I’ve been reading this one book for a while now and it has been a great pleasure. Luckily I had a bit of time to waste while waiting for my USMLE Step 2 CS First Aid to be delivered. When I just started, I considered making daily or weekly short posts on what I have learned so far, but I got carried away by the narrative and the content so much so that I am almost a quarter into it and have not posted anything yet. Oh, and the book is “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst” by Robert M. Sapolsky. Outside of the plain coolness of it, I like it for the writing style (which, as I found out later, annoyed some readers) — the quirky sense of humor and extensive usage of footnotes are all good with me. In fact, it reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s works, which have a very special and quite large dedicated space in my heart (probably the whole left ventricle with maybe a bit of left atrium).

Getting back to “Behave”, though author tried to make it as understandable as possible without distorting the facts, it is not a light read. However, the multiple revelations on the nature of our behaviour are fascinating and eyeopening. The book contains a few primers on the very basic neurology, neuroanatomy and neurophysiology since even introduction level text is impossible without this knowledge. So far my favourite chapter is “Adolescence; or Dude, Where’s My Frontal Cortex?”.