Tag: Nonfiction

Chapter 7 (Back to the Crib, Back to the Womb) discusses the roots of our behavior, which began in childhood. Warning, this chapter is insanely long, and if you are the type of person who must read an entire chapter in one sitting once you begin it (as I am), make sure you have nothing immediately planned in the future and devote a block of time. I am not going to detail the stages of development, Theory of Mind, or the reasoning stages, because even though the author discusses these topics, there is plenty of literature out there that goes into much more detail about the topics on their own. What really drew me into this chapter was the section about how childhood influences adult life, specifically the section about mothers. I got the impression that mothers were the greatest influence on an individual from pre-birth, if the mother gives birth to the child, and through childhood. A mothers’ actions and choices influence the child even while they are in the womb, from the sound of her voice, which Is preferred by babies more so than the voice of their fathers, to the substances she chooses to put into her body while carrying, a healthy diet producing a healthy child, poor nutrition producing a sickly child. Of course, there are other childhood influences that have just as much of an impact as mothers, but they were not discussed in as much detail as mothers, the author stating that these other influences had many similarities. In kind, if you want to read a little bit about negative reinforcement in order to ponder the reasons why some people become attached to their abuser, there is some good information here. The chapter then continues with the effects of violence, bullying, and culture on behavior, which I also found to be incredibly interesting. Finally, there was a section about transgender studies and how certain parts of the brain may explain why some people feel as though they were born into the wrong body.

Chapter 8 (Back to When You Were Just a Fertilized Egg) was another very long chapter, which discussed the roles of genes in behavior. It was divided into three parts, each part concluding with a wrap up of all the key points. Part one was about genes and their role in proteins, transcription factors (the regulators of genes), and the environmental influences that regulate transcription factors. I could not possibly explain this chapter in a better way than the author did, and I will not try. Part two was about looking at traits, explaining the difference between what it means when a trait is inherited versus when a trait has a degree of heritability. What I got out of this section was that genes can affect behavior depending on the environment, but the environment can affect behavior depending on the genes. You cannot look at a gene exclusively when trying to explain a behavior, you must consider the environmental factors as well. One gene can act a specific way in one type of environment, but place that same gene into another environment and there could be a completely different outcome. By only observing a gene in one environment, you could end up thinking that the genetic input towards a behavior is more important than it actually is because you are not considering the environmental role. The most thought-provoking passages from part three were about the mess that is serotonin and the many different studies that have been conducted to try to find validation in the theory that low serotonin increases aggression. This undertaking is not going well, as sometimes high serotonin can increase aggression. Towards the end of the chapter, we are told that the effect a single gene has on behavior is very small, behavior is influenced by several genes at once, each gene contributing a very small influence.  

Chapter 5 (Days to Months Before) begins by reminding us of the focus of the previous chapters, Seconds being the nervous system, Minutes to Hours being sensory cues, and Hours to Days being hormones. This chapter focuses on memory. Memory comes from the connection between the axon terminal and the dendritic spine. You would think new memory means new connections between these two, but it is rather a strengthening bond between the two which creates new memories. Putting it in the simplest terms I could follow, this happens in this way because of receptors on the dendritic spine. The spine contains one receptor, called the non-NMDA receptor. The axon releases glutamate, which causes an excitement. This excitement can only be detected by NMDA receptors. So how does the brain know to get excited about something if the spine only has non-NMDA receptors? After a length of time the axon will have released a lot of glutamate, this release will activate the NMDA receptor so that the dendritic spine becomes aware of the excitement. Lots of excitement over a long period of time leads to the NMDA receptors being more open in the future. This is how we remember. There is a lot more to it, but after reading through this section many times, this is how I came to understand the process. I then read an interesting piece about compensation. It is a common saying or belief that if you lose one of your senses the others will grow stronger, and there is proof of this being valid. The brain knows how to utilize areas of the brain that are not being used, say the visual area in the brain of a person who is blind, to improve the hearing area of the blind individual. Additionally, the visual area of the brain becomes activated when a blind person reads in Braille. Reading pieces like this make me want to learn more about compensation.

Chapter 6 (Adolescence; or, Dude, Where’s My Frontal Cortex?) did not interest me all that much. I learned that the teen years are the years when we take the most risks and are most interested in things that are unique and different, and this is because the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed and won’t be until we reach our mid-twenties. This also attributes to the reason why we are the most violent when we are teens and young adults, because we are less sensitive to pain, less sensitive to negative feedback (I like to think of it as the “I don’t care” attitude), and there isn’t a strong connection between moral reasoning and empathy. Why is there a delay in the prefrontal cortex? You’ll just need to read this chapter to hear some of the theories.

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.

This seventeen-chapter book began with an introduction that let me know I was going to enjoy myself while I struggled to understand the content. Mr. Sapolsky narrated a Hitler torture fantasy that gave a serial killer-esque feel with how obviously thought out each part of it has been detailed. From here I knew that while I would be doing some heavy thinking to try to understand a subject that I know very little about, I would at least be entertained by an author who clearly has a sense of humor. Following the Hitler fantasy, his remark about pessimism made me smirk, as I can relate, in that I also always imagine the worst-case scenario.

Chapter 1 (The Behavior) introduces behavior, and what could have happened seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, eons ago, that could have caused the nervous system to make that behavior happen. The next few chapters detail these periods of time down. Then there is a section about aggression that goes into the different types, of which I was very intrigued about the instrumental kind. Instrumental aggression, being an aggressive behavior that occurs for a nonpersonal reason, has the subject target another subject that is weaker than they are because they are feeling either frustrated, stressed, or because they are in pain. The subject needs to displace these feelings by doing something harmful or violent. I say subject, not human, because the author gives an example of this behavior being seen in a species of monkey, where a male that has lost his position in the ranks will rape a female afterwards. Mr. Sapolsky then mentioned that there would be more discussion about displacement anger in chapter 4, which got me excited with anticipation of learning more about that. Finally, one last thing I would like to mention because it really got me thinking philosophically, was how he mentioned a quote from Elie Wiesel, who said that hate was not the opposite of love, indifference was. And, apparently, hate and love are very much alike, notably in this text, when it comes to biology.

Chapter 2 (One Second Before) is where my struggles began. The author warns that the chapter is long and technical, and it was for me, and he suggests use of the appendix. It took me several hours over 3 days to get through this chapter because I was genuinely trying to understand it. Before he went into the different parts of the brain and their functions and how they play a role in behavior, the author asks why did the behavior occur? You can get endless answers to this question depending on who you ask. The answer will depend on the occupation, education, upbringing, religion, and many other factors, that belong to the identity of the person who is being asked the question. He says that no matter the answer, they are all connected. From here, he goes on to describe the layers of the brain, then structures in the brain, where I took notes, but honestly, I think it is a bit much to put here. In my opinion, the best way to get the most out of this chapter is not to read about it from me, but to read it for yourself. For me, the most interesting passages were about arousal and categorical thinking. Our hearts do the same thing when we find ourselves rampaging and when we are having an orgasm. Trying to remember a bunch of items is easier when you try to bunch similar items together rather than trying to remember them in the order they were recited or originally listed. You might find other parts of this chapter more interesting.

To be continued next week.