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
I had never planned to become ...
Quotes from the same author
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
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
If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't mess with you much. What that means is you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress toward other animals in your troop. So the baboon is a wonderful model for living well enough and long enough to pay the price for all the social-stressor nonsense that they create for each other. They're just like us: They're not getting done in by predators and famines, they're getting done in by each other.
Robert M. Sapolsky
The most important point of [Susan] Fiske's work is that it provides a taxonomy for our differing feelings about different Thems - sometimes fear, sometimes ridicule, sometimes contemptuous pity, sometimes savagery.
Robert M. Sapolsky
Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.
Robert M. Sapolsky
