We’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.

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.

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

Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease.

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

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

Digestion is quickly shut down during stress…The parasympathetic nervous system, perfect for all that calm, vegetative physiology, normally mediates the actions of digestion. Along comes stress: turn off parasympathetic, turn on the sympathetic, and forget about digestion.