Top 98 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Sapolsky

Show me one neuron that has some cellular semblance of free will. And there is no such neuron.

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.

Genes are not about inevitabilities; they're about potentials and vulnerabilities.

If a male primate is mean to a female primate, her whole family will come after him. We don't have that sort of accountability in industrial societies.

Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments.

Literal cleanliness and orderliness can release us from abstract cognitive and affective distress - just consider how, during moments where life seems to be spiraling out of control, it can be calming to organize your clothes, clean the living room, get the car washed.

If you have to abuse your power, you're probably in the process of losing it.

For moral judgment, I think the most interesting trends in neuroscience are the ways in which judgments vary as a function of how emotionally salient the situation is.

That's what stress management is about, that's what psychotherapy is about, finding religion, or finding your loved one or your hobby - any of those, they give you more outlets, more of a sense of control, more of a sense of predictability, of social support. They give you the means to psychologically finesse ambiguous outside reality.

I think my becoming a writer had much to do with spending a chunk of each year sitting by myself out in a tent without radio, without newspapers, without a whole lot of people to interact with, without anybody having any sort of similar background to me.

I was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a major neighborhood specializing in that, in Brooklyn. And somewhere when I was about 14, something changed. And that change probably involved updating every molecule in my body, in that I sort of realized: this is nonsense, there's no God, there's no free will, there is no purpose.

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.

Of necessity, a scientist typically studies one incredibly tiny sliver of some biological system, totally ensconced within one discipline, because even figuring out how one sliver works is really hard.

My adolescent rebellions took the form of, if anything, passive aggressively doing what was asked of me but doing it ten times more than what was asked of me, so that eventually they'd have to beg me to stop.

I was not especially a writer back in college.

If you're a baboon on the Serengeti, and you're miserable, it's almost certainly because some other baboon has had the free time and energy to devote to making you miserable.

My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution.

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.

When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever seen before in the primate world.

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

But I like schlocky violent movies, but I'm for strict gun control. But then there was a time I was at a laser tag place, and I had such a good time hiding in a corner shooting at people. In other words, I'm your basic confused human when it comes to violence.

I think you get to a time in life where by definition stuff's turning to quicksand and wherever you can get some solid footing of the familiar suddenly becomes real comforting.

From spending my decades thinking about behavior and the biological influences on it, I'm convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. It's just another way of stating that we're biological organisms determined by the physical laws of the universe.

I think the relationship between social-dominance orientation in people and the extent to which they're made uncomfortable by ambiguity and novelty is really important. Better a stable world that's familiar, in which I'm doing pretty poorly, than dealing with all the ambiguity of a changing world.

I am completely of the school that mind is entirely the manifestation of brain. So when there's a change in mind, there's got to be a neurobiological underpinning.

An open mind is prerequisite to an open heart.

Well, much of my research over the years has been on stress, and the adverse effects of stress on the health of the central nervous system. All things considered, I've been astonishingly unhelped by my own research.

The notion of humans as inherently rational beings has been not only trashed in economics, but trashed in all the best research on moral decision-making.

We have this amazing ability to turn on the exactly same stress response worrying about a mortgage that a zebra does when it's sprinting away from a lion.

Primates are hardwired for us/them dichotomies. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds.

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.

Regardless of your sex, if you have elevated testosterone levels in your blood, you're more likely to think a face with a neutral expression is instead looking threatening.

As I became more interested in behavior from the standpoint of neurobiology, the stress-response became really interesting. What stress physiology is about is - when there is a new environmental challenge, how does an individual adapt? It seemed like a natural transition.

When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.

Disgust is a very powerful tool for bringing about crowd violence. If a group can be dehumanized and made into the Other, the 'them,' to treat that group horribly is made much easier.

Individuating and taking someone else's perspective can be very powerful.

I'm sort of a hippie pacifist in terms of general persona.

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

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.

At its worst, there's just virtually no organ system in your body that's not thrown out of kilter in some way by chronic psychological stress.

Ninety percent of what I'm listening to overall is like the same tape of Bob Marley's Greatest Hits. Like, how did I become one of those people on late night TV where they sell anthologies to you and you buy them?

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.

We're a miserably violent species. But there's a complication, which is we don't hate violence, we hate the wrong kind. And when it's the right kind, we cheer it on, we hand out medals, we vote for, we mate with our champions of it. When it's the right kind of violence, we love it.

For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful - all those good things - when people finally accept that there is no free will.

My lab looks at the ability of stress hormones to kill brain cells, and basically we are trying to understand on a molecular level how a neuron dies after a stroke, a seizure, Alzheimer's, brain aging, and what these stress hormones do to make it worse.

The key thing about us is that we all belong to multiple tribes. Even if we are predisposed into dividing the world into 'us' and 'them,' it's incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who is an 'us' and who is a 'them' at any given moment.

Is stress always bad? No - if a stressor isn't too extreme, is only transient, and occurs in what overall feels like a benevolent environment, it's great, we love it - that's what play and stimulation are.

If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.

The stress response is incredibly ancient evolutionarily. Fish, birds and reptiles secrete the same stress hormones we do, yet their metabolism doesn't get messed up the way it does in people and other primates.

The United States has the biggest discrepancy in health and longevity between our wealthiest and our poorest of any country on Earth.

You know, I'm an egg-heady scientist with a large beard and like Birkenstocks.

I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.

If you turn on the stress response chronically for purely psychological reasons, you increase your risk of adult-onset diabetes and high blood pressure.

Authoritarians have always been here. But the features of a given moment make that way of thinking more or less appealing. Germany in the 1920s, when people are starving, suddenly makes 'populist' answers and scapegoating different groups as the source of the problem much more appealing.

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.

We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.

Well, when I was a teenager I was terribly bookish. I was very studious.

For 99 percent of the beasts on this planet, stress is about three minutes of screaming in terror after which it's either over with or you're over with. And we turn it on for 30-year mortgages.

For an architect's son, I am remarkably unformed in my architectural tastes.