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A review by dmturner
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky
5.0
"If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else." (674)
An exhaustive study of human behavior by a polymathic neuroscientist who studies baboons and teaches at Stanford, this massive undertaking talks about everything from brain structure and hormones to culture and philosophy, and could easily have been broken up into two or three separate books. Sapolsky is a very good writer (I loved A Primate's Memoir) and is also obviously a good teacher (I recommend the YouTube videos of his class), plus he is anything but arrogant.
He is meticulous about reminding us when he reintroduces a topic he talked about earlier, as well as about foreshadowing that a particular topic is going to reappear. He obligingly attaches appendices that provide basic information about things such as neurology for those who might be tackling a book of this type without knowing much. Of course, that's essential, since this book could be the curriculum for a multi-year college curriculum.
I have a few criticisms of the book. It may seem handy to use acronyms for the various brain structures, and I get it, but it's easier for me to remember "anterior cingulate cortex" than "ACC." Not that I can remember what the anterior cingulate cortex does even after having read the whole thing. I have to look it up every time (It's involved in empathy, impulse control, emotion, and decision-making) (I do, however, remember the amygdala and the insular cortex functions, because damn).
Another criticism is that while I love footnotes ordinarily, he would have done well to resist the urge to include so many of them in this book. I enjoyed reading them, and couldn't keep from looking at them, but it made reading the book a little bewildering and incredibly slow from time to time. He really couldn't resist shoving all the cool facts in, and yeah, they're cool, but I borrowed this book on Kindle from the library and had to renew it twice.
I also wish he had resisted the urge to tackle the philosophical problem of whether or not free will exists, though I guess he had to because if you are examining all the ways in which behavior is determined from synapses to cultures, you have to accept that the idea of free will is implicated. But his "homunculus" discussion either needed to be dealt with in more detail (oh, golly, another hundred pages) or in less, because he was wading into waters that are not only deep but turbulent, and the resulting chapter seemed dismissive, as well as being less grounded in research than even the chapter on religion.
That said, the book is worth wading through. If you buy the physical book, I recommend cutting it into chunks so that you don't get a backache from carrying it around. If you find that heretical, buy two copies.
An exhaustive study of human behavior by a polymathic neuroscientist who studies baboons and teaches at Stanford, this massive undertaking talks about everything from brain structure and hormones to culture and philosophy, and could easily have been broken up into two or three separate books. Sapolsky is a very good writer (I loved A Primate's Memoir) and is also obviously a good teacher (I recommend the YouTube videos of his class), plus he is anything but arrogant.
He is meticulous about reminding us when he reintroduces a topic he talked about earlier, as well as about foreshadowing that a particular topic is going to reappear. He obligingly attaches appendices that provide basic information about things such as neurology for those who might be tackling a book of this type without knowing much. Of course, that's essential, since this book could be the curriculum for a multi-year college curriculum.
I have a few criticisms of the book. It may seem handy to use acronyms for the various brain structures, and I get it, but it's easier for me to remember "anterior cingulate cortex" than "ACC." Not that I can remember what the anterior cingulate cortex does even after having read the whole thing. I have to look it up every time (It's involved in empathy, impulse control, emotion, and decision-making) (I do, however, remember the amygdala and the insular cortex functions, because damn).
Another criticism is that while I love footnotes ordinarily, he would have done well to resist the urge to include so many of them in this book. I enjoyed reading them, and couldn't keep from looking at them, but it made reading the book a little bewildering and incredibly slow from time to time. He really couldn't resist shoving all the cool facts in, and yeah, they're cool, but I borrowed this book on Kindle from the library and had to renew it twice.
I also wish he had resisted the urge to tackle the philosophical problem of whether or not free will exists, though I guess he had to because if you are examining all the ways in which behavior is determined from synapses to cultures, you have to accept that the idea of free will is implicated. But his "homunculus" discussion either needed to be dealt with in more detail (oh, golly, another hundred pages) or in less, because he was wading into waters that are not only deep but turbulent, and the resulting chapter seemed dismissive, as well as being less grounded in research than even the chapter on religion.
That said, the book is worth wading through. If you buy the physical book, I recommend cutting it into chunks so that you don't get a backache from carrying it around. If you find that heretical, buy two copies.