Quote

We are just another primate but a very confused, malleable one.

Robert M. Sapolsky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert M. Sapolsky
Another
Primate
Malleable
Primates
Confused

More quotes by 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
Oxytocin is lauded for how it promotes warmth, generosity, social bonding, cooperation, trust, and compassion.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
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.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
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
Image
The most important point of [Susan] Fiske's work is that it provides a taxonomy for our differing feelings about different Thems - sometimes fear, sometimes ridicule, sometimes contemptuous pity, sometimes savagery.
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
...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 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
If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
We’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
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
Image
The less it is possible that something can be, the more it must be.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
The regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
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
An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
Naturally, things are more complicated - those groovy, pro-social effects of oxytocin apply to how we interact with in-group members.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Image
What happened during the minutes before? That's the realm of sensory stimuli of the nervous system.
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
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
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