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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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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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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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We are just another primate but a very confused, malleable one.
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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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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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If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
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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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Only humans invent moralizing gods who monitor our behavior.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.
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Naturally, things are more complicated - those groovy, pro-social effects of oxytocin apply to how we interact with in-group members.
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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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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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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 live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
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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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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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