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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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Robert M. Sapolsky
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More quotes by Robert M. Sapolsky

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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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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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The regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
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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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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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We’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.
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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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
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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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We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
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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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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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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But often, it's easier to resist temptation with distraction, or to be so inculcated in doing the right thing that it's automatic, outside the frontal cortex's portfolio - Then it isn't the harder thing, it's the only thing you can do.
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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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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If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
Robert M. Sapolsky
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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.
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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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