subversion	Conservative
sanctity vs degradation	Conservative

Each political stance emphasizes 3 values and so act accordingly.

Affective psychological differences

The differing views of novelty certainly explain the liberal view that with correct reforms, our best days are ahead of us in a novel future, whereas conservatives view our best days as behind us, in familiar circumstances that should be returned to, to make things great again.

Resistance

Individuals no more exceptional than the rest of us provide stunning examples of our finest moments as humans.

Morality

Or “Doing the right thing once you’ve figured out what that is.”

Moral decision making can be wildly context dependent:

… studies suggest that when a sacrifice of one requires active, intentional, and local actions, more intuitive brain circuitry is engaged, and ends don’t justify means.
And in circumstances where either the harm is unintentional or the intentionality plays out at a psychological distance, different neural cicuitry predominates, producing an opposite conclusion about the morality of ends and means.

We judge ourselves by our internal motives and everyone else by their external actions.

Shame is external judgment by the group, while guilt is internal judgment of yourself.

Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren’t necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.

If not your money is sitting there, but no one’s looking. Why not grab it?

Virtue ethics (emphasis on the actor) would answer:

Because you are a better person than that, because you’ll have to live with yoursleft afterward.

Deontology (emphasis on the act) would answer:

Because it’s not okay to steal.

Consequentialism (emphasis on the outcome) would answer:

What if everyone started acting that way, think about the impact on the person whose money you’ve stolen.

Our guts learn their intuitions.
Just a few generations back we had completely different understandings of what is fair ar morally good (i.e., slavery, human rights).

Empathy and compassion

Or “Feeling/understanding/ alleviating someone’s pain.”

Neither the capacity for fancy, rerefield moral reasoning nor for feeling great empathy necessarily translated into actually doing something difficult, brave, and compassionate.

Methaphors we kill by

Literal cleanliness and orderliness can release us from abstract cognitive and affective distress.

Metaphors about weight, density, texture, temperature, interoceptive sensations, time and distance are just figures of speech. Yet the brain confusedly processes them with some of the same ciscuits that deal with the physical properties of objects.

Be dubious about someone who suggests that other types of people are like crawly, infectious things.

It’s not great if someone believes it’s okay for people to do some horrible, damaging act. But more of the world’s misery arises from people who, of course, opposite that horrible act … but cite some particular circumstance that should make them exceptions. The road to hell is paved with rationalization.

People kill and are willing to be killed to symbolic sacred values. Negotiations can make peace with Them; understanding and respecting the intensity of their sacred values can make lasting peace.

Biology, criminal justice system and free will

Three perspective on who is responsible for a crime:

We have complete free will in our behavior (nope)
We have none
Somewhere in between

In a 1457 trial of a pig and her piglets for eating a child, the pig was convicted and executed, whereas the piglets were found to be too young to have been responsible for their acts.

When you praise kids for working hard, they tend to work harder the next time, show more resilience, enjoy the process more, and become more likely to value the accomplishment for its own sake (rather than for the grade).
Praise kids for being smart, and precisely the opposite occurs.
When it becomes all about being smart, effort begins to seem suspect, beneath you - after all, if you’re really so smart, you shouldn’t have to work hard, you glide, you don’t sweat and grunt.

I can’t really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we’ll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are bening, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters - when we judge others harshly.

War and peace

Biologically, intense love and intense hate aren’t opposites. The opposite of each is indifference.