Literal cleanliness and orderliness can release us from abstract cognitive and affective distress - just consider how, during moments where life seems to be spiraling out of control, it can be calming to organize your clothes, clean the living room, get the car washed.
Robert Sapolsky
An open mind is prerequisite to an open heart.
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.
It's insanely difficult for people to accept the extent to which we are biological organisms without agency.
Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments.
That's what stress management is about, that's what psychotherapy is about, finding religion, or finding your loved one or your hobby - any of those, they give you more outlets, more of a sense of control, more of a sense of predictability, of social support. They give you the means to psychologically finesse ambiguous outside reality.
If you turn on the stress response chronically for purely psychological reasons, you increase your risk of adult-onset diabetes and high blood pressure.
From spending my decades thinking about behavior and the biological influences on it, I'm convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. It's just another way of stating that we're biological organisms determined by the physical laws of the universe.
For me, the single most important question is how to construct a society that is just, safe, peaceful - all those good things - when people finally accept that there is no free will.
My lab looks at the ability of stress hormones to kill brain cells, and basically we are trying to understand on a molecular level how a neuron dies after a stroke, a seizure, Alzheimer's, brain aging, and what these stress hormones do to make it worse.
We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.
But I like schlocky violent movies, but I'm for strict gun control. But then there was a time I was at a laser tag place, and I had such a good time hiding in a corner shooting at people. In other words, I'm your basic confused human when it comes to violence.
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.
Genes are not about inevitabilities; they're about potentials and vulnerabilities.
The stress response is incredibly ancient evolutionarily. Fish, birds and reptiles secrete the same stress hormones we do, yet their metabolism doesn't get messed up the way it does in people and other primates.
We're a miserably violent species. But there's a complication, which is we don't hate violence, we hate the wrong kind. And when it's the right kind, we cheer it on, we hand out medals, we vote for, we mate with our champions of it. When it's the right kind of violence, we love it.
Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out.
Disgust is a very powerful tool for bringing about crowd violence. If a group can be dehumanized and made into the Other, the 'them,' to treat that group horribly is made much easier.
The United States has the biggest discrepancy in health and longevity between our wealthiest and our poorest of any country on Earth.
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.
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.
Being president does seem a lot more stressful than being vice president.
I think threat of change is pretty potent. In humans, blood pressure doesn't go up when people get laid off: it goes up when they first hear rumors that layoffs are coming at the end of the month.
When it comes to how neuroscience could help the wider public, the worst thing is when we make advances in, say, mindfulness, and then decide that everybody can potentially think their way to curing themselves or develop their own psycho-neuro-immune mechanisms for boosting cancer defenses.
Is stress always bad? No - if a stressor isn't too extreme, is only transient, and occurs in what overall feels like a benevolent environment, it's great, we love it - that's what play and stimulation are.
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.
Primates are hardwired for us/them dichotomies. Our brains detect them in less than 100 milliseconds.
Yes, genes are important for understanding our behavior. Incredibly important - after all, they code for every protein pertinent to brain function, endocrinology, etc., etc. But the regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
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.
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 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.
I was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a major neighborhood specializing in that, in Brooklyn. And somewhere when I was about 14, something changed. And that change probably involved updating every molecule in my body, in that I sort of realized: this is nonsense, there's no God, there's no free will, there is no purpose.
We're lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it's time to try something new.
Depression is incredibly pervasive and thus important to talk about.
It's a profound privilege to die from stress related diseases. It is the elimination of other causes of death such as infectious disease which is responsible for bringing lifestyle diseases to the fore - and these are exquisitely sensitive to stress.
As I became more interested in behavior from the standpoint of neurobiology, the stress-response became really interesting. What stress physiology is about is - when there is a new environmental challenge, how does an individual adapt? It seemed like a natural transition.
There are absolutely ways to manipulate behavior, because our behavior is endlessly being manipulated by the world around us.
If you have to abuse your power, you're probably in the process of losing it.
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.
Depression is like the worst disease you can get. It's devastating.
I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.
If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently.
Successful stress management heavily revolves around combating the building blocks of psychological stress - a feeling as if you have no control over the adversities in your life, a feeling that you have no predictive information about the stressors, if you lack outlets for the frustrations caused by the stressors, if you have no social support.
Well, much of my research over the years has been on stress, and the adverse effects of stress on the health of the central nervous system. All things considered, I've been astonishingly unhelped by my own research.
Authoritarians have always been here. But the features of a given moment make that way of thinking more or less appealing. Germany in the 1920s, when people are starving, suddenly makes 'populist' answers and scapegoating different groups as the source of the problem much more appealing.
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.
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.
There's a science to what sort of people we're attracted to, and it has to do with everything from how similar they are to us, to what sort of pheromones we imprinted on when we were little, and what variants of genes we have related to the neurochemical oxytocin.
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.
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.
