Quotes from Robert M. Sapolsky

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

You don't have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.

On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor.

We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust.

Most people who do a lot of exercise, particularly in the form of competitive athletics, have unneurotic, extraverted, optimistic personalities to begin with. (Marathon runners are exceptions to this.)

if you're stressed like a normal mammal in an acute physical crisis, the stress response is lifesaving. But if instead you chronically activate the stress response for reasons of psychological stress, your health suffers. It

Testosterone makes people cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic.

pain makes aggressive people more aggressive, while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals.

Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, "Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.

Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.

Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a large scale

Stress is not a state of mind... it's measurable and dangerous, and humans can't seem to find their off-switch.

We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.

We all seek out stress. We hate the wrong kinds of stress but when it's the right kind, we love it - we pay good money to be stressed by a scary movie, a roller coaster ride, a challenging puzzle.

As long as experiencing your optimal level of good stress doesn't damage others, it's hard to objectively define where normal enjoyment of stimulation becomes adrenaline junkiehood.

Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease.

Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.

Oxytocin is lauded for how it promotes warmth, generosity, social bonding, cooperation, trust, and compassion.

We're getting along so well; I trust you so much for this one second that I'm going to let you yank on me.

The frontal cortex doesn't even fully develop until age 25, which is wild!

Hormones influencing the sensitivity of the person to environmental stimuli.