Quotes from Robert Sapolsky

Is stress always bad? No - if a stressor isn't too extreme, is only transient, and occurs in what overall feels like a benevolent environment, it's great, we love it - that's what play and stimulation are.

As I became more interested in behavior from the standpoint of neurobiology, the stress-response became really interesting. What stress physiology is about is - when there is a new environmental challenge, how does an individual adapt? It seemed like a natural transition.

For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful - all those good things - when people finally accept that there is no free will.

When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever seen before in the primate world.

Yes, genes are important for understanding our behavior. Incredibly important - after all, they code for every protein pertinent to brain function, endocrinology, etc., etc. But the regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.

As for testosterone, it's gotten a bum rap. Yes, it has tons to do with aggression but it doesn't cause aggression as much as sensitizes you to the environmental triggers of aggression.

What adolescence is about is by trial and error, honing a frontal cortex that is going to be more optimal by the time you're 25.

The key thing about us is that we all belong to multiple tribes. Even if we are predisposed into dividing the world into 'us' and 'them,' it's incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who is an 'us' and who is a 'them' at any given moment.

Primates are really well designed to see who is not keeping up their end of the deal.

At its worst, there's just virtually no organ system in your body that's not thrown out of kilter in some way by chronic psychological stress.

Baboons are poster children for psychosocial stress, living in troops with bruising and shifting dominance hierarchies among males and high rates of male aggression.

If a male primate is mean to a female primate, her whole family will come after him. We don't have that sort of accountability in industrial societies.

For 99 percent of the beasts on this planet, stress is about three minutes of screaming in terror after which it's either over with or you're over with. And we turn it on for 30-year mortgages.

Ninety percent of what I'm listening to overall is like the same tape of Bob Marley's Greatest Hits. Like, how did I become one of those people on late night TV where they sell anthologies to you and you buy them?

We're lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it's time to try something new.

I was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a major neighborhood specializing in that, in Brooklyn. And somewhere when I was about 14, something changed. And that change probably involved updating every molecule in my body, in that I sort of realized: this is nonsense, there's no God, there's no free will, there is no purpose.

If you're a baboon on the Serengeti, and you're miserable, it's almost certainly because some other baboon has had the free time and energy to devote to making you miserable.

Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments.

We are not humans because we've invented a different type of brain cell, a different type of brain chemical. We are the same basic building blocks as even a fruit fly.

Baboons have the exact physiology as humans do. They also get the same stress-related illnesses, such as ulcers and heart disease.

If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.

If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently.

I think the relationship between social-dominance orientation in people and the extent to which they're made uncomfortable by ambiguity and novelty is really important. Better a stable world that's familiar, in which I'm doing pretty poorly, than dealing with all the ambiguity of a changing world.

We like our individuality, we like the mysteriousness of us, the essentialism of us, and it can be alarming to see the biological gears turning underneath.