Robert Sapolsky quotes

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 Sapolsky)
Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
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. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
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. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
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. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
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. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
Physiologically, it doesn't come cheap being a bastard 24 hours a day. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
We are not getting our ulcers being chased by Saber-tooth tigers, we're inventing our social stressors - and if some baboons are good at dealing with this, we should be able to as well. Insofar as we're smart enough to have invented this stuff and stupid enough to fall for it, we have the potential to be wise enough to keep the stuff in perspective. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
We may learn everything about something, and we may learn something about everything, but we're never going to learn everything about everything. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
In order to have a couple of shamans on hand in your group, you're willing to put up with the occasional third cousin who's schizophrenic. (Robert Sapolsky)
The amazing thing is, nobody knows what the rules are! Talmudic rabbis have been scratching each others' eyes out for centuries arguing over which rules go into the 613. The numbers are more important than the content. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
There is no reason to be less moved by nature around us simply because it's revealed to have more layers of complexity than we first observed. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
I think it will require an enormous reshaping of how we think we deal with the most damaging of human behaviours, because none of it can be thought of outside the context of biology. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
When you look at traditional human society, they all have shamans. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
I am a reasonably emotional person, and I see no reason why that's incompatible with being a scientist. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
Why do we have schizophrenia in every culture on this planet? From an evolutionary perspective, schizophrenia is not a cool thing to have. ... Schizophrenia is not an adaptive trait. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
In the 1930s an anthropologist named Paul Radin first described it as "shamans being half mad," shamans being "healed madmen." View quote
Robert Sapolsky
Western religions, all the leading religions, have this schizotypalism shot through them from top to bottom. (Robert Sapolsky)
There is a need for this subtype - but not too many. The critical thing with schizotypal shamanism is, it is not uncontrolled the way it is in the schizophrenic. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
Shamans are not evolutionarily unfit. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
The purpose of science in understanding who we are as humans is not to rob us of our sense of mystery, not to cure us of our sense of mystery. The purpose of science is to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate that mystery. View quote
Robert Sapolsky
Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common? View quote
Robert Sapolsky