Human Behavioral Biology Lectures

[Cunninglinguist]

Here's an illuminating series of 25 lectures on human behavioral biology by Robert Sapolsky, Professor at Stanford University. I encourage you to watch them; Sapolsky is probably the best lecturer I've ever seen.


First lecture on Human Behavioral Biology (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA)

The first lecture is naturally a bit slower than the rest, covering the preliminaries. The rest of the lectures can be accessed via the suggestions column on youtube.

Watch. Discuss; or don't. If you want to help out this thread, additions to the notes would be much appreciated. If you have something to add send it to me in private message and I'll promptly post it.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Great. I'll copy and paste your post into my lecture thread if that's OK?

[Olga4real]

Thank you for sharing, I really enjoyed the 1stlecture and will listen to the rest soon.

[Cunninglinguist]

Notes for lecture 1: Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA)

Introduction: This lecture most generally deals with categorical thinking, course preliminaries and course outline.

4:55. Article: Menstrual stress as legal defense (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE1DF1138F93AA15756C0A9649482 60)

5:14. The Amygdala. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala)

5:54. Dan white’s Twinkie defense (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense). Perhaps more interesting than any of these four defenses is the Gay panic defense. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_panic_defense)

8:34-16:00~. Sapolsky states that the purpose of the category is mnemonic. This viewer would disagree, arguing that categories are the necessary condition for understanding and abstracted categories are the necessary condition for rational understanding. For example, suppose we lack the capacity to categorize colors (and thus objects according to colors), then we are presented with a red square and a red circle. We still see the red of the circle and the square, but we have no way of understanding the experience* beyond itself (that is, no way of understanding it in any greater context). We thus analyze the objects and categorize their properties. However, with no category “things the color red”, while still experiencing the redness, we lack the pretext to compare the two objects on that basis, and thus we lack any way of understanding that they are in fact identical in this respect. For all that we can categorize we understand that the objects as having no identical properties and, therefore, totally dissimilar. From this we can infer that by removing all abstracted categories any rational understanding becomes impossible; for, we may receive many details about the world but we have no way of understanding their relations. We have no capacity to compare objects; indeed, we have no way of categorizing a clump of details as an object in the first place, and thus we would have no conceptual understanding of an object.

So, Sapolsky states that we only categorize things to avoid having to memorize every detail; for the aforementioned this viewer would argue that he is wrong. Sapolsky is more simply trying to say that the emphasis we put on certain categories is a human creation - the emphasis “does not exist.” That is, how we categorize categories according to importance is a human construct. The reason that these normative categories are mnemonic is because they tell us what is important and thus what's important to know; without a doubt, this makes much more sense. These kinds of normative categories serve the mnemonic purpose, and it is these kinds of categories which Sapolsky is trying to disestablish, and, thus, his points remain satisfiably valid.

The goal of the course, then, is simply and only not to over-emphasize one categorical bucket. It is still rather confusing when he says things like “there are not even temporary buckets, there are no buckets.” (33:00) Annoyingly, his points are obscured in apparent paradoxes and hypocrisies.

*The experience is still a type of understanding; the simplest experience (let us call it an atomic experience) can be regarded as a category comprising one singular property, thus categories are necessary conditions for any type of understanding. In any case, this category is not abstracted nor is the understanding given by the experience a rational one.

15:50. 243-2649. 650-3260, 256-5779, 832-2449, 2, 913, 171, 2314, 026, 593-2449. 743-8840, 83152, 8, 7

26:39. Behaviorism (http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/beh.html) <- great overview.

29:01. Egas Moniz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Egas_Moniz) (1874-1955) and Frontal lobotomy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobotomy). Moniz even received a Nobel Prize for his work.

33:33. Hamsters are awesome.

35:38. Menstrual synchronicity. This viewer is pretty sure that it is not called the Wellesley effect; the paper showing menstrual cycle synchronicity was published by Martha McClintock in Nature in 1971 which, if you have a subscription, can be accessed here. (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v229/n5282/abs/229244a0.html). The effect is called the McClintock effect.



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Notes for Lecture 2: HBB Lecture 2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Oa4Lp5fLE&feature=relmfu)

Introduction: Game theory; evolutionary biology.

6:31. The Kangaroo Rat is a good example. However, in fact, the Kangaroo Rat does not have to drink at all. The Loop of Henle in the nephron in the kidney serves the function of water reabsorbtion from urine, thus long nephrons make urine highly concentrated. It just so happens that the Kangaroo Rat’s urine is about 5x more concentrated than ours. Link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_rat).

8:02. The Nash Equilibrium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium) is a concept in game theory in which, essentially, two (or more) players are simultaneously making the best decisions possible while taking into account all other player’s decisions. Sapolsky states, and I paraphrase, that the Nash Equilibrium is the optimal behavioral strategy. This true as long as cooperation is not a feasible strategy. Otherwise cooperation has the potential of being a more profitable strategy for both parties.

8:32. Note incomplete

9:11. Notable minds that entertained the idea of evolution before Darwin include Aristotle to John Milton. As far as this commenter knows, what sets most of the rest apart from Darwin was the idea that evolution was divinely directed.

9:23. Note incomplete

11:00. This is an imperative point. He later puts in a nutshell: An egg is not a chicken’s way of making another chicken; a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg.




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More to be added later.