The Biology Of Our Best and Worst Selves
Why are we – as a human race – capable of doing horrific behaviors? You know what I’m talking about. Gunning down children in an elementary school or shooting babies? Dropping atomic bombs on civilians?
Could it be what happens in our brains just seconds before these atrocities or from environmental factors over a lifetime? Dr. Robert Sapolsky discusses in a TED talk the potential variables responsible for iconic feats of heroism or despicable evils that any person might succumb to. After all, everyone has the same neurons, neurochemicals, and biology.
So why do villains come full circle to do the right thing? Remember when Hugh Thompson turned his helicopter on his fellow soldiers to force them to stop shooting babies and raping women during the My Lai Massacre?
Sapolsky ends his TED talk with “Those who don’t study the history of extraordinary human change, those who don’t study the biology of what can transform us from our worst to our best behaviors, those who don’t do this are destined not to be able to repeat these incandescent, magnificent moments.”