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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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Robert M. Sapolsky
Needed
Testosterone
Whatever
Promotes
Rather
Importantly
Challenged
Promoting
Aggression
Status
Maintain

More quotes by 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.)
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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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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 regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
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The less it is possible that something can be, the more it must be.
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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.
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What happened in the milliseconds before a behavior to cause it? That's in the neurobiological realm.
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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.
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Only humans invent moralizing gods who monitor our behavior.
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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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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.
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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.
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We’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.
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How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.
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.
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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.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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Oxytocin is lauded for how it promotes warmth, generosity, social bonding, cooperation, trust, and compassion.
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.
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An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.
Robert M. Sapolsky