Quotes by Robert Sapolsky

33 quotes     Show as list

An open mind is prerequisite to an open heart.
 
Physiologically, it doesn't come cheap being a bastard 24 hours a day.
 
If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
 
Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource.
 
The frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do.
 
If you have to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be "it's complicated".
 
Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock market boosts testosterone levels.
 
The shape of women’s faces changes subtly during their ovulatory cycle, and men prefer female faces at the time of ovulation.
 
if you want to increase your chances of avoiding stress-related diseases, make sure you don’t inadvertently allow yourself to be born poor.
 
Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments.
 
We may learn everything about something, and we may learn something about everything, but we're never going to learn everything about everything.
 
Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia.
 
Does pure altruism actually exist? Can you ever separate doing good from the expectation of reciprocity, public acclaim, seld-esteem, or the promise of paradise?
 
The more income inequality, the less likely people are to help someone (in an experimental setting) and the less generous and cooperative they are in economic games.
 
When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.
 
As for testosterone, it's gotten a bum rap. Yes, it has tons to do with aggression but it doesn't cause aggression as much as sensitizes you to the environmental triggers of aggression.
 
Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case.
 
The far-from-original point I will try to make now should seem obvious: There is an unsettling similarity between the rituals of the obsessive-compulsive and the rituals of the observantly religious.
 
One study showed kids, ages five to thirteen, pairs of faces of candidates from obscure elections and asked them whom they’d prefer as captain on a hypothetical boat trip. And kids picked the winner 71 percent of the time.
 
It's a profound privilege to die from stress related diseases. It is the elimination of other causes of death such as infectious disease which is responsible for bringing lifestyle diseases to the fore - and these are exquisitely sensitive to stress.
 
33 quotes     Show as list