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

There's the complex categorization of low warmth/high competence. This is the hostile stereotype of Asian Americans by white America, of Jews in Europe, of Indo-Pakistanis in East Africa, of Lebanese in West Africa, of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, and of the rich by the poor most everywhere. It's the same low-high derogation: They're cold, greedy, clannish - -but, dang, they're sure good at making money and you should go to one who is a doctor if you're seriously sick.

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 trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.

Naturally, things are more complicated - those groovy, pro-social effects of oxytocin apply to how we interact with in-group members.

...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 pronouncing something to be a norm - because at that instant, you have made it supremely difficult to ever again look objectively at an exception to that supposed norm.

Most people who do a lot of exercise, particularly in the form of competitive athletics, have unneurotic, extraverted, optimistic personalities to begin with. (Marathon runners are exceptions to this.)

Fossey, Fossey, you cranky difficult strong-arming self-destructive misanthrope, mediocre scientist, deceiver of earnest college students, probable cause of more deaths of the gorillas than if you had never set foot in Rwanda, Fossey, you pain-in-the-ass saint, I do not believe in prayers or souls, but I will pray for your soul, I will remember you for all of my days, in gratitude for that moment by the graves when all I felt was the pure, cleansing sadness of returning home and finding nothing but ghosts.