Robert M. Sapolsky

"Why do we do the things we do? Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from...

Explains how prolonged stress causes or intensifies a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and memory loss.

Interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of how the human brain is sculpted by evolution, constrained or freed by genes, shaped by early experience, modulated by hormones, and otherwise influenced to produce a wide range of behaviors, some of them abnormal. Explains how little can be explained by thinking about any one of these factors alone because some combination of influences is almost always at work.

Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality, is an interdisciplinary approach to the fascinating subject of behavioral biology, a field that explores interactions among the brain, mind, body, and environment that have a surprising influence on how we behave. In 24 lectures, you will investigate how the human brain is sculpted by evolution, constrained or freed by genes, shaped by early experience, modulated by hormones, and...