Robert Sapolsky Quotes

Robert Sapolsky

Profession : Scientist

Birth : April 6, 1957

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.

Robert Sapolsky

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

Robert Sapolsky

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?

Robert Sapolsky

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.

Robert Sapolsky

In terms of the most unique thing we do socially, my vote goes to something we invented alongside cities - we have lots of anonymous interactions and interactions with strangers. That has shaped us enormously.

Robert Sapolsky

I think it is inevitable that we make Us/Them distinctions but there's nothing inevitable about who counts as a Them.

Robert Sapolsky

There are absolutely ways to manipulate behavior, because our behavior is endlessly being manipulated by the world around us.

Robert Sapolsky

You don't want to end up telling somebody who's homeless or a refugee that stress is all perceptual, because it sure isn't in those cases. But most of us have fairly neurotic middle-class stressors.

Robert Sapolsky

I expected social rank to be the determining factor in health, and in some ways that's true. But far more important is what sort of society that rank occurs in. Being low ranking in a benevolent troop is a hell of a lot better for your blood pressure than being low ranking in an aggressive troop.

Robert Sapolsky

I used to be a very serious pianist, and I was one of the snot-nosed classical ones who was appalled by nightmares of Ethel Merman and trombones blasting in the background and who knows what else.

Robert Sapolsky

I'm a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, and I'm kind of half-neurobiologist, half-primatologist.

Robert Sapolsky

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.

Robert Sapolsky

If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.

Robert Sapolsky

When you're being asked to think about the meaning of your intuitions before you act on them, maybe along the way you decide your intuitions are destructive or make no sense at all. And then you don't act on them.

Robert Sapolsky

If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently.

Robert Sapolsky

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.

Robert Sapolsky

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

Robert Sapolsky

To do good science, you've got to work really, really hard.

Robert Sapolsky

I would still very much love to change the world, and there are three or four neurological diseases that I've got a personal grudge against. I wouldn't mind mopping them up in one amazing experiment to come out of my lab, and I certainly wouldn't mind transforming hundreds of thousands of people's lives overnight with some discovery.

Robert Sapolsky

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.

Robert Sapolsky