Peter Sterling
AUTHOR

Peter Sterling

Science & Engineering
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Peter Sterling studied biology at Cornell University and NYU School of Medicine and earned a PhD in neuroscience at Western Reserve University. Following postdoctoral study at Harvard Medical School, he established a laboratory at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine where he studied the structure and function of neural circuits, leading ultimately to a book with Simon Laughlin, Principles of Neural Design (2015). Sterling is also a lifelong social activist, having campaigned for civil rights as a "Freedom Rider", against the Vietnam war, and against the brain-damaging attempts to treat mental disturbance by psychosurgery, electroshock, and neuroleptic drugs. Professor Sterling's observations of differences in health between socially stressed US communities and more integrated indigenous communities in Central America led him to formulate with Joseph Eyer the concept of allostasis. The brain optimizes energy efficiency by predicting needs and governing all our biochemistry and physiology to meet them. Allostasis employs a brain circuit that compels seeking––for food, water, mates––and pauses briefly when we obtain a positive surprise. Modern life so reduces opportunities for surprise that we are compelled to seek it through consumption: bigger burgers, more opioids, and innumerable activities that involve high carbon emissions. Sterling's new book, What is Health? (2020), builds an understanding from molecules upward that society must abandon mere technical solutions and restore possibilities for daily small rewards for which we were wired by evolution. Sterling now lives half of the year on a small farm in the mountains of western Panamá and the other half in rural Massachusetts.
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