Afnan Ghazi

“When you praise kids for working hard, they tend to work harder the next time, show more resilience, enjoy the process more, and become more likely to value the accomplishment for its own sake (rather than for the grade). Praise kids for being smart, and precisely the opposite occurs. When it becomes all about being smart, effort begins to seem suspect, beneath you—after all, if you’re really so smart, you shouldn’t have to work hard; you glide, you don’t sweat and grunt.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“acute stress strengthens connectivity between the frontal cortex and motoric areas, while weakening frontal-hippocampal connections; the result is decision making that is habitual, rather than incorporating new information.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“The group is more arrogant, hypocritical, self-centered and more ruthless in the pursuit of its ends than the individual.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“I was once at a conference of neuroscientists and all-star Buddhist monk meditators, the former studying what the brains of the latter did during meditation. One scientist asked one of the monks whether he ever stops meditating because his knees hurt from all that cross-leggedness. He answered, “Sometimes I’ll stop sooner than I planned, but not because it hurts; it’s not something I notice. It’s as an act of kindness to my knees.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst