Biology
and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality, 2nd
Edition
(24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
Course No. 1597
Taught by Robert Sapolsky
Stanford University
Ph.D., Rockefeller University
Destacado de la página donde se describe el curso que venden:
Insight into Yourself and Others
As you work through this thought-provoking and engaging material, you
will learn much about your own behavior, not to mention that of others.
One particularly intriguing region of the brain relating to behavior is
the frontal cortex, which plays a central role in decision-making,
gratification postponement, and other important functions. The frontal
cortex is the part of the brain that "makes you do the harder
thing," whether it is concentrating on an unwelcome task, keeping
anger under control, or telling a white lie about a spouse's new haircut.
Consider these cases:
What happens when there is essentially no frontal cortex?: Railroad
worker Phineas Gage suffered a massive frontal cortical lesion in a
serious accident in the 1840s. Overnight, he changed from a sober,
conscientious worker to a profane, aggressive, socially inappropriate man
who could never regularly work again. The loss of his frontal cortex
meant he lost his emotional regulation; he had no means to do the
"harder thing."
What happens when the frontal cortex is "offline"?: During
rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the frontal cortex goes offline, which
explains why dreams are often wild and unrepressed—why dreams are
dreamlike. People don't dream about balancing a checkbook. They dream
about dancing in musicals or floating in the air.
What happens when the frontal cortex is immature?: One of the great
myths is that the brain is completely wired up and matured at a
very early stage. However, the frontal cortex is not fully functional
until an individual is about a quarter-century old—a fact that explains
a lot of fraternity behavior, notes Professor Sapolsky. With this in
mind, it's worth asking if a 16-year-old violent criminal is not, by
definition, organically impaired in frontal cortical function.
Myths that Die Hard
The myth of the fully wired, mature young brain is one of the often-heard
pieces of misinformation that this course corrects. Other areas where
Professor Sapolsky revises widely held beliefs include:
"For the good of the species": The old notion of group
selection has been proven wildly incorrect. This is the idea that animals
behave "for the good of the species" and that behaviors are
driven by ways to increase the likelihood of the species surviving and
multiplying. Evolution is not about animals behaving for the good of
the species but, rather, behaving to optimize the number of copies of
their own genes to pass on to the next generation.
The inevitability of social structures: Professor Sapolsky's own
fieldwork in Africa has shown that an archetypal male-dominated,
aggressive society of baboons can change radically to a tradition of
low aggression within a single generation. "If these guys are
freed from the central casting roles for them in the anthropology
textbooks, we as a species have no excuse to say we have inevitable
social structures," he says.
|
