Robert Sapolsky

“I think it is inevitable that we make Us/Them distinctions but there's nothing inevitable about who counts as a Them.”

“Successful stress management heavily revolves around combating the building blocks of psychological stress - a feeling as if you have no control over the adversities in your life, a feeling that you have no predictive information about the stressors, if you lack outlets for the frustrations caused by the stressors, if you have no social support.”

“One definitely wants to have a functioning hippocampus. It's all about learning and memory, the part blown out of the water by Alzheimer's disease. It's also the part that is most vulnerable to the effects of stress.”

“What adolescence is about is by trial and error, honing a frontal cortex that is going to be more optimal by the time you're 25.”

“Not a whole lot of us are wrestling somebody for a canned food item in the supermarket or having an ax fight in the jungle clearing. Instead, we sit and think about taxes and the ozone layer.”

“Depression is like the worst disease you can get. It's devastating.”

“If I were to try to break into the world of modern dance, after the first few rejections the logical response might be, practice even more. But after the 12,000th rejection, maybe I should realize this isn't a viable career option.”

“Baboons are poster children for psychosocial stress, living in troops with bruising and shifting dominance hierarchies among males and high rates of male aggression.”

“My guess is that people with a stereotypically conservative exclusionary stance about immigration rarely have the sense that they feel disgusted that people elsewhere in the world would want to come to the United States for better lives. Instead, there is threat by the rabble, the unwashed masses, to the American way of life.”

“I'm a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, and I'm kind of half-neurobiologist, half-primatologist.”

“When it comes to how neuroscience could help the wider public, the worst thing is when we make advances in, say, mindfulness, and then decide that everybody can potentially think their way to curing themselves or develop their own psycho-neuro-immune mechanisms for boosting cancer defenses.”

“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.”

“Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out.”

“If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently.”

“Go get yourself stressed all the time and the common cold becomes more common.”

“If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.”

“We are not humans because we've invented a different type of brain cell, a different type of brain chemical. We are the same basic building blocks as even a fruit fly.”

“If some baboons just happen to be good at seeing water holes as half full instead of half empty... we should be able to as well.”

“Juvenile justice is probably the area that's most ripe for reform, in the nice liberal sense of the word, simply because there's no getting around the fact that a teenage brain is not an adult brain.”

“Being president does seem a lot more stressful than being vice president.”