Robert M. Sapolsky Quotes

#1. If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#2. Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates dopamine pathways in the brain more than does watching porn films. This

Robert M. Sapolsky

#3. We're getting along so well; I trust you so much for this one second that I'm going to let you yank on me.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#4. Perhaps most excitingly, we are uncovering the brain basis of our behaviors - normal, abnormal and in-between. We are mapping a neurobiology of what makes us us.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#5. Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#6. If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#7. Digestion is quickly shut down during stress ... The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates the actions of digestion. Along comes stress: turn off parasympathetic, turn on the sympathetic, and forget about digestion.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#8. The less it is possible that something can be, the more it must be.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#9. Most people who do a lot of exercise, particularly in the form of competitive athletics, have unneurotic, extraverted, optimistic personalities to begin with. (Marathon runners are exceptions to this.)

Robert M. Sapolsky

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

Robert M. Sapolsky

#11. A large percentage of what we think of when we talk about stress-related diseases are disorders of excessive stress-responses.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#12. Stress is not a state of mind ... it's measurable and dangerous, and humans can't seem to find their off-switch.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#13. Finish this lecture, go outside, and unexpectedly get gored by an elephant, and you are going to secrete glucocorticoids. There's no way out of it. You cannot psychologically reframe your experience and decide you did not like the shirt, here's an excuse to throw it out - that sort of thing.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#14. Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a large scale,

Robert M. Sapolsky

#15. An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#16. But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#17. Some Poor grad student pressing on the flanks of a hamster and out comes a doctorate on the other side

Robert M. Sapolsky

#18. Essentially, we humans live well enough and long enough, and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#19. Being healthy consists of having the same disease as everyone else.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#20. Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease.

Robert M. Sapolsky

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

Robert M. Sapolsky

#22. Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#23. I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#24. We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#25. How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#26. On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor.

Robert M. Sapolsky