“The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviors are among our worst and most damaging, words like 'evil' and 'soul' will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty brakes, that they will be as rarely spoken in a courtroom as in an auto repair shop. And crucially, the analogy holds in a key way, extending to instances of dangerous people without anything obviously wrong with their frontal cortex, genes, and so on. When a car is being dysfunctional and dangerous and we take it to a mechanic, this is not a dualistic situation where (a) if the mechanic discovers some broken widget causing the problem, we have a mechanistic explanation, but (b) if the mechanic can’t find anything wrong, we’re dealing with an evil car; sure, the mechanic can speculate on the source of the problem—maybe it’s the blueprint from which the car was built, maybe it was the building process, maybe the environment contains some unknown pollutant that somehow impairs function, maybe someday we’ll have sufficiently powerful techniques in the auto shop to spot some key molecule in the engine that is out of whack—but in the meantime we’ll consider this car to be evil. Car free will also equals 'internal forces we do not understand yet.” EvilCriminal JusticeCriminality Author:Robert Sapolsky
“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 nightmare of class warfare, of the poor rising up to slaughter the wealthy, when inequality fuels violence, it is mostly the poor preying on the poor.” PsychologyViolenceInequalityAggression Author:Robert Sapolsky
“Nós não odiamos a violência. Odiamos e tememos o tipo errado de violência, aquela que ocorre no contexto errado. Porque a violência no contexto certo é diferente.” PsicologíaGuerraDiscriminaçãoComportamento Author:Robert Sapolsky
“This is the essence of gene/environment interaction. What does having a particular variant of the MAO-A gene have to do with antisocial behavior? It depends on the environment. “Warrior gene” my ass.” ScienceEpigenetics Author:Robert Sapolsky
“In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.” NeurobiologyNeurophysiology Author:Robert Sapolsky
“If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we'd desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won't be enough tomorrow.” Behavioral PsychologyNeurobiologyNeurophysiology Author:Robert Sapolsky
“While this neurobiology is mighty impressive, the brain is not where a behavior 'begins'. It's merely the final common pathway by which all the factors in the chapters to come converge and create behavior.” NeurobiologyNeurophysiology Author:Robert Sapolsky
“We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don't know a thing about.” Science Author:Robert Sapolsky
“[…] And then you notice someone. Amid the family clusters postceremony, the new graduates posing for pictures with Grandma in her wheelchair, the bursts of hugs and laughter, you see the person way in the back, the person who is part of the grounds crew, collecting the garbage from the cans on the perimeter of the event. Randomly pick any of the graduates. Do some magic so that this garbage collector started life with the graduate's genes. Likewise for getting the womb in which nine months were spent and the lifelong epigenetic consequences of that. Get the graduate's childhood as well-one filled with, say, piano lessons and family game nights, instead of, say, threats of going to bed hungry, becoming homeless, or being deported for lack of papers. Let's go all the way so that, in addition to the garbage collector having gotten all that of the graduate's past, the graduate would have gotten the garbage collector's past. Trade every factor over which they had no control, and you will switch who would be in the graduation robe and who would be hauling garbage cans. This is what I mean by determinism.” ScienceEthicsNeuroscienceNeuroethics Author:Robert Sapolsky