Top 180 Robert M. Sapolsky Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Logically, when the amygdala wants to mobilize a behavior – say, fleeing – it talks to the frontal cortex, seeking its executive approval. But if sufficiently aroused, the amygdala talks directly to subcortical, reflexive motor pathways. Again, there’s a trade-off – increased speed by by-passing the cortex, but decreased accuracy. Thus the input shortcut may prompt you to see the cell phone as a gun. And the output shortcut may prompt you to pull a trigger before you consciously mean to.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

52. “We’re getting along so well; I trust you so much for this one second that I’m going to let you yank on me.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

53. “The shape of women’s faces changes subtly during their ovulatory cycle, and men prefer female faces at the time of ovulation.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

54. “In another study subjects waited an unknown length of time to receive a shock.12 This lack of predictability and control was so aversive that many chose to receive a stronger shock immediately. And.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

55. “I was once at a conference of neuroscientists and all-star Buddhist monk meditators, the former studying what the brains of the latter did during meditation. One scientist asked one of the monks whether he ever stops meditating because his knees hurt from all that cross-leggedness. He answered, “Sometimes I’ll stop sooner than I planned, but not because it hurts; it’s not something I notice. It’s as an act of kindness to my knees.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

56. “Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one’s own skilled action.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

57. “Something roughly akin to love is needed for proper biological development, and its absence is among the most aching, distorting stressors that we can suffer.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

58. “It is never really the case that stress makes you sick, or even increases your risk of being sick. Stress increases your risk of getting diseases that make you sick, or if you have such a disease, stress increases the risk of your defenses being overwhelmed by the disease.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

59. “Priming people to think of God as punitive decreases cheating; thinking of God as forgiving increases it. The researchers then studied subjects from sixty-seven countries, considering the prevalence in each of belief in the existence of a heaven and hell. The greater the skew toward belief in hell, rather than heaven, the lower the national crime rate. When it comes to Eternity, sticks apparently work better than carrots.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

60. “Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren’t necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

61. “This leads to a thoroughly fascinating finding – social conservatives tend toward lower thresholds for disgust than liberals.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

62. “Thus there’s dopaminergic activation during schadenfreude – gloating over an envied person’s fall from grace.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

63. “In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions – religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit – bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds facing a potential tragedy of the commons. They make us less selfish in Me versus Us situations. But they send us hurtling toward our worst behaviors when confronting Thems and their different moralities.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

64. “If you have to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “it’s complicated.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

65. “What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

66. “Someone does something lousy and selfish to you in a game, and the extent of insular and amygdaloid activation predicts how much outrage you feel and how much revenge you take.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

67. “Dogs attempt to deceive one another, with marginal success – when a dog is terrified, fear pheromones emanate from his anal scent glands, and it’s not great if the guy you’re facing off against knows you’re scared. A dog can’t consciously choose to be deceptive by not synthesizing and secreting those pheromones. But he can try to squelch their dissemination by putting a lid on those glands, by putting his tail between his legs – “I’m not scared, no siree,” squeaked Sparky.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

68. “I can’t really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we’ll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters – when we judge others harshly.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

69. “One study showed kids, ages five to thirteen, pairs of faces of candidates from obscure elections and asked them whom they’d prefer as captain on a hypothetical boat trip. And kids picked the winner 71 percent of the time.31.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

70. “The group is more arrogant, hypocritical, self-centered and more ruthless in the pursuit of its ends than the individual.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

71. “In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you’ll understand the big picture. And in this reductionist world, to understand cells, organs, bodies, and behavior, the best constituent part to study is genes.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

72. “With chronic stress the nucleus accumbens is depleted of dopamine, biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

73. “Testosterone makes us more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status. And the key point is what it takes. Engineer social circumstances right, and boosting testosterone levels during a challenge would make people compete like crazy to do the most acts of random kindness. In our world riddled with male violence, the problem isn’t that testosterone can increase levels of aggression. The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

74. “Your heart does roughly the same thing whether you are in a murderous rage or having an orgasm. Again, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

75. “Our nights are filled with worries about a different class of diseases; we are now living well enough and long enough to slowly fall apart.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

76. “Look at systematic patterns of cultural variation as they pertain to the best and worst of our behaviors. Explore how different types of brains produce different culture and different types of culture produce different brains. In other words, how culture and biology coevolve.3 See the role of ecology in shaping culture.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

77. “What happens when children observe domestic violence, warfare, a gang murder, a school massacre? For weeks afterward there is impaired concentration and impulse control. Witnessing gun violence doubles a child’s likelihood of serious violence within the succeeding two years. And adulthood brings the usual increased risks of depression, anxiety, and aggression. Consistent with that, violent criminals are more likely than nonviolent ones to have witnessed violence as kids.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

78. “This level is egoistic in that rules and their application come from within and reflect conscience, where a transgression exacts the ultimate cost – having to live with yourself afterward. It recognizes that being good and being law-abiding aren’t synonymous.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

79. “So dopamine is more about anticipation of reward than about reward itself.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

80. “These differing emphases explain a lot – for example, the classical liberal view is that everyone has equal rights to happiness; rightists instead discount fairness in favor of expedient authority, generating the classical conservative view that some socioeconomic inequality is a tolerable price for things running smoothly.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

81. “A chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

82. “Thus, for our purposes, genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead they’re about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, potentials, and vulnerabilities. All embedded in the fabric of the other factors, biological and otherwise, that fill these pages.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

83. “In other cases the challenge is to appreciate how, though human physiology resembles that of other species, we use the physiology in novel ways.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

84. “Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

85. “It was the relative, not absolute, size of the surprise that mattered over a tenfold range of reward.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

86. “What Wilkinson and others have shown is that poverty is not only a predictor of poor health but, independent of absolute income, so is poverty amid plenty – the more income inequality there is in a society, the worse the health and mortality rates.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

87. “In contrast, conservatives heavily value loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Obviously, this is a big difference. Is it okay to criticize your group to outsiders? Rightists: no, that’s disloyal. Leftists: yes, if justified. Should you ever disobey a law? Rightists: no, that undermines authority. Leftists: of course, if it’s a bad law. Is it okay to burn the flag? Rightists: never, it’s sacred. Leftists: come on, it’s a piece of cloth.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

88. “Depression’s defining symptom is anhedonia, the inability to feel, anticipate, or pursue pleasure. Chronic stress depletes the mesolimbic system of dopamine, generating anhedonia. The link between childhood adversity and adult depression involves both organizational effects on the developing mesolimbic system and elevated adult glucocorticoid levels, which can deplete dopamine.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

89. “Various studies, predominantly by Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, show that when the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathic, charitable, and honest. Metaphorically, the frontal cortex says, “Screw it. I’m tired and don’t feel like thinking about my fellow human.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

90. “If you’re working to restrict your food intake, a milkshake just makes you want another one.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

91. “The opposite of love is not hate; its opposite is indifference.” The biologies of strong love and strong hate are similar in many ways, as we’ll see.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

92. “An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

93. “For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with. When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses – but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

94. “The opposite of love is not hate; its opposite is indifference.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

95. “Perhaps fifty years since we learned that reading problems of a type that we now call dyslexia aren’t due to laziness but instead involve microscopic cortical malformations.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

96. “Now we have hundreds of carefully engineered, designed, and marketed commercial foods filled with rapidly absorbed processed sugars that cause a burst of sensation that can’t be matched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation and negatives, also offered a huge array of subtle and often hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine a thousand-fold higher than anything stimulated in our drug-free world.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

97. “If it’s the right person tickling you in that adolescent stage of being on the cusp of sexuality, maybe, just maybe, that tickling is going to be followed by something really good, like hand-holding. In contrast, if it’s Slobodan Milosovic who is tickling you, maybe, just maybe, it will be followed up by his trying to ethnically cleanse you.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

98. “Basically, your heart is just a dumb, simple mechanical pump, and your blood vessels are nothing more exciting than hoses.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

99. “The depths of human conformity and obedience are shown by the speed with which they occur – it takes less than 200 milliseconds for your brain to register that the group has picked a different answer from yours, and less than 380 milliseconds for a profile of activation that predicts changing your opinion. Our brains are biased to get along by going along in less than a second.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

100. “Starting with a 1979 study, low levels of serotonin in the brain were shown to be associated with elevated levels of human aggression, with end points ranging from psychological measures of hostility to overt violence.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky