The Innovation Show

One of my favourite episodes of all time. This genre-shattering attempt to answer the question of human behaviour by looking at it from every angle. Our guest starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance. And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. What goes on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happens? Then he pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell triggers the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones act hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli which trigger the nervous system? By now, our guest has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to