Robert M. Sapolsky Quotes

20 quotes in 404 categories

• Perhaps most excitingly, we are uncovering the brain basis of our behaviors - normal, abnormal and in-between. We are mapping a neurobiology of what makes…
• We're getting along so well; I trust you so much for this one second that I'm going to let you yank on me.
• Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.
• We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
• Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.
• The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it.
• Some Poor grad student pressing on the flanks of a hamster and out comes a doctorate on the other side
• Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease.
• Finish this lecture, go outside, and unexpectedly get gored by an elephant, and you are going to secrete glucocorticoids. There's no way out of it.…
• If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't…
• Digestion is quickly shut down during stress…The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates the actions of digestion. Along comes…
• Fossey, Fossey, you cranky difficult strong-arming self-destructive misanthrope, mediocre scientist, deceiver of earnest college students, probable cause of more deaths of the gorillas than if…
• The less it is possible that something can be, the more it must be.
• Stress is not a state of mind... it's measurable and dangerous, and humans can't seem to find their off-switch.
• I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot…
• If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
• I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.
• If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a "genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger…
• Most people who do a lot of exercise, particularly in the form of competitive athletics, have unneurotic, extraverted, optimistic personalities to begin with. (Marathon runners…
• On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest…

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