Robert Sapolsky

"Most of us dont collapse into puddles of stress-related disease."

"Why do we have schizophrenia in every culture on this planet? From an evolutionary perspective, schizophrenia is not a cool thing to have. ... Schizophrenia is not an adaptive trait. You can show this formally: schizophrenics have a lower rate of leaving copies of their genes in the next generation than unaffected siblings. By the rules, by the economics of evolution, this is a maladaptive trait. Yet, it chugs along at a one to two percent rate in every culture on this planet. So whats the adaptive advantage of schizophrenia? It has to do with a classic truism — this business that sometimes you have a genetic trait which in the full-blown version is a disaster, but the partial version is good news."

"I am a reasonably emotional person, and I see no reason why thats incompatible with being a scientist. Even if we learn about how everything works, that doesnt mean anything at all. You can reduce how an impala leaps to a bunch of biomechanical equations. You can turn Bach into contrapuntal equations, and that doesnt reduce in the slightest our capacity to be moved by a gazelle leaping or Bach thundering. There is no reason to be less moved by nature around us simply because its revealed to have more layers of complexity than we first observed. The more important reason why people shouldnt be afraid is, were never going to inadvertently go and explain everything. We may learn everything about something, and we may learn something about everything, but were never going to learn everything about everything. When you study science, and especially these realms of the biology of what makes us human, whats clear is that every time you find out something, that brings up ten new questions, and half of those are better questions than you started with."

"I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means that you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it."

"The ones who I train to become scientists go at it like the warriors they should be, overturning existing knowledge and reigning paradigms, each discovery a murder of their scientific ancestors. And if I have trained them well, I must derive whatever satisfaction I can from the inevitability of becoming their Oedipal target someday."

"This is a classic case of what is often called physics envy, the disease among scientists where the behavioral biologists fear their discipline lacks the rigor of physiology, the physiologists wish for the techniques of the biochemists, the biochemists covet the clarity of the answers revealed by molecular biologists, all the way down the down until you get to the physicists, who confer only with God."

"Western religions, all the leading religions, have this schizotypalism shot through them from top to bottom. Its that same exact principle: its great having one of these guys, but we sure wouldnt want to have three of them in our tribe. Overdo it, and our schizotypalism in the Western religious setting is what we call a "cult," and there you are in the realm of a Charles Manson or a David Koresh or a Jim Jones. You can only do post-hoc forensic psychiatry on Koresh and Jones, but Charles Manson is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. But get it just right, and people are gonna get the day off from work on your birthday for millennia to come. [laughter] This is great! I think this is the first time Ive ever said that line without somebody getting up and leaving in a huff from the audience. Its very nice being here."

"The far-from-original point I will try to make now should seem obvious: There is an unsettling similarity between the rituals of the obsessive-compulsive and the rituals of the observantly religious."

"Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. Theyre always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words." You say "Well, thats true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops." This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness."

"We are not getting our ulcers being chased by Saber-tooth tigers, were inventing our social stressors — and if some baboons are good at dealing with this, we should be able to as well. Insofar as were smart enough to have invented this stuff and stupid enough to fall for it, we have the potential to be wise enough to keep the stuff in perspective."

"In the 1930s an anthropologist named Paul Radin first described it as "shamans being half mad," shamans being "healed madmen." This fits exactly. Its the shamans who are moving separate from everyone else, living alone, who talk with the dead, who speak in tongues, who go out with the full moon and turn into a hyena overnight, and that sort of stuff. Its the shamans who have all this metamagical thinking. When you look at traditional human society, they all have shamans. Whats very clear, though, is they all have a limit on the number of shamans. That is this classic sort of balanced selection of evolution. There is a need for this subtype — but not too many. The critical thing with schizotypal shamanism is, it is not uncontrolled the way it is in the schizophrenic. This is not somebody babbling in tongues all the time in the middle of the hunt. This is someone babbling during the right ceremony. This is not somebody hearing voices all the time, this is somebody hearing voices only at the right point. Its a milder, more controlled version. Shamans are not evolutionarily unfit. Shamans are not leaving fewer copies of their genes. These are some of the most powerful, honored members of society. This is where the selection is coming from. … In order to have a couple of shamans on hand in your group, youre willing to put up with the occasional third cousin whos schizophrenic."

"Orthodox Judaism has this amazing set of rules: everyday theres a bunch of strictures of things youre supposed to do, a bunch youre not supposed to do, and the number youre supposed to do is the same number as the number of bones in the body. The number that youre not supposed to do is the same number as the number of days in the year. The amazing thing is, nobody knows what the rules are! Talmudic rabbis have been scratching each others eyes out for centuries arguing over which rules go into the 613. The numbers are more important than the content. It is sheer numerology."