This and "Thinking fast and slow" are books for any top 10 list.

The first part of the book walks back temporally: starting with an aggressive action, it highlights the seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, years and millennia that led up to the action, covering (neuro)biology, hormones, culture, religion, evolution among others. The second part is more about aggression, us-vs-them, empathy and all that follows. The sections on free will and punishment were enlightening.

In between that, it explains how brains work, including all that weird counter-intuitive decisions that take place all over one's life. The author's feeling frequently reach through the pages; a paragraph about the emptiness one feels after achieving something, the human tendency of getting hungrier afterwards instead of becoming content.

It explains a log of my and society's workings.. while upholding, that in the end, it's me who decides how to act. The importance to feed one's brain with the right inputs. It gives hope that one's actions are not predetermined through genes or environment. A progressive "just because nature/society/evolution ends up in a certain way, this doesn't make it good or meant to be in that way". Oddly progressive and humanitarian in that conclusion.