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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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Robert M. Sapolsky
Exception
Optimistic
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Athletics
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Personalities
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Marathon
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More quotes by 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.
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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.
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The frontal cortex doesn't even fully develop until age 25, which is wild!
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We’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.
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We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
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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...I might continue to believe that there is no god even if it were proved that there is. A religious friend of mine once remarked that the concept of god is useful, because you can berate god during the bad times. But it is clear to me that I don't need to believe there is a god in order to berate him.
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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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.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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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
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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
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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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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.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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What happened during the minutes before? That's the realm of sensory stimuli of the nervous system.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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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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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
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Stress is not a state of mind... it's measurable and dangerous, and humans can't seem to find their off-switch.
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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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