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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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Robert M. Sapolsky
Enough
Psychological
Luxury
Stress
Sick
Social
Live
Wells
Neurologists
Well
Purely

More quotes by Robert M. Sapolsky

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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.
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Oxytocin is lauded for how it promotes warmth, generosity, social bonding, cooperation, trust, and compassion.
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How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Genes are important for understanding our behavior. Incredibly important - after all, they code for every protein pertinent to brain function, endocrinology, etc.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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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
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The regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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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.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.
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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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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Only humans invent moralizing gods who monitor our behavior.
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
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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