18/07/2025
A few months ago, I was walking past the book shelves of a store, smelling the fresh scent and scanning the names of the books, when I came across this book. It caught my attention and I picked it up.
“Behave- The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst ”- it read.
I was always inquisitive about the basis of human behaviors. Why would a polite and gentle person choose to show rudeness or disproportionate anger? People would say, “ This was not expected from you?”
How do we determine the limitations of a character? How do we categorize somebody based on their expected spectrum of behaviors? With passing time, I realized that light and darkness coexist, black and white often blend, our behaviors and identities are nothing but shades of gray. Yes, people can witness us at our Best as well as at our Worst during a single lifetime. The sooner we accept this fact, the better place this world will be. Instead of judging people, if we become more empathetic in our homes and our workplaces, we can equip ourselves with the wisdom to help each other out.
This book takes us on a rollercoaster ride through the caverns of human mind and decodes the basis of human emotions and behaviors. It is indeed a complex interplay of genetics, life experiences, circumstances, resilience, emotion regulation and neurotransmitters.
The author Dr. Robert M Sapolsky, has crafted his years of experience, put them into words and gifted us this masterpiece. We must move ahead and leave behind the inappropriate dichotomy between ‘mind’ and ‘brain’…between ‘psychiatry’ and ‘neurology’. It was always a spectrum and unfathomable beyond our present knowledge and perception.
Our life, as I believe, must be like those books on the shelves, every individual has a different story to tell, hiding within the cover pages with all its mystery and uncertainty, waiting for life to unfold in different ways. Human emotions and behaviors are colorful tapestries stitched together with care and love.
Happy reading!
