87 Quotes by Robert M. Sapolsky

Dogs attempt to deceive one another, with marginal success – when a dog is terrified, fear pheromones emanate from his anal scent glands, and it’s not great if the guy you’re facing off against knows you’re scared. A dog can’t consciously choose to be deceptive by not synthesizing and secreting those pheromones. But he can try to squelch their dissemination by putting a lid on those glands, by putting his tail between his legs – “I’m not scared, no siree,” squeaked Sparky.

It is never really the case that stress makes you sick, or even increases your risk of being sick. Stress increases your risk of getting diseases that make you sick, or if you have such a disease, stress increases the risk of your defenses being overwhelmed by the disease.

In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust.

Irrational optimism can be great; it’s why only about 15 percent instead of 99 percent of humans get clinically depressed.

Most of us don’t collapse into puddles of stress-related disease.

In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time.

This leads to a thoroughly fascinating finding – social conservatives tend toward lower thresholds for disgust than liberals.

Subjected to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless – we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst; we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are actually going fine, and we feel an aching lack of pleasure in 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. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context – who you are, your environment, and who that person is.