Quote

I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.

Robert M. Sapolsky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert M. Sapolsky
Planned
Mountain
Instead
Savanna
Grew
Baboon
Become
Baboons
Always
Gorilla
Never
Gorillas
Would
Assumed

More quotes by Robert M. Sapolsky

Image
We’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
We are just another primate but a very confused, malleable one.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
Give lab rats oxytocin and, according to that meme, they get better at talking about their feelings and sing like Joan Baez.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
The most important point of [Susan] Fiske's work is that it provides a taxonomy for our differing feelings about different Thems - sometimes fear, sometimes ridicule, sometimes contemptuous pity, sometimes savagery.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
The frontal cortex doesn't even fully develop until age 25, which is wild!
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
The frontal cortex is an incredibly interesting part of the brain - ours is proportionately bigger and/or more complex than in any other species.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
What happened in the milliseconds before a behavior to cause it? That's in the neurobiological realm.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
What does the frontal cortex do? Gratification postponement, executive function, long-term planning, and impulse control. Basically, it makes you do the harder thing.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
Until you appreciate something crucial - It is incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who counts as an Us, who as a Them.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
The less it is possible that something can be, the more it must be.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
The regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
We all seek out stress. We hate the wrong kinds of stress but when it's the right kind, we love it - we pay good money to be stressed by a scary movie, a roller coaster ride, a challenging puzzle.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
It's probably even the case that if you stoked up some Buddhist monks with tons of testosterone, they'd become wildly competitive as to who can do the most acts of random kindness.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
But often, it's easier to resist temptation with distraction, or to be so inculcated in doing the right thing that it's automatic, outside the frontal cortex's portfolio - Then it isn't the harder thing, it's the only thing you can do.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
It's great to have a buff frontal cortex to do that harder thing - for example, help a person in need rather buy some useless, shiny gee-gaw.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
Importantly, rather than promoting aggression, testosterone promotes whatever is needed to maintain status when challenged.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
The gigantic challenge is the magnitude of the individual differences in the optimal set point for good stress. For one person, it's doing something risky with your bishop in a chess game for someone else, it's becoming a mercenary in Yemen.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
Only humans invent moralizing gods who monitor our behavior.
Robert M. Sapolsky