87 Quotes by Robert M. Sapolsky

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.

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

But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you’re going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.

Something roughly akin to love is needed for proper biological development, and its absence is among the most aching, distorting stressors that we can suffer.

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.

Stress can be bad for you. We no longer die of smallpox or the plague and instead die of stress-related diseases of lifestyle, like heart disease or diabetes, where damage slowly accumulates over time. It is understood how stress can cause or worsen disease or make you more vulnerable to other risk factors. Much of this is even understood on the molecular level. Stress can even cause your immune system to abnormally target hair follicles, causing your hair to turn gray.

In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you’ll understand the big picture. And in this reductionist world, to understand cells, organs, bodies, and behavior, the best constituent part to study is genes.

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

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.