WHY AND HOW WE ACT

What goes on in a human brain the second before the body reacts? Which sights, sounds, and smells trigger the nervous system to produce that behavior? Which hormones act hours, or sometimes days, in advance  to stimulate the nervous system to respond? How do features of an individual’s environment, upbringing, genetic makeup, and culture, plus thousands of years of ecological and evolutionary factors, affect how a person’s brain works? Robert Sapolsky’s new book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst, delivers cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do…for good and for ill.

Speaker: Robert Sapolsky, Stanford University, in conversation with Dacher Keltner