Takeaways from "Behave" by Robert Sapolsky (1/n)

 Disclaimer: There will be constant updating/ edits made to this blog as I get along the book.

I will be trying to condense my thoughts and document some of the key takeaways/insights in a chapter by chapter basis as I get along the book. This would help me read and retain better the scientific details and maybe some of you can also benefit from it :)

• INTRODUCTION

How is it that the introduction of a book is so interesting? It is totally unfair! The amount of writing prowess that Robert brings along to present such a compelling narrative.

I have earlier watched the lecture series on Human behavioral biology by Robert Sapolsky on YouTube(Human behavioral biology) which in itself is an entertaining watch. He bases the book around that course, if anyone interesting in watching the contents of the book rather than read it. 

One of the first important takeaways, was him critically looking at the academicians trail of logic on how his/her work impacts the world.

I think like an academic egghead, believing that if I write enough paragraphs about a scary subjective enough lectures about it, it will give up and go quietly. And if everyone took up classes about the biology of violence and studied hard, we'd all be able to take a nap between the snoozing lion and the lamb. Such is the delusional sense of efficiency of a professor 

This is so insightful! I have been thinking about the value of creation in the space of ideas (Theories/Models/ Frameworks etc) Vs creation in an engineering sense (Music/Movies/products/companies etc). Just thinking from a free market perspective this denotes why the top percentiles of creative enterprises are valued way more than people who create things in the realm of ideas. Hard action and worldly impact is an essential part of the human enterprise otherwise what does it all mean?

Hard Vs Soft sciences. There is a huge temptation in STEM fields to brand the social sciences as not truly being scientific. This stems from the naivety of a certain academicians to assume that knowing the (molecular dynamics/physical principles/ trajectories of particles) we can figure out the monetary strategy to be followed by a federal bank or analyze how democracies fail etc.A similar argument was put forth by Robert in his approach in this book to mix ideas from neurobiology with primatology.

Category induced dissonance: Robert explains that putting ideas into clear demarcated buckets of thought has a huge cost associated with it. He explains that most things exist on a spectrum and usually the boundaries are typically arbitrary. 

Behaviorism : This theory seem very interesting and I am curious of how this affected American culture and the idea of the "American dream" or was affected by? 

Wellesley Effect : Human females syncing up their periods, as same as rats? Isn't this fascinating!

Some things that set humans apart from other animals:

• Only species that talk about how good sex was after the act.
• Pass beliefs multi generationally, the Bible?
• chess player losing weight by just sitting?