Quotes from Robert M. Sapolsky

Most child behavioral development research is implicitly stage oriented, concerning: (a) the sequence with which stages emerge; (b) how experience influences the speed and surety with which that sequential tape of maturation unreels; and (c) how this helps create the adult a child ultimately becomes.

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.

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

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.

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.

Having the low-activity version of MAO-A tripled the likelihood … but only in people with a history of severe childhood abuse. And if there was no such history, the variant was not predictive of anything. 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.

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.

Furthermore, as shown with neuroimaging, when contemplating mouthwash versus soap, those who had just spoken a lie activated parts of the sensorimotor cortex related to the mouth (i.e., the subjects were more aware of their mouths at the time); those who had written the lie activated the cortical regions mapping onto their hand.

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.

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

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

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

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.

While average finger number is an inherited trait, the heritability of finger number is low—genes don't explain individual differences much.

Our nights are filled with worries about a different class of diseases; we are now living well enough and long enough to slowly fall apart.

The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills.

Two complications illustrate some endocrine principles.fn16 Estrogen contributes to maternal aggression. But estrogen can also reduce aggression and enhance empathy and emotional recognition. It turns out there are two different types of receptors for estrogen in the brain, mediating these opposing effects and with their levels independently regulated. Thus, same hormone, same levels, different outcome if the brain is set up to respond differently.51

The opposite of love is not hate; its opposite is indifference.

don't hate aggression; we hate the wrong kind of aggression but love it in the right context. And conversely, in the wrong context our most laudable behaviors are anything but. The motoric features of our behaviors are less important and challenging to understand than the meaning behind our muscles' actions.

A vida adulta está cheia de encruzilhadas significativas nas quais fazer a coisa certa é sem dúvida mais complicado. Conduzir-se a contento por esse caminho faz parte do portfólio do córtex frontal, e desenvolver as habilidades necessárias para fazer isso de maneira correta requer um profundo aprimoramento por meio da experiência.

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.

Other work has shown that when people are hungry, they become less generous with money and show more future discounting (i.e., are more likely to want reward X now, rather than wait for reward 2X).

you asked amygdala experts what behavior their favorite brain structure brings to mind, "aggression" wouldn't top their list. It would be fear and anxiety.

MAO-A variants show other important gene/environment interactions. For example, in one study the low-activity MAO-A variant predicts criminality, but only if coupled with high testosterone levels