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

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. “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

104. “Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality – it must be a drag being right-wing. But despite that, in a multinational study, rightists were happier than leftists.42 Why? Perhaps it’s having simpler answers, unburdened by motivated correction. Or, as favored by the authors, because system justification allows conservatives to rationalize and be less discomfited by inequality. And as economic inequality rises, the happiness gap between the Right and the Left increases.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

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

— Robert M. Sapolsky

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Robert M. Sapolsky

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Robert M. Sapolsky

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Robert M. Sapolsky

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “This is the essence of learning. The lecturer says something, and it goes in one ear and out the other. The factoid is repeated; same thing. It’s repeated enough times and – aha! – the lightbulb goes on and suddenly you get it. At a synaptic level, the axon terminal having to repeatedly release glutamate is the lecturer droning on repetitively; the moment when the postsynaptic threshold is passed and the NMDA receptors first activate is the dendritic spine finally getting it.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

147. “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

148. “The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it with slavery.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

149. “We process emotionally salient information more rapidly and automatically, but with less accuracy. Frontal function – working memory, impulse control, executive decision making, risk assessment, and task shifting – is impaired, and the frontal cortex has less control over the amygdala. And we become less empathic and prosocial. Reducing sustained stress is a win-win for us and those stuck around us.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

150. “What’s a heritability score? “What does a gene do?” is at least two questions. How does a gene influence average levels of a trait? How does a gene influence variation among people in levels of that trait?”

— Robert M. Sapolsky