35 quotes
Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)
The notion of the psychopathology of the shaman works just as readily in understanding the roots of major Western religions as well.
The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997)
From the very moment of your life, culture is leaving an imprint on who you are.
The Neuroscience Behind Behavior (2017)
We may learn everything about something, and we may learn something about everything, but we're never going to learn everything about everything.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.
And regardless of where we hide, should our leaders push the button, we will all be lost in a final global violence.
The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997)
The far-from-original point I will try to make now should seem obvious: There is an unsettling similarity between the rituals of the obsessive-compulsive and the rituals of the observantly religious.
The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997)
If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
Stress, Neurodegeneration and Individual Differences (2001)
I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means that 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.
In the 1930s an anthropologist named Paul Radin first described it as "shamans being half mad," shamans being "healed madmen." This fits exactly.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)
There is no reason to be less moved by nature around us simply because it's revealed to have more layers of complexity than we first observed.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
When you look at traditional human society, they all have shamans.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That’s not generic prosociality. That’s ethnocentrism and xenophobia.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)
Western religions, all the leading religions, have this schizotypalism shot through them from top to bottom.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
In order to have a couple of shamans on hand in your group, you're willing to put up with the occasional third cousin who's schizophrenic.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease.
Stress, Neurodegeneration and Individual Differences (2001)
Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
I am a reasonably emotional person, and I see no reason why that's incompatible with being a scientist.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)