

Why Humans (and Baboons) Stress So Much - seren6ipity
http://www.livescience.com/health/070219_stress_human.html

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kirubakaran
Poor Daniel Gilbert: (Author of the beautiful book _Stumbling On Happiness_ )

[ Priests vow to remain celibate, physicians vow to do no harm, and letter
carriers vow to swiftly complete their appointed rounds despite snow, sleet,
and split infinitives. Few people realize that psychologists also take a vow,
promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a
book, a chapter, or at least an article that contains this sentence: "The
human being is the only animal that..." We are allowed to finish the sentence
any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words. Most of us wait
until relatively late in our careers to fulfill this solemn obligation because
we know that successive generations of psychologists will ignore all the other
words that we managed to pack into a lifetime of well-intentioned scholarship
and remember us mainly for how we finished "The Sentence." We also know that
the worse we do, the better we will be remembered. For instance, those
psychologists who finished The Sentence with "can use language" were
particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate with
hand signs. And when researchers discovered that chimps in the wild use sticks
to extract tasty termites from their mounds (and to bash one another over the
head now and then), the world suddenly remembered the full name and mailing
address of every psychologist who had ever finished The Sentence with "uses
tools." So it is for good reason that most psychologists put off completing
The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough,
they just might die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.

I have never before written The Sentence, but I'd like to do so now, with you
as my witness. "The human being is the only animal that thinks about the
future." ]

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seren6ipity
Quoting from the article -

"For 99 percent of the beasts on this planet, stress is about three minutes of
screaming in terror after which it's either over with or you're over with. And
we turn it on for 30-year mortgages," -- Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford
University neuroscientist

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mynameishere
Deer always seemed constantly petrified to me, but maybe that was because I
only saw them at times when I happened to be near.

