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 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.

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.

For 99 percent of the beasts on this planet, stress is about three minutes of screaming in terror after which it's either over with or you're over with. And we turn it on for 30-year mortgages.

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.

Depression is incredibly pervasive and thus important to talk about.

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.

If I were to try to break into the world of modern dance, after the first few rejections the logical response might be, practice even more. But after the 12,000th rejection, maybe I should realize this isn't a viable career option.

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.

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.

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.

If you have to abuse your power, you're probably in the process of losing it.

Depression is like the worst disease you can get. It's devastating.

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.

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.

Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out.

The United States has the biggest discrepancy in health and longevity between our wealthiest and our poorest of any country on Earth.

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 humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever seen before in the primate world.

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.

Genes are not about inevitabilities; they're about potentials and vulnerabilities.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Primates are really well designed to see who is not keeping up their end of the deal.

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.

Regardless of your sex, if you have elevated testosterone levels in your blood, you're more likely to think a face with a neutral expression is instead looking threatening.

I think the relationship between social-dominance orientation in people and the extent to which they're made uncomfortable by ambiguity and novelty is really important. Better a stable world that's familiar, in which I'm doing pretty poorly, than dealing with all the ambiguity of a changing world.

Not a whole lot of us are wrestling somebody for a canned food item in the supermarket or having an ax fight in the jungle clearing. Instead, we sit and think about taxes and the ozone layer.

At its worst, there's just virtually no organ system in your body that's not thrown out of kilter in some way by chronic psychological stress.

For an architect's son, I am remarkably unformed in my architectural tastes.

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

I was this eggheady kid, the one who was consistently beaten up and picked last for the baseball teams.

As for testosterone, it's gotten a bum rap. Yes, it has tons to do with aggression but it doesn't cause aggression as much as sensitizes you to the environmental triggers of aggression.

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.

When you've wised up enough, there is a very clear conclusion that you have to reach after a while, which is, at the end of the day, it is really impossible for one person to make a difference.

Baboons are poster children for psychosocial stress, living in troops with bruising and shifting dominance hierarchies among males and high rates of male aggression.

Go get yourself stressed all the time and the common cold becomes more common.

When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.

My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution.