Behave, Robert Sapolsky

Introduction

• We divide things into categories to understand them, but categories can distort our perception of reality. Shown two colours on a spectrum, depending on how the culture defines their colours the observer may see the colours as more similar or different
• To describe behaviour, the thrust of this book is to invoke the various timescales that precede that behaviour, to connect the scientific disciplines (neurobiology, biochemistry, endocrinology, evolutionary biology, etc.) into a consilient whole to explain why we do things
• “We use the same muscles as does a male chimp when attacking a sexual competitor, but we use them to harm someone because of their ideology.”
  • This is also sexual competition, in a weird way, but in the context of group competition. An ideology is partly an attractant devised to lure individuals who long for a coherent explanation of life’s complexity. The more that are lured, the greater group’s reproductive fitness (but not necessarily survival fitness)

    Chapter 2: One second before

• The hypothalamus is the limbic pathway to autonomic regulation, where emotions inform autonomic responses (blood flow, heart-rate, temperature regulation)—the limbic to lizard bridge
• The frontal cortex is the brain region most interconnecting the limbic system and cortex
• The amygdala, responsible for fear, uncertainty management, and aggression, adapts with exposure to fears. This adaptation does not occur passively, the neural inputs to the basolateral amygdala require active exposure to objects of fear
  • Insert “trigger warnings and avoidance strategies are harmful” here
• The extreme sensitivity of the amygdala’s neural connections to sensory neurons allows us to sense fleeting and faint information that the cortex (conscious awareness) misses
• The insular cortex and amygdala form a connection that concerns disgust. This disgust pathway is triggered by rotten food and moral transgression. We literally express disgust with people we find socially reprehensible. Dangerous.
• Autonomic arousal doesn’t influence what you feel, but the intensity of what is felt. Whether you have a sympathetic or parasympathetic response will colour your perceptions differently.
• “The front cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do.”
• Willpower and self-control are finite resources, and frontal cortex neurons are metabolically expensive cells
• Increased cognitive load leads to less prosocial decision making (less charitable, more likely to lie)
• The dorsolateral PFC is the chief cognitive region for forgoing short-term pleasure for long term achievement.
• The ventromedial PFC is where the PFC interfaces with the limbic system. vmPFC damage silences gut feelings; this lack of emotional thrust makes decision-making more challenging. Decisions aren’t felt and become more utilitarian.
• Suppressing thought or emotion is near impossible. But thinking/feeling differently is achievable. Antecedent rather than response strategies can protect us from distress, and when done right activate the dlPFC and suppress the amygdala and sympathetic nervous system.
• We are most prosocial to in-group when our emotions and intuitions hold sway; we are most prosocial concerning out-group when cognition holds sway.
• You can predict whether someone will buy something by looking at brain imaging. If it’s cheaper than expected, their vmPFC surges and their emotions goad them to buy it; if it’s more expensive, their disgust-oriented insular cortex throbs as they snarkily refuse
• “What was an unexpected please yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.”
• Anticipatory dopamine release peaks when uncertainty is maximal as to whether a reward will occur
• Low serotonin predicts cognitive impulsivity and impulsive aggression, meaning it inhibits PFC projections in some way and amplifies amygdala projections

  Chapter 3: Seconds to minutes before

• Discussed subliminal stimuli. Interoception (e.g., autonomic arousal can make us less trusting), psychological priming (e.g., being told pleasant words makes us more trusting), inherent biases (gender, race)

  Chapter 4: Hours to days before

• Supraphysiological levels of androgens (i.e., from PEDs) cause steroid abusers to be more paranoid and anxious, and aggression may follow
• Testosterone quiets the PFC and increases coupling with the amygdala. Thus, more influence by split-second, low-resolution inputs and less let’s-stop-and-think-about-this.
• Testosterone causes us to be fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic
• Testosterone makes us more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status.
• Oxytocin and vasopressin aren’t necessarily the prosocial love hormones. They’re social hormones. For instance, these hormone increases make women improve at detecting kinship relationships, and men improve at detecting dominance relationships
• Oxytocin makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. As well as the love hormone, it is the ethnocentric, xenophobic hormone.
• Acute stress response enhances immunity, chronic stress suppresses immunity, increasing vulnerability to infection
• Chronic stress dampens PFC activation and amplifies amygdala responses, facilitating the learning of fear associations but impairing the learning of fear extinction. This creates a feedback loop, where more fears are learned and less are extinguished.
• Sustained stress makes us more selfish and less capable of empathizing with others

  Chapter 5: Days to months before

• Experience alters the number and strength of synapses, the extent of dendritic arbor, and the projection targets of axons.
• Hippocampal neurogenisis is enhanced by learning, exercise, environmental enrichment, estrogen, and antidepressants

  Chapter 6: Adolescence; or, dude, where’s my frontal cortex?

• Frontal cortex maturation in adolescence is about a more efficient brain, not a larger one. Synapses are actually pruned in adolescence, equivalent tasks require less effort in well-pruned brains (i.e., in adults)
• When looking at highly expressive faces, an adult sees amygdaloid activation and a tempering of emotion via the vmPFC, but an adolescent can rely less on the inhibitory vmPFC and gets a bigger, sustained amygdala activation (more distress-provoking)
• Adolescents have 2 to 4 times the rates of pathological gambling as do adults (underdeveloped PFC hinders judgment of risk)
• Adolescence is about risk taking and novelty seeking
• Depression radiates young women like a viral contagion, as their tendency to co-ruminate reinforces their negative affect
• Rejection hurts adolescents more (due to reduced vmPFC hushing and increased amygdala screaming), producing a stronger need to fit in
• Those who feel most strongly about other’s pain, with the most pronounced arousal and anxiety, are actually less likely to act prosocially. Instead, the personal distress prompts avoidance, because as empathetic pain increases, one’s own pain becomes of primary concern
• “Because it is the last to mature, by definition the front cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience…Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.”

  Chapter 7: Back to the crib, back to the womb

• Mothers with children in the hospital were once asked to leave their child and let the hospital take care of everything. Infants began dying of “hospitalism”, devoid of social contact and embalmed in a suprasanatized environment, died of illnesses unrelated to their initial illness. The poorest hospitals performed better, as they couldn’t afford incubation chambers and had to use hands on, intimate methods
• Infants may suppress glucocorticoid release as it stunts brain development. This is why, when abused (even by their mother), they may grip to their mother tighter, entrusting her so that they don’t have a brain-damaging aversive response. This would have made evolutionary sense for vulnerable children.
• Pathway to addiction from adverse childhood: 1) effected developing dopamine system, 2) excessive exposure to glucocorticoids (stress) that increase drug craving, 3) poorly developed frontal cortex
• “Cultures (starting with parents) raise children to become adults who behave in the ways valued by that culture.”
• Play teaches social competence; provides a chance to roleplay and improve motor function; provides exposure to transient and moderate stress; and as a tool decides which excess synapses to prune
• One reason dogs may wag their tails is for pheromone distribution to indicate a willingness/desire to play

  Chapter 8: Back to when you were just a fertilized egg

• “Genes don’t make sense outside the context of environment.” Genetic evolution occurred in relationship with environment. You can’t make sense of genes without the environment, they are shaped by their surroundings
• Your genes aren’t carbon copies of your parents. Shuffling sometimes occurs in genes, where a stretch of DNA is copied and transposed into another stretch (these are called transposons). This process occurs in the neurons in our brains, and transposon events have been shown to produce new memories in fruit flies, freeing them from strict genetic inheritance
• Inheritance and heritability are different. Inheritance describes an average genetic trait; heritability describes the genetic variability around that average. Inheritance tells us how different we are from a wildebeest; heritability tells us how different we are from our neighbour
• Heritability measures are always inflated. When we control an environment in an experiment to make things easier to interpret, we restrict gene regulation to a single environment, neglecting how other environments may influence genes. One example is in twin studies, the effects of birth order are by definition neglected. Without influence of birth order, genetic influence receives more attention (inflated heritability)
• Heritability scores tell us how much variation in a trait is explained by genes in the environment in which it was studied.
• It’s not meaningful to ask what a gene does, only what a gene does in a particular environment.
• The challenge with gene candidate approaches (singling out a gene and seeing how it affects behaviour) is that there are still tens of thousands more genes that we lose sight of, and gazillions more environments to consider due to gene/environment interactions
• The other approach is to examine large swaths of genes at once and see how they explain the variance in some phenotypic trait. In a Nature study on height with nearly 200,000 participants, the top gene explained 0.4% of height variance. Similar for BMI and educational attainment. Surprise, networks of genes influence behaviour, not just one.
• “Ask not what a gene does. Ask what it does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes.”
• “Genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead, they’re about context-dependent tendencies.”

  Chapter 9: Centuries to millennia before

• A gene associated with impulsivity and novelty seeking occurs in 10-20% of Africans and Europeans, 0% in collectivist East Asians, and 30-60% in American/South American indigenous. Having most recently expanded, those who crossed the Bering strait ages ago possessed an inclination to explore. Those in long established societies (East Asians) with collectivist norms would have damped impulsivity and emigration
• Southern Americans have larger stress and testosterone responses to slights of honour. Southerners are mostly of Scottish, northern Irish, and northern English descent, which are herding cultures. Given the problems which pastoralist cultures deal with (i.e., the potentially catastrophic consequences of losing a herd to thieves), monotheism and duty tends to run deep in pastoralists
• “As income inequality grows, the percentage of people who bother voting generally declines.”
• As economic stratification increases, investment in public goods (public transit, public schools, universal healthcare) decreases, and as a result public health decreases. The rich don’t benefit from these public expenditures, instead relying on private equivalents, and thus avoid taxation for and mount political opposition to services that don’t apply to them.
• Incidence in air rage has been increasing. Incidence increases further when passengers are forced to walk past first-class passengers. Being reminded of lower status provokes frustration that then gets displaced onto flight attendants. First class passengers are also, unsurprisingly, more likely to provoke air rage incidents related to senses of entitlement
• Clarity of borders can reduce intergroup conflict, say separation by mountain range or river. As concluded by a study at the New England complex systems institute, “Peace does not depend on integrated coexistence, but rather on well-defined topographical and political boundaries separating groups, allowing for partial autonomy within a single country.”

  Chapter 10: The evolution of behaviour

• Divorce rates are skewed by serial divorces. Keep in mind when seeing “half of marriages end in divorce.” If one person divorces 3 times, 3 other marriages could be fine and produce the 50% number (in this case 1/4 of individuals marriages end in divorce)
• Pseudokinship: seeing nonkin as kin, being charitable to strangers, adopting them, empathizing with them. Pseudospeciation: seen nonkin as non-species. Seeing opposing human tribes as pests and vermin, akin to another species, that are deserving of extermination.

  Chapter 11: Us versus Them

• “We feel positive associations with people who share the most meaningless traits with us.”
• Arbitrary markers allow us to differentiate (symbols, dress, accent). The markers themselves are often meaningless, but they are linked to meaningful differences in values and beliefs
• Symbols then, when associated with reward, become imbued with meaning themselves, leading people to literally live and die for patterned colors on cloth (national flags)
• Those with stronger negative attitudes towards outgroup (immigrants, foreigners, etc.) are more prone to interpersonal levels of disgust (resistant to wearing clothes of others or sitting on a warm seat just vacated)
• High warmth/high competence: pride; low warmth/high competence: envy; high warm/low competence: pity; low warmth/low competence: disgust
• “The need for justification fuels those on top to pour the stereotypes of, at best, high warmth/low competence or, worse, low warmth/low competence on the heads of those struggling at the bottom, and those on the bottom reciprocate with the simmering time bomb that is the perception of the ruling class as low warmth/high competence.”
• “Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces that we never suspect.”

  Chapter 12: Hierarchy, obedience, and resistance

• “Countries with more brutal socioeconomic hierarchies produce children who enforce their own hierarchies more brutally.” (More bullying)
• Highest ranking primates don’t necessarily have the highest levels of testosterone. If their group is unstable, they will, and they’ll be fighting for their spot. But during stability, the pressure to maintain rank is less demanding, requiring less testosterone to maintain that rank. Adolescents near the bottom of the hierarchy are most testosterone fueled, as they are most motivated to climb
• “The worst stress-related health typically occurs in middle management, with its killer combo of high work demands but little autonomy—responsibility without control.”
• Right wing authoritarianism is associated with lower IQ and higher intergroup prejudice. RWA provides simple answers that are ideal for those with low abstract reasoning skills
• “When people’s insulae activate (disgust activation) at the thought of Thems, you can check one thing off your genocide to-do list.”
• The descent into savagery is incremental, and despite our love and emphasis of arbitrary boundaries, the boundaries to degeneracy are subtle. Treat them 10% worse, then 15%, then 30%, and so on. When do we stop? The jumps can be so incremental that we don’t notice them.
• Diffusion of responsibility can justify atrocity. Death penalty executers are numbered and some are given blanks so that they can live with themselves (I may not have even shot him, phew)
• Warriors from cultures that transform and standardize their appearance before battle are more likely to torture and mutilate their enemies. Anonymity diffuses responsibility, justifying atrocity because it “wasn’t just me” or “it was the character I was playing”
• To understand whether someone is likely to be conservative, “understand how they feel about novelty, ambiguity, empathy, hygiene, disease and dis-ease, and whether things used to be better and the future is a scary place.”

  Chapter 13: Morality and doing the right thing, once you’ve figured out what that is

• People with obsessive compulsive disorder see wildly active dlPFCs when making everyday decisions and moral decisions
• “When we confront a moral choice, the dlPFC doesn’t adjudicate in contemplative silence. The waters roil below.”
• “When facing a moral quandary, activation in the amygdala, vmPFC, and insula typically precede dlPFC activation.”
• A study conducted in a Swiss bank found that when psychologically primed to think as bankers, banking employees were more likely to cheat in an experiment than before they had been primed. This shows an at-least dualism in identity, normal personal identity and get-ahead banker identity
• In a game where subjects could pool tokens for collective gain and punish for misbehaviour, it was found that if the subject came from a region with lower social capital, they were more likely to punish overly generous subjects, as much as punishing free-riders. Interesting…in regions with more distrust and less self-efficacy, over-generosity can be seen as a threat
• Collectivist cultures discourage moral transgressions with shame, and individualist cultures with guilt. Shame comes from external judgment; guilt comes from internal judgment. Shame requires an audience, is about honour. Guilt appears in cultures that treasure privacy and conscience. Shame is applied to the individual as a whole, guilt is applied to the action, making it possible to hate the sin but love the sinner.
• Deontologism is about moral intuitions, recruiting more emotional vmPFC, amygdala, and insula; whereas consequentialism is about cold cognitive calculation, recruiting more dlPFC. Automatic and intuitive judgements tend to be nonutilitarian, since our brains evolved to help spread genes, not maximize collective happiness (although this can coincide with gene spreading)
• Moral reasoning thrives when both subjective feelings and objective judgements harmonize. Long-term, pragmatic consequentialism that explores how decisions change the landscape coupled with deontological emotional intuitions about how inhabiting the landscape will make people feel.
• “Most intergroup conflicts on our planet ultimately are cultural disagreements about whose “right” is righter.”
• In Me vs. Them scenarios, be intuitive, your “gut” evolved to benefit the group. In Us vs. Them scenarios, be pragmatic, your “gut” also evolved to prefer Us at the detriment of Them.
• Dogs drop their tail between their legs when scared, partly to mask the scent of their anal scent glands that secrete fear pheromones
• Classic polygraph lie detectors measures sympathetic arousal. This doesn’t work well for interviewees who are nervous, sociopathic, or take measures to reduce sympathetic responses. Modern polygraphs instead measure anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activation instead, which activates when conflicting information needs to be sorted out (e.g., fictional lie vs. true reality)

  Chapter 14: Feeling, understanding, and alleviating someone’s pain

• The ACC is involved in interoception (monitoring internal stimuli) and is an “all purpose alarm that signals when ongoing behaviour has hit a snag.”
• The ACC lights up when we observe others pain and is mediated by oxytocin release. However, the ACC seems to be brain region associated with more selfish motives, indicating that the ACC activates, and we feel the pain of others so as not to repeat their mistakes
• The ACC is crucial for learned fear and conditioned avoidance by observing misfortune of others. Feeling someone else’s pain is more useful to the self than merely knowing someone else’s pain
• Later in maturation the insula and amygdala get involved in empathy. This is when we start becoming disgusted and angry with injustice inflicted on the vulnerable.
• Even when the source of pain is from a benign source, we search for something to blame, a target for our hatred and disgust. “The more the purity of empathy is clouded with anger, disgust, and indignation of blame, the harder it is to actually help.”
• The larger the distance between you and others (physically or socially), the more cognitive work required to empathize
• Mirror neurons have yet to demonstrate unequivocal causality towards empathy
• The adolescent frenzied feeling of feeling others’ pains tends to lead to frenzied self-absorption. Young people tend to imagine how injustice would feel if it happened to them (self-oriented) rather than imagining how victims are feeling (other-oriented). Self-oriented individuals report more distress and anxiety, and are thus more likely to focus on lessening their own distress
• We can hear the sound of someone else’s need when we are calm and our hearts aren’t pounding in our chests
• The point is not whose pain pains us the most but who most needs our help
• Empathy is optimal when it’s automatic and ingrained by culture. If we have to think about it, we’re vulnerable to thinking into why we shouldn’t bother. Yet too much heart (limbic) can lead to feeling the pain too deeply and tending to ourselves instead. Detachment is necessary to mitigate this.

  Chapter 15: Metaphors we kill by

• Feelings of disgust produced by the insular cortex activate for moral transgressions. Being primed into moral disgust also makes things seem more disgusting (things seem dirtier, we want to sanitize more, a neutral drink tastes worse)
• We become more socially conservative when disgusted, and the socially conservative are more disgust prone. Disgust is meant to protect from threat; for instance, conservative opposed to gay marriage see it as a threat to family values and the sanctity of marriage
• Sensations paint unrelated judgements. Sit in a hard chair and we judge others as hard-assed. Place a resume on a heavier clipboard and our achievements carry more weight. Hold someone’s iced coffee and we perceive them as having a colder personality.
• Recall the judge example: empty stomach, harsher judgment. When we’re hungry, we show more future discounting (foregoing long-term gain for short term pleasure). The more we crave, the more we discount our future.
• The most unique neurons, the recently evolved and slow-developing von Economo neurons, are predominantly housed in the ACC and insula. The adaptive advantages of (mostly self-interested) empathy and moral disgust have seemed to attract recent evolutionary brain development.
• One cannot truly end conflict, make peace, without acknowledging and respecting the sacred values of Them

  Chapter 16: Biology, the criminal justice system, and (oh, why not?) free will

• Neuroscientist Gazzaniga fully accepts the material nature of the brain but nonetheless sees room for responsibility. “Responsibility exists at a different level of organisation: the social level, not in our determined brains.” Except the social level is just as much a product of evolutionary biology as are our brains, there are just further layers of intimidating complexity.
• The deepest line in the sand drawn by mitigated free will believers is the notion that aptitude and impulsion are biological and perseverance and resisting impulse are willful.
• Traditional rationales around punishment are to protect the public, rehabilitate, punish, and to use the threat of punishment to deter others. This last one is tricky; increased strictness of punishment does indeed deter others. But we have to be careful not to invoke stricter punishments because it’s pleasurable, because it satiates some sadistic desire
• “The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviours are among our worst and most damaging, words like ‘evil’ and ‘soul’ will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty brakes.” When we take a car to the mechanic and he can’t find what’s wrong, he doesn’t conclude that the car is evil.
• “Many who are viscerally opposed to this view charge that it is dehumanizing to frame damaged humans as broken machines…doing that is a lot more humane than demonizing and sermonizing them as sinners.”
• “I can’t really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible…Perhaps we’ll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of trucking thinking rationally for where it matters—when we judge others harshly.”

  Chapter 17: War and Peace

• In a study which polled “Indian Hindus, Russian Orthodox, Israeli Jews, Indonesian Muslims, British Protestants, and Mexican Catholics as to whether they’d die for their religion and whether people of other religions caused the world’s troubles,” it was found that in all cases frequent attendance of religious services, but not frequent prayer, predicted those views. Religiosity doesn’t stoke intergroup hostility, being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm in-group identity, commitment, and shared loves and hatreds does.
• “It’s useless to call for religion to broaden the extent of their Us-ness…Religions range from “only those who look, act, talk, and pray like Us” to “all of life”. It will be…tough to shift religions from the former to the latter.”
• “Hatred is exhausting; forgiveness, or even just indifference, is freeing.”
• “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.” - Booker T. Washington
• “We decide someone is guilty based on reasoning but then decide their punishment based on emotion.”