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. It's the meaning of the behavior.

To out-group-members, oxytocin makes you crappier - less cooperative and more preemptively aggressive. It's not the luv hormone. It's the in-group parochialism/xenophobia hormone.

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

We're getting along so well; I trust you so much for this one second that I'm going to let you yank on me.

It's probably even the case that if you stoked up some Buddhist monks with tons of testosterone, they'd become wildly competitive as to who can do the most acts of random kindness.

I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.

On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor.