Evan Wondrasek

“Suppose there’s a rooster standing next to you, and there’s a chicken across the street. The rooster gives a sexually solicitive gesture that is hot by chicken standards, and she promptly runs over to mate with him (I haven’t a clue if this is how it works, but let’s just suppose). And thus we have a key behavioral biological question—why did the chicken cross the road? And if you’re a psychoneuroendocrinologist, your answer would be “Because circulating estrogen levels in that chicken worked in a certain part of her brain to make her responsive to this male signaling,” and if you’re a bioengineer, the answer would be “Because the long bone in the leg of the chicken forms a fulcrum for her pelvis (or some such thing), allowing her to move forward rapidly,” and if you’re an evolutionary biologist, you’d say, “Because over the course of millions of years, chickens that responded to such gestures at a time that they were fertile left more copies of their genes, and thus this is now an innate behavior in chickens,” and so on, thinking in categories, in differing scientific disciplines of explanation.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Is the brain a gift from God, or simply the jackpot of a trillion rolls of DNA dice?”
― Frank T. Vertosick Jr., When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery

“According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the quarter century following the introduction of OxyContin, some 450,000 Americans had died of opioid-related overdoses. Such overdoses were now the leading cause of accidental death in America, accounting for more deaths than car accidents—more deaths, even, than that most quintessentially American of metrics, gunshot wounds. In fact, more Americans had lost their lives from opioid overdoses than had died in all of the wars the country had fought since World War II.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

“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