Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
An open mind is prerequisite to an open heart.
Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.
I'm sort of a hippie pacifist in terms of general persona.
My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution.
Depression is like the worst disease you can get. It's devastating.
Depression is incredibly pervasive and thus important to talk about.
The first roller coaster I ever went on in my life wasn't until college.
Well, when I was a teenager I was terribly bookish. I was very studious.
Being president does seem a lot more stressful than being vice president.
We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.
For an architect's son, I am remarkably unformed in my architectural tastes.
If you have to abuse your power, you're probably in the process of losing it.
You know, I'm an egg-heady scientist with a large beard and like Birkenstocks.
Go get yourself stressed all the time and the common cold becomes more common.
Genes are not about inevitabilities; they're about potentials and vulnerabilities.
Primates are really well designed to see who is not keeping up their end of the deal.
Show me one neuron that has some cellular semblance of free will. And there is no such neuron.
If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently.
I spend most of my time by being at a university, hanging out with very manic, excited 18-year-olds.
Primates are hardwired for us/them dichotomies. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds.
I was this eggheady kid, the one who was consistently beaten up and picked last for the baseball teams.
It's insanely difficult for people to accept the extent to which we are biological organisms without agency.
I'm a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, and I'm kind of half-neurobiologist, half-primatologist.
I think it is inevitable that we make Us/Them distinctions but there's nothing inevitable about who counts as a Them.
There are absolutely ways to manipulate behavior, because our behavior is endlessly being manipulated by the world around us.
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.
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.
Baboons have the exact physiology as humans do. They also get the same stress-related illnesses, such as ulcers and heart disease.
The United States has the biggest discrepancy in health and longevity between our wealthiest and our poorest of any country on Earth.
Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out.
Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments.
Baboons who have friends do much better in terms of their physiology. And if that applies to a baboon, it could certainly apply for a human.
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.
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.
Trying to get somebody excited about learning and trying to get somebody to think in a moral context have begun to have a lot more significance to me.
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.
If you turn on the stress response chronically for purely psychological reasons, you increase your risk of adult-onset diabetes and high blood pressure.
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.
We like our individuality, we like the mysteriousness of us, the essentialism of us, and it can be alarming to see the biological gears turning underneath.
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.
I was very sheltered, very bookish and, basically, skittish about life. My parents were both older when I came along and they didn't do things like take vacations.
Baboons are poster children for psychosocial stress, living in troops with bruising and shifting dominance hierarchies among males and high rates of male aggression.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Low socioeconomic status carries with it an enormously increased risk of a broad range of diseases, and this gradient cannot be fully explained by factors such as health-care access.