87 Quotes by Robert M. Sapolsky

If you have to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be "it's complicated.

Obviously, oxytocin and vasopressin are the grooviest hormones in the universe. Pour them into the water supply, and people will be more charitable, trusting, and empathic. We'd be better parents and would make love, not war (mostly platonic love, though, since people in relationships would give wide berths to everyone else). Best of all, we'd buy all sorts of useless crap, trusting the promotional banners in stores once oxytocin starts spraying out of the ventilation system.

Our nights are filled with worries about a different class of diseases; we are now living well enough and long enough to slowly fall apart.

sometimes, it can be enormously stressful to construct a world without stressors.

Being fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic sure feels good. No surprise, then, that testosterone can be pleasurable.

Essentially, we humans live well enough and long enough, and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads.

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.

An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.

Now we have hundreds of carefully engineered, designed, and marketed commercial foods filled with rapidly absorbed processed sugars that cause a burst of sensation that can’t be matched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation and negatives, also offered a huge array of subtle and often hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine a thousand-fold higher than anything stimulated in our drug-free world.