The frontal cortex is an incredibly interesting part of the brain - ours is proportionately bigger and/or more complex than in any other species..

But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to mak….

For example, most mammals are either monogamous or polygamous. But as every poet or divorce attorney will tell you, humans are confused - After all, ….

On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the r….

Finish this lecture, go outside, and unexpectedly get gored by an elephant, and you are going to secrete glucocorticoids. There's no way out of it. Y….

Almost always, genes are about potentials and vulnerabilities rather than about determinism..

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….

We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress..

What happened during the minutes before? That's the realm of sensory stimuli of the nervous system..

...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 pronounc….

We all seek out stress. We hate the wrong kinds of stress but when it's the right kind, we love it - we pay good money to be stressed by a scary movi….

Fossey, Fossey, you cranky difficult strong-arming self-destructive misanthrope, mediocre scientist, deceiver of earnest college students, probable c….

...I might continue to believe that there is no god even if it were proved that there is. A religious friend of mine once remarked that the concept o….

The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it..

If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't mess with you much. Wh….

The fascinating thing about our best and worst behaviors isn't the behavior itself - the brain tells the muscles to do something or other - big deal.….

Individual differences in testosterone level predict very little about differences in aggression..

Digestion is quickly shut down during stress…The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates ….

It's great to have a buff frontal cortex to do that harder thing - for example, help a person in need rather buy some useless, shiny gee-gaw..

Some Poor grad student pressing on the flanks of a hamster and out comes a doctorate on the other side.

Importantly, rather than promoting aggression, testosterone promotes whatever is needed to maintain status when challenged..