You look at the quarter poorest places on Earth, and indeed, people there don't live very long and are miserable. But once you get past sort of the subsistence level, there's not a great relationship between the wealth of a country... and levels of happiness or life expectancy.

Almost everybody out there has a completely wrong idea as to what testosterone does, which is testosterone makes you aggressive ... The easy thing, then, tends to conclude that testosterone causes aggression, and the reality is testosterone does no such thing; it doesn't cause aggression.

My personal, way out in left field, inflammatory stance is I don't think we have a shred of free will. Despite 95% of philosophers and, I think, probably the majority of neuroscientists saying that we have free will in at least some circumstances, I don't think there's any at all.

I think it's a fair summary to think that when it comes to motivated, strong behaviors, what testosterone does is make you more of whatever you already are in that domain—sexual arousal, libido, aggressiveness, spontaneous aggression, reactive aggression, things of that sort; it's upping the volume of things that are already strongly there.

For every neuron that a fruit fly has, we have a hundred million ... With enough quantity, you invent quality.

The stress management-type techniques that work, you can't save them for the weekend. You can't save them for when you're stuck on hold on the phone with music for two minutes. It's got to be something where you stop what you're doing and do it virtually daily or every other day and spend 20-30 minutes doing it.

It turns out the optimal amount of glucocorticoids, something that is moderately stressful, in other words, something stimulating, does great stuff to your hippocampus. It increases blood delivery there, glucose, oxygen, and makes the synapses, the connections between neurons, more excitable ... A little bit of arousal and alertness is a good thing for learning and memory.

Not only can, say, prenatal hormone exposure change the way your brain is being constructed, but learning that prenatal hormone exposure can change the construction of your brain will change your brain right now and how you think about where your intentions came from ... The knowledge of the knowledge is an effect in and of itself.

About 20 years ago, [John Wingfield] formulated what was called 'The Challenge Hypothesis of Testosterone Action.' What does testosterone do? Testosterone is what you secrete when your status is being challenged, and it makes it more likely that you'll do the behaviors needed to hold on to your status.

Estrogen, in lots of ways, could be summarized by: If you had a choice in the matter between having a lot of estrogen in your bloodstream or not, go for having a lot of estrogen. It enhances cognition... It stimulates neurogenesis in the hippocampus. It increases glucose and oxygen delivery. It protects you from dementia. It decreases inflammatory oxidative damage to blood vessels, which is why it's good for protecting from cardiovascular disease...

When you look at the source of variability and health among humans on this planet, socioeconomic differences, differences in absolute levels, difference in degrees of inequality within cultures and within communities... is an enormous predictor of health.

I actually don't think stress kills you outright very often, but it sure makes other things that kill you more effective at doing it.

Do not trust anybody who says it has been scientifically proven that their brand of stress management works better than the other ones. Just watch your wallet at that point.

We don't hate stress; we hate the wrong amount of stress. When it's the right amount, we love it.

If you're in a circumstance that is requiring that your heart races and your breathing is fast and you're using your muscles... you're going to be having roughly the same brain activation profile—whether this is for something wonderful or something terrible—with the one exception being that, if the amygdala is part of the activation, this is something that's going to be counting as adverse.

We are simultaneously the most miserably violent species on Earth and the most altruistic, cooperative, and empathic.

The actual evidence for a role of stress in causing cancer, bringing it out of remission, accelerating tumor growth is very, very minimal.

Do you have a sense of control? A sense of control makes stressors less stressful.

What your childhood is like has a lot to do with what sort of adult you're going to wind up being...

It turns out, if you have elevated glucocorticoid levels while you're asleep, you have less delta sleep time.