Comportamento: sobre o nosso melhor e o pior

As razões que fazem de “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst” (2017) um livro obrigatório para todos os que estudam o Humano são as mesmas que Robert M. Sapolsky utiliza para descrever o comportamento humano enquanto “arco multifactorial”. Ou seja, o comportamento humano é apresentado enquanto resultado de um conjunto alargado de fatores biológicos e experienciais, produzindo a necessidade em Sapolsky de escrever um livro evocando um conjunto imensamente alargado de ciências — da biologia à psicologia, passando pela neuroendocrinologia, genética, psicologia evolucionária, primatologia, economia comportamental, teoria dos jogos, educação e ainda a antropologia, a política e a filosofia — não dando primazia a qualquer uma destas, antes buscando em cada uma as partes que contribuem para o resultado final do comportamento humano. Sapolsky não diferencia os genes da experiência, antes coloca ambos como pólos de um eixo dimensional entre os quais atuam múltiplos e variáveis fatores, e em que cada um destes afeta o funcionamento do anterior e posterior, tornando impossível determinar com certeza o que produz o quê. Este problema é o cerne das ciências que estudam o humano e acaba por explicar porque as humanidades nunca se vergaram às ciências. A leitura do comportamento, seja ele expressivo ou meramente funcional, requer além da descrição processual, que a ciência fornece, uma interpretação desse processo que só as humanidades podem fornecer. Por outro lado, é neste problema ou impossibilidade de fechar o ciclo causal que reside o núcleo do nosso livre-arbítrio.

Para entrar na abordagem proposta por Sapolsky apresento um excerto da Introdução que sintetiza a essência:

“A behavior has just occurred. Why did it happen? Your first category of explanation is going to be a neurobiological one. What went on in that person’s brain a second before the behavior happened? Now pull out to a slightly larger field of vision, your next category of explanation, a little earlier in time. What sight, sound, or smell in the previous seconds to minutes triggered the nervous system to produce that behavior? On to the next explanatory category. What hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual was to the sensory stimuli that trigger the nervous system to produce the behavior? And by now you’ve increased your field of vision to be thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and short-term endocrinology in trying to explain what happened.
And you just keep expanding. What features of the environment in the prior weeks to years changed the structure and function of that person’s brain and thus changed how it responded to those hormones and environmental stimuli? Then you go further back to the childhood of the individual, their fetal environment, then their genetic makeup. And then you increase the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual—how has culture shaped the behavior of people living in that individual’s group?—what ecological factors helped shape that culture—expanding and expanding until considering events umpteen millennia ago and the evolution of that behavior.
(…)
There are not different disciplinary buckets. Instead, each one is the end product of all the biological influences that came before it and will influence all the factors that follow it. Thus, it is impossible to conclude that a behavior is caused by a gene, a hormone, a childhood trauma, because the second you invoke one type of explanation, you are de facto invoking them all. No buckets. A “neurobiological” or “genetic” or “developmental” explanation for a behavior is just shorthand, an expository convenience for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective.”

Do meu lado pessoal, e além do que introduzi acima, o que me fez apaixonar pelo livro foi o facto do caminho científico-teórico reproduzido por Sapolsky ao longo do livro estar tão de acordo com o percurso que eu próprio tenho feito no estudo da Emoção e Cognição, e no modo como estas impactam a interação, comunicação e expressão humanas. Desde logo a evocação de Robert McLean e o cérebro triúnico, assumindo que é mais metáfora do que ciência, mas assumindo que é fundamental para compreendermos o funcionamento do processo cognitivo e emotivo do nosso cérebro. Passando depois pela discussão sobre a Amígdala, o Córtex Frontal, os Marcadores Somáticos, a Testosterona, a Oxitocina, a Serotonina e a Dopamina que impactam a Motivação, a Curiosidade e o Brincar, o Vínculo Parental, a Seleção Natural, a Seleção Sexual que por sua vez impactam os Genes e os transformam, desenvolvendo variações dimensionais do Competitivo ao Colaborativo, produzindo a Empatia que regula os níveis do "Nós vs. Eles". Muito disto foi amplamente discutido por tantos outros autores aqui evocados por Sapolsky desde o grande mentor Darwin até Dawkins, Damásio ou Kahneman, passando por Harlow, Zimbardo, Milgram e Pinker ou ainda Voltaire, Hobbes e Rousseau. Este percurso requer obrigatoriamente a multidisciplinaridade como poderão ver na minha prateleira Human Engagement no GoodReads.

Existem tantas partes do livro relevantes que gostaria de aqui transcrever, muitas delas apenas como re-afirmação de ideias e conceitos, outras como crítica social assente naquilo que a ciência nos vai deixando entrever, outras como portas para novas investigações e interesses. Mas é um livro impossível de sintetizar em duas ou três páginas, é um livro que precisa de ser lido e relido, apesar das suas 800 páginas, para que possamos interiorizar a compreensão da ciência existente e ganhar assim um maior entendimento sobre o que somos:

“Neuroimaging studies show the dramatic sensitivity of adolescents to peers. Ask adults to think about what they imagine others think of them, then about what they think of themselves. Two different, partially overlapping networks of frontal and limbic structures activate for the two tasks. But with adolescents the two profiles are the same. “What do “you think about yourself?” is neurally answered with “Whatever everyone else thinks about me.” (Cap. 6)

“Are we a pair-bonded or tournament species? Western civilization doesn’t give a clear answer. We praise stable, devoted relationships yet are titillated, tempted, and succumb to alternatives at a high rate. Once divorces are legalized, a large percentage of marriages end in them, yet a smaller percentage of married people get divorced—i.e., the high divorce rate arises from serial divorcers (...) Measure after measure, it’s the same. We aren’t classically monogamous or polygamous. As everyone from poets to divorce attorneys can attest, we are by nature profoundly confused—mildly polygynous, floating somewhere in between.” (Cap. 10)

“Worldwide, monotheism is relatively rare; to the extent that it does occur, it is disproportionately likely among desert pastoralists (while rain forest dwellers are atypically likely to be polytheistic). This makes sense. Deserts teach tough, singular things, a world reduced to simple, desiccated, furnace-blasted basics that are approached with a deep fatalism. “I am the Lord your God” and “There is but one god and his name is Allah” and “There will be no gods before me”— dictates like these proliferate (...) In contrast, think of tropical rain forest, teeming with life, where you can find more species of ants on a single tree than in all of Britain. Letting a hundred deities bloom in equilibrium must seem the most natural thing in the world." (Cap. 9)

“That when it comes to empathy and compassion, rich people tend to suck (..) Across the socioeconomic spectrum, on the average, the wealthier people are, the less empathy they report for people in distress and the less compassionately they act (..) (a) wealthier people (as assessed by the cost of the car they were driving) are less likely than poor people to stop for pedestrians at crosswalks; (b) suppose there’s a bowl of candy in the lab; invite test subjects, after they finish doing some task, to grab some candy on the way out, telling them that whatever’s left over will be given to some kids—the wealthier take more candy. (..) Make people feel wealthy, and they take more candy from children. What explains this pattern? (..) wealthier people are more likely to endorse greed as being good, to view the class system as fair and meritocratic, and to view their success as an act of independence — all great ways to decide that someone else’s distress is beneath your notice or concern.” (Cap. 12)

“But Pinker failed to take things one logical step further—also correcting for differing durations of events. Thus he compares the half dozen years of World War II with, for example, twelve centuries of the Mideast slave trade and four centuries of Native American genocide. When corrected for duration as well as total world population, the top ten [of world ever conflicts] now include World War II (number one), World War I (number three), the Russian Civil War (number eight), Mao (number ten), and an event that didn’t even make Pinker’s original list, the Rwandan genocide (number seven), where 700,000 people were killed in a hundred days." (Cap. 17)

Contudo, e apesar de tantos e tantos estudos, a verdade é que determinar o comportamento humano, as suas razões ou efeitos continua a ser imensamente complexo, e por isso termino com a grande conclusão do livro, que para mim é inspiradora:

“If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that...” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try.
Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.”

No final do livro, no Epílogo, Sapolsky lista um conjunto de grandes conclusões, cerca de 30, das quais opto por destacar 5:

• “Repeatedly, biological factors (e.g., hormones) don’t so much cause a behavior as modulate and sensitize, lowering thresholds for environmental stimuli to cause it.”
• “Cognition and affect always interact. What’s interesting is when one dominates.”
• “Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience; that’s how we learn—context, context, context.”
• “Often we’re more about the anticipation and pursuit of pleasure than about the experience of it.”
• “We implicitly divide the world into Us and Them, and prefer the former. We are easily manipulated, even subliminally and within seconds, as to who counts as each.”

O livro já foi editado em Portugal pela Temas & Debates, sob o título "Comportamento: A Biologia Humana No Nosso Melhor e Pior".