Robert M. Sapolsky famous quotes

50 minutes ago

I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Art #Pain #Mean
Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Action #Pessimism
We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Stress #Luxury #Sick
The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Purpose #Mystery #Wonder
If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Emotional #Rats #Trouble
Stress is not a state of mind... it's measurable and dangerous, and humans can't seem to find their off-switch.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Stress #Mind #States
Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Stress #Disease #Puddles
If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't mess with you much. What that means is you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress toward other animals in your troop. So the baboon is a wonderful model for living well enough and long enough to pay the price for all the social-stressor nonsense that they create for each other. They're just like us: They're not getting done in by predators and famines, they're getting done in by each other.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Stress #Mean #Animal
Fossey, Fossey, you cranky difficult strong-arming self-destructive misanthrope, mediocre scientist, deceiver of earnest college students, probable cause of more deaths of the gorillas than if you had never set foot in Rwanda, Fossey, you pain-in-the-ass saint, I do not believe in prayers or souls, but I will pray for your soul, I will remember you for all of my days, in gratitude for that moment by the graves when all I felt was the pure, cleansing sadness of returning home and finding nothing but ghosts.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Gratitude #Strong #Prayer
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.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#People #Next #Cult
An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Heart #Mind #Open Mind
Essentially, we humans live well enough and long enough, and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Smart #Long #Events
Some Poor grad student pressing on the flanks of a hamster and out comes a doctorate on the other side
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Sides #Students #Poor
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.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Real #Thinking #Brain
Perhaps most excitingly, we are uncovering the brain basis of our behaviors - normal, abnormal and in-between. We are mapping a neurobiology of what makes us us.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Brain #Normal #Behavior
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.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#I Trust You #Wells #Getting Along
The less it is possible that something can be, the more it must be.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky
Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Brain #Behavior #Tendencies
Digestion is quickly shut down during stressâ€¦The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates the actions of digestion. Along comes stress: turn off parasympathetic, turn on the sympathetic, and forget about digestion.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Stress #Perfect #Digestion
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.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Strong #Sunset #Appreciate
Finish this lecture, go outside, and unexpectedly get gored by an elephant, and you are going to secrete glucocorticoids. There's no way out of it. You cannot psychologically reframe your experience and decide you did not like the shirt, here's an excuse to throw it out â€” that sort of thing.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Elephants #Way #Lectures
I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Mountain #Gorillas #Grew
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.)
-- Robert M. Sapolsky

#Optimistic #Exercise #People

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