Top 180 Robert M. Sapolsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “A “neurobiological” or “genetic” or “developmental” explanation for a behavior is just shorthand, an expository convenience for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

154. “When a rat wins a fight, the number of testosterone receptors increases in the ventral tegmentum and accumbens, increasing sensitivity to the hormone’s feel-good effects.10.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

155. “Thus, over the course of seconds sensory cues can shape your behavior unconsciously.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

156. “Parts of the book describe work carried out in my own laboratory, and these studies have been made possible by funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Klingenstein Fund, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Adler Foundation.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

157. “I once received a lesson in kids’ private world of rule making from my then-four-year-old son. We had gone to a public bathroom together; we stood side by side at two urinals, and I finished a bit earlier than he did. “I wish we had finished at the same time,” he said. Why? “We get more points that way.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

158. “For starters, circulating oxytocin levels are elevated in couples when they’ve first hooked up. Furthermore, the higher the levels, the more physical affection, the more behaviors are synchronized, the more long-lasting the relationship, and the happier interviewers rate couples to be.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

159. “The people running a corporation are occasionally criminally responsible when the corporation has done something illegal; however, they are not when the corporation does something legal yet immoral -it is outside the realm of guilt.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

160. “THE AMYGDALAfn8 IS the archetypal limbic structure, sitting under the cortex in the temporal lobe. It is central to mediating aggression, along with other behaviors that tell us tons about aggression.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

161. “This context dependency means that rather than causing X, testosterone amplifies the power of something else to cause X.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

162. “Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

163. “If people around you smell scared, your brain tilts toward concluding that you are too.25.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

164. “And behavior is altered by “situational labels” – call the game the “Wall Street Game,” and people become less cooperative. Calling it the “Community Game” does the opposite.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

165. “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

166. “The authors first replicated this effect, showing that watching a short film clip of something physically disgusting made subjects more morally judgmental – unless they had washed their hands after watching the film. Another study suggests that the washing decreases emotional arousal, as it decreased the diameter of subjects’ pupils.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

167. “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

168. “Thus, particularly important is a 2011 study that used transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques to temporarily inactivate the vmPFC; subjects became less likely to change their answer to conform.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

169. “University of Cambridge.68 When compared with non-CAH girls, CAH girls do more rough-and-tumble play, fighting, and physical aggression. Moreover, they prefer “masculine” toys over dolls. As adults they score lower on measures of tenderness and higher in aggressiveness and self-report more aggression and less interest in infants. In addition, CAH women are more likely to be gay or bisexual or have a transgender sexual identity.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

170. “If they’re told, “The drug has a 95 percent survival rate,” people, including doctors, are more likely to approve it than when told, “The drug has a 5 percent death rate.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

171. “Crucially, the brain region most involved in feeling afraid and anxious is most involved in generating aggression.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

172. “The impact of social relationships on life expectancy appears to be at least as large as that of variables such as cigarette smoking, hypertension, obesity, and level of physical activity.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

173. “The human olfactory system is atrophied; roughly 40 percent of a rat’s brain is devoted to olfactory processing, versus 3 percent in us.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

174. “The biologies of strong love and strong hate are similar in many ways, as we’ll see.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

175. “Consider this: the human genome codes for about 1,500 different TFs, contains 4,000,000 TF-binding sites, and the average cell uses about 200,000 such sites to generate its distinctive gene-expression profile.5 This is boggling.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

176. “So oxytocin is central to female mammals nursing, wanting to nurse their child, and remembering which one is their child.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

177. “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

178. “Schultz’s group has shown that the magnitude of an anticipatory dopamine rise reflects two variables. First is the size of the anticipated reward. A monkey has learned that a light.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

179. “Our prototypical behavior has occurred. How was it influenced by events when the egg and sperm that formed that person joined, creating their genome – the chromosomes, the sequences of DNA – destined to be duplicated in every cell in that future person’s body? What role did those genes play in causing that behavior?”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

180. “If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited. If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritability.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

181. “Secure-attachment 7Rs show more generosity than average. Thus 7R has something to do with generosity – but its effect is entirely context dependent.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

182. “Genes have plenty to do with behavior. Even more appropriately, all behavioral traits are affected to some degree by genetic variability.65 They have to be, given that they specify the structure of all the proteins pertinent to every neurotransmitter, hormone, receptor, etc. that there is. And they have plenty to do with individual differences in behavior, given the large percentage of genes that are polymorphic, coming in different flavors. But their effects are supremely context dependent.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

183. “As Beck and other cognitive therapists have emphasized, much of what constitutes a depression is centered around responding to one awful thing and overgeneralizing from it – cognitively distorting how the world works.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

184. “Suppose a major traumatic stressor occurs, of a sufficient magnitude to disrupt hippocampal function while enhancing amygdaloid function. At some later point, in a similar setting, you have an anxious, autonomic state, agitated and fearful, and you haven’t a clue why – this is because you never consolidated memories of the event via your hippocampus while your amygdala-mediated autonomic pathways sure as hell remember. This is a version of free-floating anxiety.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

185. “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

186. “Thus, adult behavior produces persistent molecular brain changes in offspring, “programming” them to be likely to replicate that distinctive behavior in adulthood.76.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

187. “Did destruction of the human amygdala lessen aggression? Pretty clearly so, when violence was a reflexive, inchoate outburst preceding a seizure.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

188. “It’s not until the non-NMDA has been stimulated over and over by a long train of glutamate release, allowing enough sodium to flow in, that this activates the NMDA receptor. It suddenly responds to all that glutamate, opening its channels, allowing an explosion of excitation. This is the essence of learning.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

189. “What helps define a particular culture? Values, beliefs, attributions, ideologies.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky

190. “So if whites see a black face shown at a subliminal speed, the amygdala activates.10 But if the face is shown long enough for conscious processing, the anterior cingulate and the “cognitive” dlPFC then activate and inhibit the amygdala. It’s the frontal cortex exerting executive control over the deeper, darker amygdaloid response.”

— Robert M. Sapolsky