87 Quotes by Robert M. Sapolsky

Fear is the vigilance and the need to escape from something real. Anxiety is about dread and foreboding and your imagination running away with you. Much as with depression, anxiety is rooted in a cognitive distortion. In this case, people prone toward anxiety overestimate risks and the likelihood of a bad outcome.

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.

The insula activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so.

Someone does something lousy and selfish to you in a game, and the extent of insular and amygdaloid activation predicts how much outrage you feel and how much revenge you take.

I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.

Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.

Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one’s own skilled action.

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

Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, “Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.