Quotes from Robert Sapolsky

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

there's no reason why something should lose its power simply because it turns out to have layers of complexity that were not initially available to us, which we slowly attain.

Measure after measure, it's the same. We aren't classically monogamous or polygamous. As everyone from poets to divorce attorneys can attest, we are by nature profoundly confused—mildly polygynous, floating somewhere in between.

During one wave, I suddenly found myself cramped over in front of my tent, stark naked, painful, liquid acidic craps, and, the humiliation of it all, surrounded by six elephants, silent, quizzical, polite, murmuring, almost solicitous, their trunks waving in the air investigating my actions and moans. They watched my agonized shitting as if it were an engrossing, silent Shakespearean tragedy performed in the round.

It was grace. In those who were always honest, the dlPFC, vlPFC, and ACC were in veritable comas when the chance to cheat arose. There's no conflict. There's no working hard to do the right thing. You simply don't cheat.

Thus, as adolescence dawns, frontal cortical efficiency is diluted with extraneous synapses failing to make the grade, sluggish communication thanks to undermyelination, and a jumble of uncoordinated subregions working at cross-purposes; moreover, while the striatum is trying to help, a pinch hitter for the frontal cortex gets you only so far. Finally, the frontal cortex is being pickled in that ebb and flow of gonadal hormones. No wonder they act adolescent.

It is virtually impossible to understand how biology works outside the context of environment.

This is huge. Saying that a gene "decides" when it is transcribed is like saying that a recipe decides when a cake is baked. Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.

While this neurobiology is mighty impressive, the brain is not where a behavior 'begins'. It's merely the final common pathway by which all the factors in the chapters to come converge and create behavior.

Words unconsciously shift thoughts and feelings. One person's 'terrorist' is another's 'freedom fighter'; politicians jockey to commandeer 'family values,' and somehow you can't favor both 'choice' and 'life'.

Oxytocin and vasopressin are chemically similar hormones; the DNA sequences that constitute their genes are similar, and the two genes occur close to each other on the same chromosome. There was a single ancestral gene that, a few hundred million years ago, was accidentally "duplicated" in the genome, and the DNA sequences in the two copies of the gene drifted independently, evolving into two closely related genes

This is the essence of gene/environment interaction. What does having a particular variant of the MAO-A gene have to do with antisocial behavior? It depends on the environment. "Warrior gene" my ass.

I suspect that it's because their belief system has segmented their world into a moral in-group and out-group so decisively that they're unconflicted about what they're doing. To them, the people they're killing are scarcely human. I think you share my concern about bad ideas being the malware that can get even psychologically normal people, biologically normal people, to do the unthinkable. How do you view this, in the context of your research?

It's complicated...Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns... We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don't know a thing about.

Testosterone makes us more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status...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.

Literal cleanliness and orderliness can release us from abstract cognitive and affective distress - just consider how, during moments where life seems to be spiraling out of control, it can be calming to organize your clothes, clean the living room, get the car washed.

I think you get to a time in life where by definition stuff's turning to quicksand and wherever you can get some solid footing of the familiar suddenly becomes real comforting.

If you have to abuse your power, you're probably in the process of losing it.

Juvenile justice is probably the area that's most ripe for reform, in the nice liberal sense of the word, simply because there's no getting around the fact that a teenage brain is not an adult brain.

You don't want to end up telling somebody who's homeless or a refugee that stress is all perceptual, because it sure isn't in those cases. But most of us have fairly neurotic middle-class stressors.

I'm sort of a hippie pacifist in terms of general persona.

Well, when I was a teenager I was terribly bookish. I was very studious.

We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don't know a thing about.

I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.