Robert M. Sapolsky Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Emotional, Rats, Trouble

  "Stress, Neurodegeneration and Individual Differences". Robert M. Sapolsky's lecture at Washington State University, October 10, 2001.

  18 Copy quote

• Digestion is quickly shut down during stress…The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates the actions of digestion. Along comes stress: turn off parasympathetic, turn on the sympathetic, and forget about digestion.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Stress, Perfect, Digestion

  "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping - Now Revised and Updated".

  6 Copy quote

• Individual differences in testosterone level predict very little about differences in aggression.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Individual Differences, Levels, Littles

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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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.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Interesting, Brain, Bigger

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  6 Copy quote

• The regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Interesting, Regulation, Environment

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  14 Copy quote

• Almost always, genes are about potentials and vulnerabilities rather than about determinism.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Genes, Determinism, Vulnerability

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  13 Copy quote

• Oxytocin is a Teflon hormone - bad news rolls off it.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Oxytocin, Teflon, News

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  7 Copy quote

• We’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Smart, Sick, Enough

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Example, Needs, Useless

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  10 Copy quote

• To out-group-members, oxytocin makes you crappier - less cooperative and more preemptively aggressive. It's not the luv hormone. It's the in-group parochialism/xenophobia hormone.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Xenophobia, Oxytocin, Groups

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Brain, Abnormal, Behavior

  17 Copy quote

• What happened in the milliseconds before a behavior to cause it? That's in the neurobiological realm.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Causes, Behavior, Realms

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  18 Copy quote

• How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Important

  16 Copy quote

• The fascinating thing about our best and worst behaviors isn't the behavior itself - the brain tells the muscles to do something or other - big deal. It's the meaning of the behavior.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Brain, Behavior, Bigs

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  10 Copy quote

• Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Action, Pessimism, Effects

  14 Copy quote

• There's the complex categorization of low warmth/high competence. This is the hostile stereotype of Asian Americans by white America, of Jews in Europe, of Indo-Pakistanis in East Africa, of Lebanese in West Africa, of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, and of the rich by the poor most everywhere. It's the same low-high derogation: They're cold, greedy, clannish - -but, dang, they're sure good at making money and you should go to one who is a doctor if you're seriously sick.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Doctors, Europe, White

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• For example, most mammals are either monogamous or polygamous. But as every poet or divorce attorney will tell you, humans are confused - After all, we have monogamy, polygamy, polyandry, celibacy, and so on. 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.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Confused, Divorce, Unique

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  16 Copy quote

• Oxytocin is lauded for how it promotes warmth, generosity, social bonding, cooperation, trust, and compassion.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Compassion, Oxytocin, Generosity

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  12 Copy quote

• Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Brain, Behavior, Genes

  Robert M. Sapolsky (2004). “Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping - Now Revised and Updated”, p.293, Macmillan

  17 Copy quote

• Pulling a gun's trigger can be an appalling act. But if it is suicidal drawing fire to save someone, it has an utterly different meaning. Placing your hand on someone's arm can be an act of deep compassion or the first step of betrayal. The punch line? It's all about context, and the biology of context is vastly more complicated than the biology of the behavior itself.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Betrayal, Suicidal, Gun

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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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

  Mountain, Gorillas, Grew Up

  Robert M. Sapolsky (2007). “A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

  12 Copy quote

• Fossey, Fossey, you cranky difficult strong-arming self-destructive misanthrope, mediocre scientist, deceiver of earnest college students, probable cause of more deaths of the gorillas than if you had never set foot in Rwanda, Fossey, you pain-in-the-ass saint, I do not believe in prayers or souls, but I will pray for your soul, I will remember you for all of my days, in gratitude for that moment by the graves when all I felt was the pure, cleansing sadness of returning home and finding nothing but ghosts.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Gratitude, Strong, Prayer

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Temptation, Portfolios, Distraction

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Talking, Oxytocin, Giving

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Stress, Individual Differences, Games

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  8 Copy quote

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