Quotes from Robert M. Sapolsky

And then you increase the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual—how has culture shaped the behavior of people living in that individual's group?—what ecological factors helped shape that culture—expanding and expanding

The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it with slavery.

This was John Watson, a founder of behaviorism, writing around 1925. Behaviorism, with its notion that behavior is completely malleable, that it can be shaped into anything in the right environment, dominated American psychology in the midtwentieth century;

Watson was pathologically caught inside a bucket having to do with the environmental influences on development. "I'll guarantee . . . to train him to become any type." Yet we are not all born the same, with the same potential, regardless of how we are trained.*

Logically, gambling shouldn't evoke much anticipatory dopamine, given the astronomical odds against winning. But the behavioral engineering—the 24-7 activity and lack of time cues, the cheap alcohol pickling fronto-cortical judgment, the manipulations to make you feel like today is your lucky day—distorts and shifts the perception of the odds into a range where dopamine pours out and, oh, why not, let's try again.

Josh Greene and Jonathan Cohen of Princeton wrote an extremely clearheaded piece on this, "For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything." Where neuroscience and the rest of biology change nothing is in the continued need to protect the endangered from the dangerous.30

Thus political orientation about social issues reflects sensitivity to visceral disgust and strategies for coping with such disgust.

So dopamine is more about anticipation of reward than about reward itself.

This is the essence of learning. The lecturer says something, and it goes in one ear and out the other. The factoid is repeated; same thing. It's repeated enough times and—aha!—the lightbulb goes on and suddenly you get it. At a synaptic level, the axon terminal having to repeatedly release glutamate is the lecturer droning on repetitively; the moment when the postsynaptic threshold is passed and the NMDA receptors first activate is the dendritic spine finally getting it.

Dopamine is not just about reward anticipation; it fuels the goal-directed behavior needed to gain that reward; dopamine "binds" the value of a reward to the resulting work. It's about the motivation arising from those dopaminergic projections to the PFC that is needed to do the harder thing (i.e., to work). In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.fn50,99

religious wars, which are, to cite a quote generally attributed to Napoleon, "people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend

Thus, shorter refractory periods mean a higher rate of action potentials. So is testosterone causing action potentials in these neurons? No. It's causing them to fire at a faster rate if they are stimulated by something else. Similarly, testosterone increases amygdala response to angry faces, but not to other sorts.

by the year 2020, depression is projected to be the second leading cause of medical disability on earth.

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

Back to mutations. Can there be mutations in DNA stretches constituting promoters? Yes

In the 1970s Allan Wilson and Mary-Claire King at Berkeley correctly theorized that the evolution of genes is less important than the evolution of regulatory sequences upstream of genes (and thus how the environment regulates genes). Reflecting that, a disproportionate share of genetic differences between chimps and humans are in genes for TFs.

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.

how acute stress strengthens connectivity between the frontal cortex and motoric areas, while weakening frontal-hippocampal connections; the result is decision making that is habitual, rather than incorporating new information. Similarly, chronic stress increases spine number in frontal-motor connections and decreases it in frontal-hippocampal ones.9

Second depressing finding: subliminal signaling of race also affects the fusiform face area, the cortical region that specializes in facial recognition.11 Damaging the fusiform, for example, selectively produces "face blindness" (aka prosopagnosia), an inability to recognize faces.

The frontal cortex is the last brain region to fully mature, with the most evolutionarily recent subparts the very last. Amazingly, it's not fully online until people are in their midtwenties.

Outgroups mocking the ingroup is a weapon of the weak, lessening the sting of subordination. But when an ingroup mocks an outgroup, it solidifies negative stereotypes and reifies the hierarchy.

The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it.

If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.

If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a "genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.