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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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Robert M. Sapolsky
Probably
Monk
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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.
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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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We are just another primate but a very confused, malleable one.
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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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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 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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An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.
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If you care about your longevity and health, be a socially affiliated baboon who is better than high-ranking ones at walking away from provocations.
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What happened during the minutes before? That's the realm of sensory stimuli of the nervous system.
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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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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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Until you appreciate something crucial - It is incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who counts as an Us, who as a Them.
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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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