Words matter. These are the best Robert Sapolsky Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’m sort of a hippie pacifist in terms of general persona.
Primates are hardwired for us/them dichotomies. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds.
When it comes to how neuroscience could help the wider public, the worst thing is when we make advances in, say, mindfulness, and then decide that everybody can potentially think their way to curing themselves or develop their own psycho-neuro-immune mechanisms for boosting cancer defenses.
I spend most of my time by being at a university, hanging out with very manic, excited 18-year-olds.
I am completely of the school that mind is entirely the manifestation of brain. So when there’s a change in mind, there’s got to be a neurobiological underpinning.
If you’re a gazelle, you don’t have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It’s not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.
To do good science, you’ve got to work really, really hard.
Baboons are poster children for psychosocial stress, living in troops with bruising and shifting dominance hierarchies among males and high rates of male aggression.
Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments.
You don’t want to end up telling somebody who’s homeless or a refugee that stress is all perceptual, because it sure isn’t in those cases. But most of us have fairly neurotic middle-class stressors.
The first roller coaster I ever went on in my life wasn’t until college.
My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution.
For an architect’s son, I am remarkably unformed in my architectural tastes.
But I like schlocky violent movies, but I’m for strict gun control. But then there was a time I was at a laser tag place, and I had such a good time hiding in a corner shooting at people. In other words, I’m your basic confused human when it comes to violence.
I expected social rank to be the determining factor in health, and in some ways that’s true. But far more important is what sort of society that rank occurs in. Being low ranking in a benevolent troop is a hell of a lot better for your blood pressure than being low ranking in an aggressive troop.
If you have to abuse your power, you’re probably in the process of losing it.
One definitely wants to have a functioning hippocampus. It’s all about learning and memory, the part blown out of the water by Alzheimer’s disease. It’s also the part that is most vulnerable to the effects of stress.
Of necessity, a scientist typically studies one incredibly tiny sliver of some biological system, totally ensconced within one discipline, because even figuring out how one sliver works is really hard.
Disgust is a very powerful tool for bringing about crowd violence. If a group can be dehumanized and made into the Other, the ‘them,’ to treat that group horribly is made much easier.
The United States has the biggest discrepancy in health and longevity between our wealthiest and our poorest of any country on Earth.
As for testosterone, it’s gotten a bum rap. Yes, it has tons to do with aggression but it doesn’t cause aggression as much as sensitizes you to the environmental triggers of aggression.
For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful – all those good things – when people finally accept that there is no free will.
If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently.
Authoritarians have always been here. But the features of a given moment make that way of thinking more or less appealing. Germany in the 1920s, when people are starving, suddenly makes ‘populist’ answers and scapegoating different groups as the source of the problem much more appealing.
I’m a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, and I’m kind of half-neurobiologist, half-primatologist.
We have this amazing ability to turn on the exactly same stress response worrying about a mortgage that a zebra does when it’s sprinting away from a lion.
When you’ve wised up enough, there is a very clear conclusion that you have to reach after a while, which is, at the end of the day, it is really impossible for one person to make a difference.
We like our individuality, we like the mysteriousness of us, the essentialism of us, and it can be alarming to see the biological gears turning underneath.
We do our worst when we’re surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.
If you turn on the stress response chronically for purely psychological reasons, you increase your risk of adult-onset diabetes and high blood pressure.
Go get yourself stressed all the time and the common cold becomes more common.
For 99 percent of the beasts on this planet, stress is about three minutes of screaming in terror after which it’s either over with or you’re over with. And we turn it on for 30-year mortgages.
What adolescence is about is by trial and error, honing a frontal cortex that is going to be more optimal by the time you’re 25.
I was this eggheady kid, the one who was consistently beaten up and picked last for the baseball teams.
Individuating and taking someone else’s perspective can be very powerful.
Low socioeconomic status carries with it an enormously increased risk of a broad range of diseases, and this gradient cannot be fully explained by factors such as health-care access.
I used to be a very serious pianist, and I was one of the snot-nosed classical ones who was appalled by nightmares of Ethel Merman and trombones blasting in the background and who knows what else.
There’s a science to what sort of people we’re attracted to, and it has to do with everything from how similar they are to us, to what sort of pheromones we imprinted on when we were little, and what variants of genes we have related to the neurochemical oxytocin.
Show me one neuron that has some cellular semblance of free will. And there is no such neuron.
Depression is like the worst disease you can get. It’s devastating.
We are not humans because we’ve invented a different type of brain cell, a different type of brain chemical. We are the same basic building blocks as even a fruit fly.
In terms of the most unique thing we do socially, my vote goes to something we invented alongside cities – we have lots of anonymous interactions and interactions with strangers. That has shaped us enormously.
Baboons who have friends do much better in terms of their physiology. And if that applies to a baboon, it could certainly apply for a human.
For moral judgment, I think the most interesting trends in neuroscience are the ways in which judgments vary as a function of how emotionally salient the situation is.
My lab looks at the ability of stress hormones to kill brain cells, and basically we are trying to understand on a molecular level how a neuron dies after a stroke, a seizure, Alzheimer’s, brain aging, and what these stress hormones do to make it worse.
Being president does seem a lot more stressful than being vice president.
I think you get to a time in life where by definition stuff’s turning to quicksand and wherever you can get some solid footing of the familiar suddenly becomes real comforting.
I think my becoming a writer had much to do with spending a chunk of each year sitting by myself out in a tent without radio, without newspapers, without a whole lot of people to interact with, without anybody having any sort of similar background to me.
When you’re being asked to think about the meaning of your intuitions before you act on them, maybe along the way you decide your intuitions are destructive or make no sense at all. And then you don’t act on them.
I was not especially a writer back in college.
Intellectually, I believe there’s no free will.
It’s insanely difficult for people to accept the extent to which we are biological organisms without agency.
I think it is inevitable that we make Us/Them distinctions but there’s nothing inevitable about who counts as a Them.
Literal cleanliness and orderliness can release us from abstract cognitive and affective distress – just consider how, during moments where life seems to be spiraling out of control, it can be calming to organize your clothes, clean the living room, get the car washed.
If you’re a baboon on the Serengeti, and you’re miserable, it’s almost certainly because some other baboon has had the free time and energy to devote to making you miserable.
