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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

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

More quotes by Robert M. Sapolsky

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As long as experiencing your optimal level of good stress doesn't damage others, it's hard to objectively define where normal enjoyment of stimulation becomes adrenaline junkiehood.
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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 also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.
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Only humans invent moralizing gods who monitor our behavior.
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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 us us.
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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 whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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Essentially, we humans live well enough and long enough, and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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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
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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
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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
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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 are exceptions to this.)
Robert M. Sapolsky
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Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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We’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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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
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Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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Importantly, rather than promoting aggression, testosterone promotes whatever is needed to maintain status when challenged.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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Naturally, things are more complicated - those groovy, pro-social effects of oxytocin apply to how we interact with in-group members.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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The less it is possible that something can be, the more it must be.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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We are just another primate but a very confused, malleable one.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
Robert M. Sapolsky