First off, he’s funny. And he can write: not just clear science without condescension or pretension (an overlooked gift), but glorious essays that may begin and end in science, but offer zinging tangents and hilarious revelations along the way.

He studies stress stress, basically “the biology of the human predicament.” Right now, his Stanford-based neuroscience lab is researching neuronal cell death in the brain, with a particular focus on how stress and stress hormones affect neurons following a shock or trauma. And he also spends part of his time in Kenya, observing baboon behavior. That’s how I came to him—through A Primate’s Memoir, the story of his time with the baboons. (It’s only $10.20 at Amazon—buy it!)

Like me, he grew up loving the gorilla, and did his fair share of Fossey fetishizing. But he ended up in the baboon troop because he knew he wanted to study the effects of stress on the human body, and gorillas had too many external stressors to stand in for humans in his research. As he says:

Baboons live in big, complex social groups, and the population I went to study lived like kings….The baboons work maybe four hours a day to feed themselves; hardly anyone is likely to eat them. Basically, baboons have about a half dozen solid hours of sunlight a day to devote to being rotten to each other. Just like our society….We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.

Betsy and I saw Robert Sapolsky speak at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco a couple of years ago. He was talking about what makes us human. He began with what makes us different from animals—not so much, as it turns out—and ended with a dazzling discourse on the prefrontal cortex and all its heartbreaks and mysteries. Our frontal cortex is what gives us impulse control, the ability to hold off for later. It’s the last part of the brain to develop—not until we’re around 30, which explains a lot about my twenties—and it can be damaged by time or a good knock to the front of the head, changing our personalities, eroding who we are. Neuroscientists call that “getting frontal,” which sounds like what it is: an in-your-face acting out, an impulse-driven id amok. Without that humanizing frontal function, we can become more like un-adorable animals with a rage on.

The range of human behavior is amazing, he told us, but it all occurs along a continuum. What looks like silly ritual in one person becomes riotous, binding OCD in another. The difference between you and a Sober House castmember is just soul-curdling fame and a few more benders. We’re all nuts in one direction or another, it’s a matter of degrees. That’s not to say we’re without the quirks of personality, that dark brew of ways and means and wild, wild wants. Basically, we’re all special snowflakes caught up in a great grey drift of snow along the edge of the parking lot at the local Grocery. Some are packed in deep and won’t melt until we’ve had weeks of spring, others are on the gravelled top, and one warm day would wear us away.

Sapolsky’s talk was dizzying, delicious: I felt infinitely smarter, yet awesomely dumb at the end of his lecture. He’s number 1 on my list of dream dinner party attendees. Who’s on your list?

Tags: a primate's memoir, baboons, frontal cortex, robert sapolsky, stress

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