Quotes from Robert M. Sapolsky

There's support for the idea—three of my favorites are that (a) forcing depressed people to smile makes them feel better; (b) instructing people to take on a more "dominant" posture makes them feel more so (lowers stress hormone levels); and (c) muscle relaxants decrease anxiety ("Things are still awful, but if my muscles are so relaxed that I'm dribbling out of this chair, things must be improving"). Nonetheless

The contrast between rapid, automatic moral intuitionism and conscious, deliberative moral reasoning plays out in another crucial realm and is the subject of Greene's superb 2014 book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

Starting with a 1979 study, low levels of serotonin in the brain were shown to be associated with elevated levels of human aggression, with end points ranging from psychological measures of hostility to overt violence.

Why else evolve the fusiform? The shape of women's faces changes subtly during their ovulatory cycle, and men prefer female faces at the time of ovulation.

Thus, for our purposes, genes aren't about inevitability. Instead they're about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, potentials, and vulnerabilities. All embedded in the fabric of the other factors, biological and otherwise, that fill these pages.

I was once at a conference of neuroscientists and all-star Buddhist monk meditators, the former studying what the brains of the latter did during meditation. One scientist asked one of the monks whether he ever stops meditating because his knees hurt from all that cross-leggedness. He answered, "Sometimes I'll stop sooner than I planned, but not because it hurts; it's not something I notice. It's as an act of kindness to my knees.

This is thought to reflect the killer combination that these folks are often burdened with, namely, high work demands but little autonomy—responsibility without control.

Did destruction of the human amygdala lessen aggression? Pretty clearly so, when violence was a reflexive, inchoate outburst preceding a seizure.

It was the relative, not absolute, size of the surprise that mattered over a tenfold range of reward.

Cognitive therapists, like Aaron Beck of the University of Pennsylvania, even consider depression to be primarily a disorder of thought, rather than emotion, in that sufferers tend to see the world in a distorted, negative way.

In other cases the challenge is to appreciate how, though human physiology resembles that of other species, we use the physiology in novel ways.

these capacities evolved so recently that our brains are, if you will, winging it and improvising on the fly when dealing with metaphor. As a result, we are actually pretty lousy at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal, at remembering that "it's only a figure of speech"—with enormous consequences for our best and worst behaviors.

Knowledge emerged about synapses, neurotransmitter-ology was born, and this idea was modified—a new memory requires the formation of a new synapse, a new connection between an axon terminal and a dendritic spine.

Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies

The group is more arrogant, hypocritical, self-centered and more ruthless in the pursuit of its ends than the individual.

I think like an academic egghead, believing that if I write enough paragraphs about a scary subject, give enough lectures about it, it will give up and go away quietly. And if everyone took enough classes about the biology of violence and studied hard, we'd all be able to take a nap between the snoozing lion and lamb. Such is the delusional sense of efficacy of a professor.

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.

It is the ambiguity of violence, that we can pull a trigger as an act of hideous aggression or of self-sacrificing love, that is so challenging.

As Beck and other cognitive therapists have emphasized, much of what constitutes a depression is centered around responding to one awful thing and overgeneralizing from it—cognitively distorting how the world works.

if some octopus moved in next door, I would feel hostile superiority because I have a spine and it didn't, but that animosity might melt into a sense of kinship when I discovered that the octopus, like me, loved playing Twister as a kid.

Feeling someone else's pain can be more effective for learning than just knowing that they're in pain. At its core the ACC is about self-interest, with caring about that other person in pain as an add-on.

Ask not what a gene does. Ask what it does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes

Your heart does roughly the same thing whether you are in a murderous rage or having an orgasm. Again, the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

Crucially, the brain region most involved in feeling afraid and anxious is most involved in generating aggression.