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

Robert M. Sapolsky

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Robert M. Sapolsky
Primate
Malleable
Primates
Confused
Another

More quotes by 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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If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
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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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
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The less it is possible that something can be, the more it must be.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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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.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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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.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.
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 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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Importantly, rather than promoting aggression, testosterone promotes whatever is needed to maintain status when challenged.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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What happened in the milliseconds before a behavior to cause it? That's in the neurobiological realm.
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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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
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Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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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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The frontal cortex doesn't even fully develop until age 25, which is wild!
Robert M. Sapolsky
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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.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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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.
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