279-Behave-Robert Sapolsky-Biography-2017
279-Behave-Robert Sapolsky-Biography-2017
Barack
2020/10/12
《Behave》，于2017年首版于美国。生物类书籍。它尝试利用神经学科的前沿研究，去解释我们做事情的动机和目的。
Robert Sapolsky，于1957年出生于美国纽约的布鲁克林。他曾于哈佛大学获得学士学位，于洛克菲勒大学获得博士学位。他是一名神经内分泌学家。代表作：《Behave》、《Monkeyluv》、《A Primate's Memoir》等。
Table of Contents
1. The behavior
2. One second before
3. Seconds to minutes before
4. Hours to days before
5. Days to months before
6. Adolescence: or, Dude, where's my frontal cortex?
7. Back to the crib, back to the womb
8. Back to when you were just a fertilized egg
9. Centuries to millennia before
10. The evolution of behavior
“What occurred in the prior seconds to minutes that triggered the nervous system to produce that behavior? This is the world of sensory stimuli, much of it sensed unconsciously. What occurred in the prior hours to days to change the sensitivity of the nervous system to such stimuli? Acute actions of hormones. And so on, all the way back to the evolutionary pressures played out over the prior millions of years that started the ball rolling.”
人体本身就是一个精密的机器。如果我们对这部机器的运作方式一无所知。那么我们想充分地利用它也是很困难的。因此，我们应该去了解我们的决策系统是如何运作的，去了解我们的思维如何引导了我们的行动。当我们对这套机制了解越多，那么也就越可能充分利用它的好处，而避免它的坏处。
“I was once at a conference of neuroscientists and all-star Buddhist monk meditators, the former studying what the brains of the latter did during meditation. One scientist asked one of the monks whether he ever stops meditating because his knees hurt from all that cross-leggedness. He answered, “Sometimes I’ll stop sooner than I planned, but not because it hurts; it’s not something I notice. It’s as an act of kindness to my knees.” “Whoa,” I thought, “these guys are from another planet.” A cool, commendable one, but another planet nonetheless. Crimes of passion and good acts of passion make the most sense to us (nevertheless, as we shall see, dispassionate kindness often has much to recommend it).”
我们的意识能左右我们的行为吗？我们行为能影响我们的意识吗？冥想真的能让一个人忘记肉体上的痛苦吗？别人如何评价我们的行为，往往会考虑到我们的动机，我们自己能够用动机来影响自己的行为吗？如果可以，我们又该如何有意识地利用这种规则和特性呢？
“Various muscles have moved, and a behavior has happened. Perhaps it is a good act: you’ve empathically touched the arm of a suffering person. Perhaps it is a foul act: you’ve pulled a trigger, targeting an innocent person. Perhaps it is a good act: you’ve pulled a trigger, drawing fire to save others. Perhaps it is a foul act: you’ve touched the arm of someone, starting a chain of libidinal events that betray a loved one. Acts that, as emphasized, are definable only by context.”
同样的行为，在不同的语境之下会有不同的意义。而不同的行为，在不同的语境之下，有可能产生相同的效果，促使我们采取某个实际行动的，到底是什么？我们如何更好地理解从想法到行动之间的环节？又如何从行动推断出想法呢？
“There really aren’t “centers” in the brain “for” particular behaviors. This is particularly the case with the limbic system and emotion. There is indeed a sub-subregion of the motor cortex that approximates being the “center” for making your left pinkie bend; other regions have “center”-ish roles in regulating breathing or body temperature. But there sure aren’t centers for feeling pissy or horny, for feeling bittersweet nostalgia or warm protectiveness tinged with contempt, or for that what-is-that-thing-called-love feeling. No surprise, then, that the circuitry connecting various limbic structures is immensely complex.”
实际上，我们所以为的自己拥有的一些特殊情感，是建立在某些基本的生物基础上的。不同的只是如何组合。这大概就有点像做菜。食材和调料是一样的，但风味却迥然不同，主要区别在于如何将它们组合起来。
“The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) mediates the body’s response to arousing circumstances, for example, producing the famed “fight or flight” stress response.”
“Meanwhile, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) arises from different midbrain/brain-stem nuclei that project down the spine to the body.”
感受到相同的刺激，但是不同人大脑中的不同系统会被激活，这就导致了他们会产生不同的情感，并最终指向不同的行为。有的人看到某个场景，感动得流泪，有些人则无动于衷，也有人报以嘲笑。
“Two more details. First, the cortex is not a smooth surface but instead is folded into convolutions. The convolutions form a superstructure of four separate lobes: the temporal, parietal, occipital, and frontal, each with different functions.”
“Second, brains obviously have left and right sides, or “hemispheres,” that roughly mirror each other.”
随着神经科学的逐渐发展，我们对大脑的物质结构了解得越来越清楚，我们对大脑在我们的思维过程中所起到的作用，也越来越清楚。那么是否可能，有一天我们能完全理解清楚这些行为背后的原因和动机呢？在那个时候，思维在我们眼中看来，是否不再神奇了呢？
“The greatest lateralization occurs in the cortex; the left hemisphere is analytical, the right more involved in intuition and creativity. These contrasts have caught the public fancy, with cortical lateralization exaggerated by many to an absurd extent, where “left brain”–edness has the connotation of anal-retentive bean counting and “right brain”–edness is about making mandalas or singing with whales. In fact the functional differences between the hemispheres are generally subtle, and I’m mostly ignoring lateralization.”
虽然作者认为左右脑的差别被过分渲染，我作为一个神经科学的门外汉来看，仍然觉得它很有趣。那么，是否有某种测试，能够测试孩子左右脑的活跃情况，从而为他们将来的人生发展提供更好的建议呢？比如，左脑更发达的人，或许在选择专业时，更适合从事工程一类的职业。而右脑更发达的人，或许更适合从事与艺术有关的职业。
“In 1962 Meinhof had had a benign brain tumor surgically removed; the 1976 autopsy showed that remnants of the tumor and surgical scar tissue impinged on her amygdala.”
我也曾在心理学家的著作中看过一些外科手术的例子，某些人在大脑进行了手术后，或者受到创伤后，行为发生了急剧变化。在我自己的观点里，我们所以为的神圣的、简直像是具有某种神性的抽象情感和思维，或许紧紧地依附于我们大脑的物理结构。
“His suicide note requested an autopsy of his brain, and that any money he had be given to a mental health foundation. The autopsy proved his intuition correct—Whitman had a glioblastoma tumor pressing on his amygdala.”
作者在这里举了两个例子，他猜测这些反人类的行为可能与下丘脑受损有关。这并非是科学的论证，但因为他提供了充满丰富细节的事实，所以乍看之下，具有非常强的说服力。
“Thus the human amygdala preferentially responds to fear-evoking stimuli, even stimuli so fleeting as to be below conscious detection.”
下丘脑的活动引起了恐惧和焦虑之类的情感。另一方面，下丘脑的活跃也与攻击性的行为有关。这一点可以理解。人们的攻击行为往往由于现在或以前的某种不安全感造成。如果人们觉得自己极为安全，或许他们的攻击行为就会减弱。从这个意义上讲，攻击行为是否一定程度上也是一种自我保护的行为呢？
“When we stop fearing something, it isn’t because some amygdaloid neurons have lost their excitability. We don’t passively forget that something is scary. We actively learn that it isn’t anymore.”
就像大概不少人有过小时候害怕黑夜的经历。但是等我们长大以后，这种害怕会逐渐减弱。可是我们大概仍然能够依稀记得当时害怕黑夜时的感受。而现在我们不害怕天黑，大概是一种后天学习产生的结果。
“Studies like these clarify that the amygdala isn’t about the pleasure of experiencing pleasure. It’s about the uncertain, unsettled yearning for a potential pleasure, the anxiety and fear and anger that the reward may be smaller than anticipated, or may not even happen. It’s about how many of our pleasures and our pursuits of them contain a corrosive vein of disease.”
通常情况下，我们认为下丘脑和脑垂体分泌多巴胺，使我们产生愉悦感。可或许，多巴胺更大的作用在于，它在生理上的愉悦感没有实际发生时，让我们想象欲望被满足时的快乐。从这个意义上讲，它带给我们的并不是实际的快感，而是想象快感未来被满足的愉悦感。
" This has two implications. Both sex and aggression activate the sympathetic nervous system, which in turn can influence behavior—people feel differently about things if, say, their heart is racing versus beating slowly. Does this mean that the pattern of your autonomic arousal influences what you feel? Not really. But autonomic feedback influences the intensity of what is felt.”
“The second consequence reflects a core idea of this book. Your heart does roughly the same thing whether you are in a murderous rage or having an orgasm. Again, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
爱也好，恨也好，它们都是极为强烈的情绪。这些情绪与交感神经有关。虽然这些行为在社会意义上的表现相差很大，可是在生理层面上的特征表现却是类似的。
“What does the frontal cortex do? Its list of expertise includes working memory, executive function (organizing knowledge strategically, and then initiating an action based on an executive decision), gratification postponement, long-term planning, regulation of emotions, and reining in impulsivity.”
相比下丘脑，前额皮质离理性更近一步，而离本能更远一步。在我的理解里，它们有点像编程语言中的汇编语言和高级语言。下丘脑像汇编语言。前额皮质像高级语言。
“I will group these varied functions under a single definition, pertinent to every page of this book: the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do.”
我们的本能很容易就能判断一件事情是否困难，但是却不一定能判断它是否是正确的事情。尤其是当我们面临的挑战，从短期的生存问题，变为长期的发展问题时，更是如此。进化使得人类本能地倾向于做那些局部最优的事情，但是在现代社会的语境下，局部最优往往不是长期最优。
“The frontal cortex is the last brain region to fully mature, with the most evolutionarily recent subparts the very last. Amazingly, it’s not fully online until people are in their midtwenties.”
我个人认为，30岁是一个人在体力脑力上达到最佳综合状态的年龄。 30岁时，一个人的肉体状态，不一定处在整个人生中最顶峰，但是也相距不远。而他此时的大脑应该已经发育完全。
而且此时他已经从学校毕业了一段时间，经历了一段时间的社会洗礼。一个人的事业巅峰或许要到40岁才能达到。但是撇开外在，只谈内在的话，我认为30岁应该是巅峰所在。
“What does “doing the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do” look like in the realm of cognition (defined by Princeton’s Jonathan Cohen as “the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals”)?”
我们通常认为，成年人比孩子拥有更强的自制力。这种自制力一般指的是强迫自己做一些必须做的事情，比如学习或工作，比如去处理一些虽然枯燥乏味但是却必须要去做的日常事务。
孩子们之所以不耐烦，或愿意承担远期风险而不去做这些迫在眉睫的事情，原因之一或者就是因为他们的大脑皮质还不够成熟，以至于他们难以自我控制。从生理上看，这是一种能够让人接受的解释。
我们都知道肌肉可以锻炼，那么，随之而来的问题是，我们也可以有意识地区锻炼大脑的下丘脑和前额皮质吗？如果可以，如何锻炼才是最有效的呢？
