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e2c9f59
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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." --
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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e0342fb
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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.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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2185414
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I am not worried if scientists go and explain everything. This is for a very simple reason: an impala sprinting across the Savannah can be reduced to biomechanics, and Bach can be reduced to counterpoint, yet that does not decrease one iota our ability to shiver as we experience impalas leaping or Bach thundering. We can only gain and grow with each discovery that there is structure underlying the most accessible levels of things that fill ..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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83cd154
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The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of ..
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frontal-cortex
genes
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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2ee9f57
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Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.
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Robert M Sapolsky |
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eb9035d
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You don't have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.
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morality
philosophy
veganism
ethics
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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d963a71
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Most people who do a lot of exercise, particularly in the form of competitive athletics, have unneurotic, extraverted, optimistic personalities to begin with. (Marathon runners are exceptions to this.)
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personality
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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16308e7
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We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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c206728
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when doing science (or perhaps when doing anything at all in a society as judgmental as our own), be very careful and very certain before pronouncing something to be a norm - because at that instant, you have made it supremely difficult to ever again look objectively at an exception to that supposed norm.
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Robert M Sapolsky |
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4da6ee4
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Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.
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pessimistic
self
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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2d52da7
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Freud was fascinated with depression and focused on the issue that we began with--why is it that most of us can have occasional terrible experiences, feel depressed, and then recover, while a few of us collapse into major depression (melancholia)? In his classic essay "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), Freud began with what the two have in common. In both cases, he felt, there is the loss of a love object. (In Freudian terms, such an "objec..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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692ddb1
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If we accept that there will always be sides, it's a nontrivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces that we never suspect. Focus on the larger, shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate. Recall the historical lessons of how often the truly maligna..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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a8e80f5
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Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there's immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundr..
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individualism
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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b74a0a3
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In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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fe43f1c
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Ultimately, forgiveness is usually about one thing--"This is for me, not for you." Hatred is exhausting; forgiveness, or even just indifference, is freeing. To quote Booker T. Washington, "I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him." Belittle and distort and consume. Forgiveness seems to be at least somewhat good for your health--victims who show spontaneous forgiveness, or who have gone through forgiveness therapy (as o..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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63652e3
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probably the most important fact about genetics and culture is the delayed maturation of the frontal cortex--the genetic programming for the young frontal cortex to be freer from genes than other brain regions, to be sculpted instead by environment, to sop up cultural norms. To hark back to a theme from the first pages of this book, it doesn't take a particularly fancy brain to learn how to motorically, say, throw a punch. But it takes a fa..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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6ab256a
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Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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bac4dfa
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Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a large scale,
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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e71fc20
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Second, nothing about adolescence can be understood outside the context of delayed frontocortical maturation. If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the frontal cortex is still working out the assembly instructions, we've just explained why adolescents are so frustrating, great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive, self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible, and world changing. Thin..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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888c7b7
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if you're stressed like a normal mammal in an acute physical crisis, the stress response is lifesaving. But if instead you chronically activate the stress response for reasons of psychological stress, your health suffers. It
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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0998879
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Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, "Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness."
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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50fc9f0
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Suddenly, I get this giddy desire to shock these guys a little. I continue, "These baboons really are our relatives. In fact, this baboon is my cousin." And with that I lean over and give Daniel a loud messy kiss on his big ol' nose. I get more of a response than I bargained for. The Masai freak and suddenly, they are waving their spears real close to my face, like they mean it. One is yelling, "He is not your cousin, he is not your cousin!..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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1b2dc45
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A large percentage of what we think of when we talk about stress-related diseases are disorders of excessive stress-responses.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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f240020
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Testosterone also increases confidence and optimism, while decreasing fear and anxiety.5 This explains the "winner" effect in lab animals, where winning a fight increases an animal's willingness to participate in, and its success in, another such interaction. Part of the increased success probably reflects the fact that winning stimulates testosterone secretion, which increases glucose delivery and metabolism in the animal's muscles and mak..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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f591396
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We love stress that is mild and transient and occurs in a benevolent context.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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3fe0b21
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This is great. But what I'm grasping at is an idea about a subtler goal. This thinking owes a lot to conversations with Manjula Waldron of Ohio State University, an engineering professor who also happens to be a hospital chaplain. This feels embarrassingly Zen-ish for me to spout, being a short, hypomanic guy with a Brooklyn accent, but here goes: Maybe the goal isn't to maximize the contrast between a low baseline and a high level of activ..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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445e443
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Everything in physiology follows the rule that too much can be as bad as too little. There are optimal points of allostatic balance. For example, while a moderate amount of exercise generally increases bone mass, thirty-year-old athletes who run 40 to 50 miles a week can wind up with decalcified bones, decreased bone mass, increased risk of stress fractures and scoliosis (sideways curvature of the spine)--their skeletons look like those of ..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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546c531
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One last bit of bad news. We've been focusing on the stress-related consequences of activating the cardiovascular system too often. What about turning it off at the end of each psychological stressor? As noted earlier, your heart slows down as a result of activation of the vagus nerve by the parasympathetic nervous system. Back to the autonomic nervous system never letting you put your foot on the gas and brake at the same time--by definiti..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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97ac04e
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Another study that winds up in half the textbooks makes the same point, if more subtly. The subjects of the "experiment" were children reared in two different orphanages in Germany after World War II. Both orphanages were run by the government; thus there were important controls in place--the kids in both had the same general diet, the same frequency of doctors' visits, and so on. The main identifiable difference in their care was the two w..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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a2518c7
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Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That's not generic prosociality. That's ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context--who you are, your environment, and who that person is.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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577a1df
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This leads to a thoroughly fascinating finding--social conservatives tend toward lower thresholds for disgust than liberals.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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a5c4d21
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Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren't necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.
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morality
philosophy
veganism
ethics
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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dbd4d70
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As adults, these kids are mostly what you'd expect. Low IQ and poor cognitive skills. Problems with forming attachments, often bordering on autistic. Anxiety and depression galore. The longer the institutionalization, the worse the prognosis.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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6ecb485
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Subjected to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless--we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst; we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are actually going fine, and we feel an aching lack of pleasure in everything.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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b411835
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It takes surprisingly little in terms of uncontrollable unpleasantness to make humans give up and become helpless in a generalized way.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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01c42ff
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Eyes often have an implicit censorious power.22 Post a large picture of a pair of eyes at a bus stop (versus a picture of flowers), and people become more likely to clean up litter. Post a picture of eyes in a workplace coffee room, and the money paid on the honor system triples. Show a pair of eyes on a computer screen and people become more generous in online economic games.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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e8b5b11
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This is the critical point of this book: if you are that zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for your meal, your body's physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for dealing with such short-term physical emergencies. For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it's either over with or you're over with. When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we tu..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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52a9bd8
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Memory can be dramatically disrupted if you force something that's implicit into explicit channels. Here's an example that will finally make reading this book worth your while--how to make neurobiology work to your competitive advantage at sports. You're playing tennis against someone who is beating the pants off of you. Wait until your adversary has pulled off some amazing backhand, then offer a warm smile and say, "You are a fabulous tenn..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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7387eaf
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A final depressing point about inequality and violence. As we've seen, a rat being shocked activates a stress response. But a rat being shocked who can then bite the hell out of another rat has less of a stress response. Likewise with baboons--if you are low ranking, a reliable way to reduce glucocorticoid secretion is to displace aggression onto those even lower in the pecking order. It's something similar here--despite the conservative ni..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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779ed78
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Testosterone makes people cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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0e08047
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In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you'll understand the big picture. And in this reductionist world, to understand cells, organs, bodies, and behavior, the best constituent part to study is genes.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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921a36c
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This brings up a key concept, namely the inverted U. The complete absence of stress is aversively boring. Moderate, transient stress is wonderful--various aspects of brain function are enhanced; glucocorticoid levels in that range enhance dopamine release; rats work at pressing levers in order to be infused with just the right amount of glucocorticoids. And as stress becomes more severe and prolonged, those good effects disappear (with, of ..
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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91fda5b
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pain makes aggressive people more aggressive, while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals.
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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f69bb0a
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The defining feature of a major depression is loss of pleasure. 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."
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Robert M. Sapolsky |