Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

31 hrs. 26 min.

Popular Science

Language Russian

Author Robert Sapolsky

Narrator Dmitry Mashkovich

Description

As the famous primatologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky says, if you want to understand human behavior and the nature of a good or bad act, you’ll have to look into literally everything—both what happened literally a second before it, and what happened millions of years ago. In this book, the author examines step by step—one might say, through the chronological cross-section—an enormous number of factors that influence our behavior. How does our brain work? What is the role of the amygdala, and what should we thank the frontal cortex for? What does the «island» (insula) «hate»? Why do London taxi drivers have an enlarged hippocampus? How are the lengths of the index and ring fingers connected to the amount of prenatal testosterone? How do teenagers differ from children and adults from the standpoint of neurobiology? Are there «pure» altruists? What’s the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation? Is free will real? How do complex social connections affect our behavior and decision-making? And that’s only a small part of the questions addressed in the large-scale work of this renowned scholar.