Behave (Book Review & Notes)

• Copyright: 2017
• Pages: 717 ex-notes
• Year(s) Read: 2018/2024

What I Liked

In 2018, I was on a flight to Saint Kitts struggling to get through this book and I read the following:

What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.

In other words, the pleasure is in the anticipation of reward, and the reward itself is nearly an afterthought (unless, of course, the reward fails to arrive, in which case it’s the most important thing in in the world). If you know your appetite will be sated, pleasure is more about the appetite than about the sating.

This is hugely important.

— Robert Sapolsky, Behave (p. 70-71)

I didn’t realize it at the time, but these two pages completely changed how I think.

Beyond pleasure and rewards, I am slower in establishing expectations, of others, for others, and for myself. Once the expectation is there, it has to happen or else “it’s the most important thing in the world.”

More broadly, the book is about why we do what we do and what factors influence our decisions and actions. The author shifts the entire framing from what’s happening at the time of the decision and behavior to what happened before the behavior.

I now think more in terms of emotional time delays and planting seeds. Proving the point, it took 6 years of the book marinating in my subconscious for my ideas about it to form here.

What I eat, how I sleep, and what I do isn’t just affecting me this week. It affects how I feel, what I think, and how I behave next week.

Be patient with this book.

I wouldn’t read it straight through unless you have a biology background. Freshman year of high school I got kicked out of my biology class after flicking a bottlecap across the room and hitting my teacher in the forehead during finals week. So, while reading I had to Google and re-read a lot of sentences .

Even absorbing 1% of the content may change the way you think and act around certain things for the rest of your life.

For men, our prefrontal cortex (responsible for decision making) doesn’t fully develop until we’re at least 25 (as girls learn the hard way). The book talks a lot about this, and it’s hard to overstate how seemingly important this is. We will reference this in future posts.

I jumped around. I read 40% of it then put it down when I read too many acronyms & chemicals (vmPFC, dopamine, pheromones, testosterone, and synapses). I came back to it, read another 30% or so, put it down for a couple years, then came back to it again.

The coming back to it, and re-reading it for a second time, is when I learned the most.

If pressed for time, watch Sapolsky’s TED Talk on the book. Here is a quick summary of the framework.

Why Did That Behavior Occur?

• One second before: What went on in his brain? 
• Seconds to minutes before: What environmental stimuli influenced his brain?
• Hours to days before: What hormones sensitized him to those stimuli? 
• Weeks to months before: How did experience reshape how his brain responded to those forces?
• Back to adolescence: How did that immature frontal cortex shape the adult he became?
• Back to childhood and fetal life: How did early life experiences cause lifelong changes in brain function and gene expression?
• Back to fertilized egg: What genes coded for those hormones, neurotransmitters, etc.? 
• Decades to millennia before: How did culture shape the social environment in which he lives, and how did ecological factors shape his culture?
• Millions of years back: How did the behavior evolve? 

You know, I know this isn’t you talking, it’s your hormones.

— Knocked Up (2007)

Book Notes & Quotes

• It literally takes time, and a physical, biological change, for us to “change our mind.”  This is really interesting to think about — our minds can reprogram themselves, but it takes time.  Remapping neurons, such as visual neurons converting to tactile and auditory in newly blind people occurs within 5 days.

• We love stress that is mild and transient and occurs in a benevolent context. (127)

• The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.

• beta-endorphin => “runner’s high” (p. 123)  

• Stress-induced (aka frustration-induced) displacement aggression is ubiquitous in various species. (131)

• Humans excel at stress-induced displacement aggression — consider how economic downturns increase the rate of spousal and child abuse. (132)

• Hormones don’t determine, command, cause, or invent behaviors. Instead they make us more sensitive to the social triggers of emotionally laden behaviors and exaggerate our preexisting tendencies in those domains. (136)

• Donald Hebb, in his book The Organization of Behavior nearly 70 years ago, proposed memories are formed by the strengthening of preexisting synapses. (138) 

• For starters, a hierarchy is a ranking system that formalizes unequal access to limited resources, ranging from meat to that nebulous thing called “prestige.” (426)

• Then there is the issue of how high rank is attained. In many cases, (e.g. female baboons) rank is inherited, a system with kin selection written all over it. In contrast, in other species/sexes (male baboons, for example) ranks shift over time, changing as a function of fights, showdowns, and Shakespearean melodrama, where rising in the hierarchy is about brawn, sharp canines, and winning the right fight. (428-429)

• But what about the more interesting issue of how high rank, once attained, is maintained? As we’ll see, this has less to do with muscle than with social skills. (429)

• This ushers in a key point — social competence is challenging, and this is reflected in the brain. (429)

• “Rank” and “hierarchy” in other animals is anything but straightforward and varies considerably depending on the species, gender, and social group. (430)

• What about gender? Milgram-like studies have shown that women average higher rates than men of voicing resistance to the demands to obey . . . but higher rates, nonetheless, of ultimately complying. (474)

• But this circumstance is different. The context dependency of morality is crucial and an additional realm. It is a nightmare of a person who with remorseless sociopathy believes it is okay to steal, rape, kill and plunder. But far more of humanity’s worst behaviors are due to a different kind of person. Namely, most of the rest of us who will say that of course it is wrong to do X. But here’s why these special circumstance make me an exception right now. We use different brain circuits when contemplating our own moral failings. (492)

• Going easy on ourselves also reflects a key cognitive fact. We judge ourselves by our internal motives and everyone else by their external actions and thus in considering our own misdeeds we have more access to mitigating situational information. (493)

• As David Ariely writes in his book, overall Cheating is not limited by risk, it is limited by our ability to rationalize the cheating to ourselves. (493)

• As we saw in chapter nine, it is only when groups get large enough that people regularly interact with strangers that cultures invent moralizing gods. These are not gods who sit around the banquet table laughing with detachment at the foibles of humans Down below, or gods who punish humans for lousy sacrificial offerings. These are gods who punish people for being rotten to other humans. In other words, the large religions and being Gods who do third party punishment No wonder this predicts these religions adherence being third party punishers themselves. (499)

• If you’re stressed like a normal mammal in an acute physical crisis, the stress response is lifesaving. But if instead you chronically activate the stress response for reasons of psychological stress, your health suffers.

• We tend to think of market interactions as being the epitome of complexity, finding a literal common currency for the array of human needs and desires in the form of this abstraction called money.

• But at their core market interactions represent an impoverishment of human reciprocity. in its natural form, human reciprocity is a triumph of comfortably and intuitively doing long term math with apples and oranges.

• This guy over here is a superstar Hunter. That guy isn’t in his league, but has your back if there’s a line around. Meanwhile, she’s amazing at finding the best mongongo nuts that older woman knows all about medicinal herbs. And that geeky guy remembers the best stories. We know where one another live, the debit column, the debit columns even out over time and if somebody is really abusing the system, we’ll get around to collectively dealing with them.

• In contrast, at its core, a cash economy market interaction strips it all down to I give you this now, so you give me that now, myopic present tense interactions whose obligations of reciprocity must be balanced immediately. People in small scale societies are relatively new to functioning this way. It’s not the case that small scale cultures that are growing big and market reliant, are newly schooled in how to be fair, instead, they’re newly schooled and how to be fair in the artificial circumstances modeled by something like the ultimate made them game. (500)

• In the sense used by most in the field, including these authors, shame is external judgment by the group while guilt is internal judgment of yourself. Shame requires an audience and is about honor. Guilt is for cultures that treasure privacy and is about conscience. Shame is a negative assessment of the entire individual guilt, that of an act making it possible to hate the sin but love the sinner. Effective shaming requires a conformist homogenous population. Effective guilt requires respect for law. feeling shame is about wanting to hide. feeling guilt is about wanting to make amends. Shame is when everyone says you can no longer live with us. Guilt is when you say how am I going to live with myself. (502)

• From the time that Benedict first articulated this contrast, there has been a self congratulatory view in the West that shame is somehow more primitive than guilt as the West has left behind dunce caps public flogging and Scarlet letters. Shame is the mob guilt is internalizing rules, laws, edicts, decrees and statutes. Yet Jacquet convincingly, argues for the continued usefulness of shaming in the West calling for its rebirth in a post modernist form, for her shaming is particularly useful when the powerful show no evidence of feeling guilt, and evade punishment. We have no shortage of examples of such evasion in the American legal system where one can benefit from the best defense that money or power can by shaming can often step in to that vacuum. (502)

• Anthropologist studying everyone from hunter gatherers to urbanites have found that about two thirds of everyday conversation is gossip, with the vast majority of it being negative, as has been said, gossip with the goal of shaming is a weapon of the weak against the powerful it has always been fast and cheap is and is infinitely more so now in the area.

• Nothing about adolescence can be understood outside the context of delayed frontocortical maturation. If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the frontal cortex is still working out the assembly instructions, we’ve just explained why adolescents are so frustrating, great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive, self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible, and world changing. Think about this — adolescence and early adulthood are the times when someone is most likely to kill, be killed, leave home forever, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, devote themselves to the needy, become addicted, marry outside their group, transform physics, have hideous fashion taste, break their neck recreationally, commit their life to God, mug an old lady, or be convinced that all of history has converged to make this moment the most consequential, the most fraught with peril and promise, the most demanding that they get involved and make a difference. In other words, it’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex.

• To cite a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde, “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”

• Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.

See also:

• Stanford Lectures: Human Behavioral Psychology (Robert Sapolsky)
• Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (Robert Sapolsky)