Book Review: 3/5 Impact On Me (Book By Robert M. Sapolsky)
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I enjoyed the last two-thirds of the book, but I found the first third very technical and hard to follow, even after listening to it twice. I realized this book works best as a reference—something I can return to and search through in its Kindle version. Overall, I liked the book because it emphasized and reinforced ideas from other books I’ve read, like Human Kind by Rutger Bregman, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
Humankind was a controversial book - it challenged many well-known psychology experiments and facts about human behavior, showing they are not as accurate as people believe. I’m glad this book, Behave, reinforced that Human Kind got it right.
It also helped me better understand teenagers and why their stage of life is different from being a child or an adult—though some aspects are a social construct.
I appreciated learning about implicit biases in various situations and how to increase or decrease them. From another book I read recently, I thought oxytocin wasn’t as significant as often claimed, and that endorphins were more important. However, endorphins are harder to study because they don’t cross the blood-brain barrier. This book argues that oxytocin is valuable too because it strengthens feelings of "us" or group belonging.
I rate the impact of this book a 3 out of 5. The initial sections were challenging to tackle, but the later parts provided valuable insights that I will keep in mind for day-to-day interactions.