A biography for Robin Marantz Henighasn’t been written yet.
“The chance you passed up or missed could have had any number of different outcomes, and it's easy to fantasize about how much better every one of those outcomes would have been.”
“Parents bobble between a nostalgia-infused yearning for their children to play and fear that time spent playing is time lost to more practical pursuits.”
“As the brain matures, one thing that happens is the pruning of the synapses. Synaptic pruning does not occur willy-nilly; it depends largely on how any one brain pathway is used.”
“It's almost a rite of passage for the middle-aged, it seems, to invent generational stereotypes for dumping on the young.”
“I'm always made a little uncomfortable by studies that assert that Millennials are the most narcissistic generation in history. To me, being young has always meant being self-absorbed; in many ways, that's what youth is for.”
“If you're satisfied with your social life, according to psychologists, you tend to be satisfied with life in general.”
“Anxiety is not fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you - a real and objective danger.”
“For humans and animals alike, truly vigorous, wholehearted, spontaneous play is something of a biological frill.”
“The essence of play is that the sequence of actions is fluid and scattered.”
“Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories.”
“I regret not working harder to create true friendships with other couples, not seeking out people with whom to go do things and go places - people with whom to have a few crazy, memorable bonding adventures.”
“The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial.”
“Beliefs about how lying looks are plentiful and often contradictory: depending on whom you choose to believe, liars can be detected because they fidget a lot, hold very still, cross their legs, cross their arms, look up, look down, make eye contact or fail to make eye contact.”
“The 20s are like the stem cell of human development: the pluripotent moment when any of several outcomes is possible. Decisions and actions during this time have lasting ramifications.”
“Whatever the reason for any one individual's tendency to gain weight, the only way to lose the weight is to eat less and exercise more.”
“In the modern world, the anxious temperament does offer certain benefits: caution, introspection, the capacity to work alone. These can be adaptive qualities.”
“Elderly parents tend to think their relationship with their middle-aged children is smoother than the children do. Adult grandchildren, who have little stake in pulling away from their grandparents, tend to describe that relationship as less rose-colored than do Gram and Gramps.”
“The limbic system explodes during puberty, but the prefrontal cortex keeps maturing for another 10 years.”
“Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions.”
“Many of us are tethered to bodies that sabotage us in our struggle to keep from getting fat, or to slim down when we do.”