Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert M. Sapolsky
Case
Wildly
Cases
Tons
Probably
Monk
Become
Random
Even
Competitive
Buddhist
Stoked
Acts
Monks
Kindness
Testosterone

More quotes by 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
We’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.
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
We are just another primate but a very confused, malleable one.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
Oxytocin is lauded for how it promotes warmth, generosity, social bonding, cooperation, trust, and compassion.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
Only humans invent moralizing gods who monitor our behavior.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.
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
We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
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
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
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
Image
...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
Image
The frontal cortex doesn't even fully develop until age 25, which is wild!
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
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