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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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Robert M. Sapolsky
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How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.
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Genes are important for understanding our behavior. Incredibly important - after all, they code for every protein pertinent to brain function, endocrinology, etc.
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Only humans invent moralizing gods who monitor our behavior.
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Importantly, rather than promoting aggression, testosterone promotes whatever is needed to maintain status when challenged.
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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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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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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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We are just another primate but a very confused, malleable one.
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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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Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.
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We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
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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 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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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.
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An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.
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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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If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
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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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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.
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We’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.
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