Top 180 Robert M. Sapolsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “It is the ambiguity of violence, that we can pull a trigger as an act of hideous aggression or of self-sacrificing love, that is so challenging.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

103. “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

104. “The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

105. “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

106. “Science provides us with some of the most elegant, stimulating puzzles that life has to offer. It throws some of the most provocative ideas into our arenas of moral debate. Occasionally, it improves our lives. I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means that you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

107. “Oxytocin and vasopressin facilitate mother-infant bond formation and monogamous pair-bonding, decrease anxiety and stress, enhance trust and social affiliation, and make people more cooperative and generous. But this comes with a huge caveat – these hormones increase prosociality only toward an Us. When dealing with Thems, they make us more ethnocentric and xenophobic. Oxytocin is not a universal luv hormone. It’s a parochial one.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

108. “If you pay lots of attention to where boundaries are, you pay less attention to complete pictures.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

109. “Feeling someone else’s pain can be more effective for learning than just knowing that they’re in pain. At its core the ACC is about self-interest, with caring about that other person in pain as an add-on.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

110. “Thus, shorter refractory periods mean a higher rate of action potentials. So is testosterone causing action potentials in these neurons? No. It’s causing them to fire at a faster rate if they are stimulated by something else. Similarly, testosterone increases amygdala response to angry faces, but not to other sorts.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

111. “Josh Greene and Jonathan Cohen of Princeton wrote an extremely clearheaded piece on this, “For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything.” Where neuroscience and the rest of biology change nothing is in the continued need to protect the endangered from the dangerous.30.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

112. “The explains why basal levels of testosterone have little to do with subsequent aggression, and why increases in testosterone due to puberty, sexual stimulation, or the start of mating season don’t increase aggression either.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

113. “A recent study adds an important twist to this story. There are the kids with problems with impulse control – “I’m absolutely going to hold out for two marshmallow” – who then instantly eat that first one. That profile is a statistical predictor of adult violent crime. In contrast, there are kids with steep time-discounting curves – “Wait fifteen minutes for two marshmallows when I can have one right now? What kind of fool waits fifteen minutes?” That is a predictor of adult property crime.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

114. “The subject is also fascinating because of the nature of the revisionism – neuroplasticity radiates optimism. Books on the topic are entitled The Brain That Changes Itself, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, and Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life, hinting at the “new neurology.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

115. “We don’t passively forget that something is scary. We actively learn that it isn’t anymore.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

116. “The health risk of poverty turns out to be a huge effect, the biggest risk factor there is in all of behavioral medicine – in other words, if you have a bunch of people of the same gender, age, and ethnicity and you want to make some predictions about who is going to live how long, the single most useful fact to know is each person’s SES.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

117. “In other words, the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

118. “There is often an inverse relationship between levels of intragroup and intergroup aggression. In other words, groups with highly hostile interactions with neighbors tend to have minimal internal conflict. Or, to spin this another way, groups with high levels of internal conflict are too distracted to focus hostility on the Others.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

119. “This was John Watson, a founder of behaviorism, writing around 1925. Behaviorism, with its notion that behavior is completely malleable, that it can be shaped into anything in the right environment, dominated American psychology in the midtwentieth century;.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

120. “The candidate gene approaches show that the effect of a single gene on a behavior is typically tiny. In other words, having the “warrior gene” variant of MAO probably has less effect on your behavior than does believing that you have it.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

121. “And you’d better bet that changes along the lines of those presented in this chapter occurred in the brains of anyone transformed by these transformations. A different world makes for a different worldview, which means a different brain. And the more tangible and real the neurobiology underlying such change seems, the easier it is to imagine that it can happen again.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

122. “To cite a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde, “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.” It’s Us versus Them framed morally, and the importance of what Greene calls “the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality” is shown by the fact that most intergroup conflicts on our planet ultimately are cultural disagreements about whose “right” is righter.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

123. “Research shows that rejecting an offer is an emotional decision, triggered by anger at a lousy offer and the desire to punish. The.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

124. “Thus political orientation about social issues reflects sensitivity to visceral disgust and strategies for coping with such disgust.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

125. “We readily think of stressors as consisting of various unpleasant things that can be done to an organism. Sometimes a stressor can be the failure to provide something essential, and the absence of touch is seemingly one of the most marked developmental stressors that we can suffer.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

126. “Hormonal responses to various fetal and childhood experiences have epigenetic effects on genes related to the growth factor BDNF, to the vasopressin and oxytocin system, and to estrogen sensitivity. These effects are pertinent to adult cognition, personality, emotionality, and psychiatric health. Childhood abuse, for example, causes epigenetic changes in hundreds of genes in the human hippocampus.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

127. “Axonal remapping in blind or deaf individuals is great, exciting, and moving. It’s cool that your hippocampus expands if you drive a London cab. Ditto about the size and specialization of the auditory cortex in the triangle player in the orchestra. But at the other end, it’s disastrous that trauma enlarges the amygdala and atrophies the hippocampus, crippling those with PTSD. Similarly, expanding the amount of motor cortex devoted to finger dexterity is great in neurosurgeons but.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

128. “A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

129. “But in reality the brain is about circuits, about the patterns of functional connectivity among regions. The growing myelination of the adolescent brain shows the importance of increased connectivity.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

130. “In other words, pain makes aggressive people more aggressive, while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals.27.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

131. “When deontologism and consequentialism contemplate trolleys, the former is about moral intuitions rooted in the vmPFC, amygdala, and insula, while the latter is the domain of the dlPFC and moral reasoning. Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, “Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

132. “Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

133. “Ask not what a gene does. Ask what it does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

134. “Kids learn dichotomies in the absence of any ill intent. When a kindergarten teacher says, “Good morning, boys and girls,” the kids are being taught that dividing the world that way is more meaningful than saying, “Good morning, those of you who have lost a tooth and those of you who haven’t yet.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

135. “Amazingly, prison sentences for murderers have now been lessened in at least two cases because it was argued that the criminal, having the “warrior gene” variant of MAO-A, was inevitably fated to be uncontrollably violent. OMG.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

136. “Logically, gambling shouldn’t evoke much anticipatory dopamine, given the astronomical odds against winning. But the behavioral engineering – the 24-7 activity and lack of time cues, the cheap alcohol pickling fronto-cortical judgment, the manipulations to make you feel like today is your lucky day – distorts and shifts the perception of the odds into a range where dopamine pours out and, oh, why not, let’s try again.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

137. “Neuropsychologists are coming to recognize that there is a specialized subset of long-term memory. Remote memories are ones stretching back to your childhood – the name of your village, your native language, the smell of your grandmother’s baking. They appear to be stored in some sort of archival way in your brain separate from more recent long-term memories. Often, in patients with a dementia that devastates most long-term memory, the more remote facets can remain intact.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

138. “The contrast between rapid, automatic moral intuitionism and conscious, deliberative moral reasoning plays out in another crucial realm and is the subject of Greene’s superb 2014 book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

139. “Over the course of minutes to hours, hormonal effects are predominantly contingent and facilitative. Hormones don’t determine, command, cause, or invent behaviors. Instead they make us more sensitive to the social triggers of emotionally laden behaviors and exaggerate our preexisting tendencies in those domains.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

140. “These are crucially different. For example, how much do genes have to do with people’s scores averaging 100 on this thing called an IQ test? Then how much do genes have to do with one person scoring higher than another?”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

141. “We have multiple dichotomies in our heads, and ones that seem inevitable and crucial can, under the right circumstances, have their importance evaporate in an instant.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

142. “Thus, we tend to think of Us as noble, loyal, and composed of distinctive individuals whose failings are due to circumstance. Thems, in contrast, seem disgusting, ridiculous, simple, homogeneous, undifferentiated, and interchangeable.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

143. “I think like an academic egghead, believing that if I write enough paragraphs about a scary subject, give enough lectures about it, it will give up and go away quietly. And if everyone took enough classes about the biology of violence and studied hard, we’d all be able to take a nap between the snoozing lion and lamb. Such is the delusional sense of efficacy of a professor.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

144. “What the data show: the fewer social relationships a person has, the shorter his or her life expectancy, and the worse the impact of various infectious diseases. Relationships that are medically protective can take the form of marriage, contact with friends and extended family, church membership, or other group affiliations.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

145. “Remarkably, the fetal brain generates far more neurons than are found in the adult. Why? During late fetal development, there is a dramatic competition in much of the brain, with winning neurons being the ones that migrate to the correct location and maximize synaptic connections to other neurons. And neurons that don’t make the grade? They undergo “programmed cell death” – genes are activated that cause them to shrivel and die, their materials then recycled.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

146. “And then you increase the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual – how has culture shaped the behavior of people living in that individual’s group? – what ecological factors helped shape that culture – expanding and expanding.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

147. “A critical realization roared through the research community: the physiological stress-response can be modulated by psychological factors. Two identical stressors with the same extent of allostatic disruption can be perceived, can be appraised differently, and the whole show changes from there.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

148. “All but the most heroically strong among us would slip another step lower in the face of this loss. It is true that hope, no matter how irrational, can sustain us in the darkest of times. But nothing can break us more effectively than hope given and then taken away capriciously. Manipulating these psychological variables is a powerful but double-edged sword.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

149. “By ages four through six, kids in cultures from around the world respond negatively when they are the ones being shortchanged. It isn’t until ages eight through ten that kids respond negatively to someone else being treated unfairly.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

150. “During sustained stress, the amygdala processes emotional sensory information more rapidly and less accurately, dominates hippocampal function, and disrupts frontocortical function; we’re more fearful, our thinking is muddled, and we assess risks poorly and act impulsively out of habit, rather than incorporating new data.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky