James Cameron Quotes

There's something about the human brain, that it actually has a predilection towards negativity, which served us really well when we lived in an environment that was very threatening.

Fear, in evolution, has a special prominence: perhaps more than any other emotion it is crucial for survival.

When we're threatened, it's very easy to appeal to our basic natures.

We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.

We get stressed out now by having somebody yell at us in the office or by making a mistake or by losing a bunch of money. These aren't problems that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had. They'd get stressed if a lion came to them or a boulder was rolling towards their living quarters. That kind of stress provoked the fight or flight response.

We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.

Evolution has programmed us to feel rejection in our guts. This is how the tribe inforced obedience, by wielding the threat of expulsion. Fear of rejection isn't just psychological; it's biological. It's in our cells.

We instinctively fear snakes, but we appear not to be afraid of fast cars, which are a real danger now. This suggests our emotions were shaped by our evolutionary environment not the one we grew up in.

Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. ... But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide.

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

The brain works fast when it thinks it’s about to be cut in half.

Fear gives sudden instincts of skill.

The first time you see something that you have never seen before, you almost always know right away if you should eat it or run away from it.

When we respond to threats immediately and take action right away, it's usually the threats that we're hard-wired to respond to, the kinds of things that our ancestors survived.

The idea of safety had shrunk into particles - one snug moment, then the next. Meanwhile, the brain piped fugues of worry and staged mind-theaters full of tragedies and triumphs, because unfortunately, the fear of death does wonders to focus the mind, inspire creativity, and heightens the senses. Trusting one's hunches only seems gamble if one has time for seem; otherwise the brain goes on autopilot and trades the elite craft of analysis for the best rapid insights that float up from its danger files and ancient bag of tricks.

An animal so poor in spirit that he won't even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes.

. . . by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

We're hard-wired by 200,000 years of evolution to be sensitive to the idea that someone might be watching us. They might be predators, after all. An uneasy feeling is perfectly natural if you suspect that someone has you in their ocular sights, whether it's a ghost or just some guy at the bus stop.

There are doubtless all kinds of ways of explaining why people want security, but I do not think we can start with the psychological explanations. Even psychological states like fear or desire for safety are conditioned by social and political forms of intimidation and scare-mongering that intensify those emotions, and even work to persuade people that nothing less than their survival is at stake.

What makes horror movies work is the idea that "oh my God, what would I do if I were in that situation? How would I get out of that alive? What would I do if I saw the door to my closet creaking open in the middle of the night and a doll on a tricycle comes riding out?"

... if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being perserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offsping similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.

Evolutionary theory holds that our ability to sense when we should be suspicious has been every bit as essential for human survival as our capacity for trust and cooperation.

Pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival.