Chapter 3 (Seconds to Minutes Before) discussed outside stimuli and their influences on behavior. Sounds, sights, smells, and touch are all sensory cues that can have an effect on your behavior, but in ways so subtle they are not noticed by you. I think my favorite parts in this chapter involved the things I learned about smell. In many mammals, humans not included, smell contributes a great deal to behavior. Animals can sense things through smell that we cannot, and they know how to react when they catch a whiff of a certain smell. Us humans cannot smell the difference between a sample of sweat that came from someone who was working out over a sample that came from someone who was watching a horror film. But our brains know the difference, due to studies showing that a certain area in our brain will activate. If we smell fear, we cannot tell another person that the surrounding air smells of fear, but if you are put in a room full of frightened people, your brain will conclude that you are scared too. For those who studied psychology or just have an interest in it, there are brief mentions of operant conditioning. As a former student of psychology, I was particularly intrigued at the utterance of certain behaviors not following the rules of conditioning.
Chapter 4 (Hours to Days Before) is another very long chapter, but for me it was not as difficult to get through as Chapter 2. If you want to learn about hormones and how everything you thought you knew about them is wrong, please read this chapter. I first learned about testosterone, and how it does not cause aggression. As an example, men who are castrated, eunuchs, or given blockers, chemical castration, do not become less aggressive. In reality, the more aggressive behaviors a person, usually male, has demonstrated in the past, the more likely they are to display continued aggressive behavior in the future because it is a learned behavior. Aggression stimulates testosterone, which is why you see more of it in persons showing aggressive behavior, and thus the backwards thinking that testosterone is the cause. Testosterone is very complicated, and it does far more than most people know, but you will have to read to find out what exactly. I next learned about oxytocin and vasopressin, which are involved with bonding. I grew very interested in a small section towards the end that mentioned cross species bonding, which has existed for an extremely short period of time when compared to how long these neuropeptides have been around for. Next, came female aggression, which does not entirely have to do with a certain hormone, estrogen. Aggression in females, which is not studied as extensively as male aggression, can come from many factors that males do not have to deal with. Hormone ratio, the fact that hormone levels in the female can change within hours, breeding being either year-round or during certain seasons, and perimenstrual aggression and irritability, all factors that play a part in female aggression that cannot be found in the human male. Finally, I learned about stress and its effects on behavior. Apparently, there is stress that is good for you, called stress that we love by the author, and stress that is bad for you, the kind that can kill you if you find yourself in a constant state of stress. The chapter ends with a conclusion, which I thought summed everything up very well in bullet point form.
I was going to include Chapter 5, but I considered that might be a bit much as I wrote a lot about Chapter 3 and 4. Look for Chapter 5 plus more next week.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 