Quotes from Robin Marantz Henig

The chance you passed up or missed could have had any number of different outcomes, and it's easy to fantasize about how much better every one of those outcomes would have been.

There's very little about being in a functional-M.R.I. scanner that is natural: you are flat on your back, absolutely still, with your head immobilized by pillows and straps. The scanner makes a dreadful din, which headphones barely muffle.

Friends and relatives might be surprised that I think of myself as lonely. I'm married to a man I not only love but like, and we spend a lot of time together. If I feel like socializing, I can usually find someone to meet for coffee or a drink.

In the modern world, the anxious temperament does offer certain benefits: caution, introspection, the capacity to work alone. These can be adaptive qualities.

I regret not working harder to create true friendships with other couples, not seeking out people with whom to go do things and go places - people with whom to have a few crazy, memorable bonding adventures.

Beliefs about how lying looks are plentiful and often contradictory: depending on whom you choose to believe, liars can be detected because they fidget a lot, hold very still, cross their legs, cross their arms, look up, look down, make eye contact or fail to make eye contact.

Whatever the reason for any one individual's tendency to gain weight, the only way to lose the weight is to eat less and exercise more.

As the brain matures, one thing that happens is the pruning of the synapses. Synaptic pruning does not occur willy-nilly; it depends largely on how any one brain pathway is used.

The limbic system explodes during puberty, but the prefrontal cortex keeps maturing for another 10 years.

The essence of play is that the sequence of actions is fluid and scattered.

Alright, alright, I admit it: my husband is the quiet, kind, accepting parent, and I'm the one who wants so much to be part of our two daughters' lives than I can't even let them finish a story without interrupting.

The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random.

Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories.

In the womb, humans are free of microbes. Colonization begins during the journey down the birth canal, which is riddled with bacteria, some of which make their way onto the newborn's skin.

The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial.

To me, it's always interesting to see what people end up regretting, as a way maybe to avoid such regrets in your own life.

Even though loneliness affects so many of us, it has gotten scant research attention compared to related conditions like depression or anxiety.

Some of my happiest moments are the ones I spend with my husband, a few close relatives, and a handful of very good friends who know me well and like me anyway.

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions.

Parents bobble between a nostalgia-infused yearning for their children to play and fear that time spent playing is time lost to more practical pursuits.

Through social media, young people are constantly being pinged about a whole slew of potentially better matches or social activities.

The real thing young people should fear is missing out on those few, true, long-term friendships that make for a richer, happier life.

The music that was popular in your youth seems to be the music you recall most vividly - and most nostalgically - for the rest of your life. But so is the music that was popular in your parents' youth.

I'm always made a little uncomfortable by studies that assert that Millennials are the most narcissistic generation in history. To me, being young has always meant being self-absorbed; in many ways, that's what youth is for.