Speaker 1: How can a brain grow up in chaos and still
Speaker 1: find its way to order? There are many ways to
Speaker 1: have a bad childhood, But why do some children break
Speaker 1: while others bend and keep going. How much of who
Speaker 1: you are is written in your genes and how much
Speaker 1: is sculpted by your environment? And if we could know
Speaker 1: everything about a child's genes and environment, would we be
Speaker 1: able to predict who they would become?
Speaker 2: Why or why not?
Speaker 1: How many versions of you were possible? And why did
Speaker 1: this one win out? When you look back at your childhood,
Speaker 1: which moments mattered more than you realized at the time.
Speaker 1: Today we're joined by David Cicillo, who grew up in
Speaker 1: a very tough childhood, abandoned by his parents when he
Speaker 1: was eight, and he had about thirteen sets of surrogate
Speaker 1: parents over the years. But he grew up and he
Speaker 1: became a neuroscientist at Stanford and then at Google Brain
Speaker 1: and now it met up and today we're going to
Speaker 1: explore that unlikely trajectory and what it teaches us about
Speaker 1: genes and brains and our own lives. Welcome to Inner
Speaker 1: Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author
Speaker 1: at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail deeply into
Speaker 1: our three pound universe to uncover some of the most
Speaker 1: surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode is about the
Speaker 1: determinants of who we become. When a baby human drops
Speaker 1: into the world, the brain is not yet finished. As
Speaker 1: I put this in my book Live Wired. Their brain
Speaker 1: is half baked. It is still in a full tilt
Speaker 1: construction project where you've got billions of neurons wiring themselves together.
Speaker 1: And this wiring is guided partly by genetic instructions and
Speaker 1: largely by the experiences they pick up. So every moment
Speaker 1: in a baby's life is laying down traces. Every interaction
Speaker 1: they have is nudging their life trajectory to go in
Speaker 1: different possible directions. So when we look at the big
Speaker 1: picture of who someone becomes, we know the ingredients. Genes matter,
Speaker 1: and environment matters environment like nutrition and stress and language
Speaker 1: and safety and love and so on. These all shape
Speaker 1: the architecture. But here's the strange part. Because we can't
Speaker 1: possibly know all the details about these ingredients and their interactions,
Speaker 1: we can't even possibly predict the outcome.
Speaker 2: And we see this all the time.
Speaker 1: When two children begin in similar circumstances and end up
Speaker 1: in very different places.
Speaker 2: Whereas we'll talk about today, someone can be in.
Speaker 1: Circumstances that seem really difficult, but they emerge into something
Speaker 1: really great. So what is it about the developing brain
Speaker 1: that allows for such divergence? Can we even understand the
Speaker 1: thousand small moments that tip the scales? Today's conversation circles
Speaker 1: around exactly this question. This is with a colleague of mind,
Speaker 1: someone who has worked at the frontiers of neuroscience and
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence, from Stanford to Google, Brain to Meta. His
Speaker 1: name is David Sicilo, and he's just written a very
Speaker 1: moving memoir about his trajectory called Emergence. Part of his
Speaker 1: book touches on Modern AI. But that's not what we're
Speaker 1: focusing on today. Instead, we're looking at the rest of
Speaker 1: the story, because David's early life was all about instability
Speaker 1: at a scale that's hard for most of us to fathom.
Speaker 1: He was abandoned by his parents and he moved through
Speaker 1: something like thirteen different foster parents. And the question that
Speaker 1: sits the center of his story is how does a
Speaker 1: brain travel from there to here? How does the life
Speaker 1: take shape under those conditions? And what does that tell
Speaker 1: us about development and resilience and who we become. Here's
Speaker 1: my conversation with David Cicillo. Okay, so David, let's start
Speaker 1: with what you're doing now.
Speaker 2: Sure. So I'm a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs.
Speaker 2: I work on their EMG device. So this is electromagram
Speaker 2: electromagram So basically, it's a wristband. You put it on
Speaker 2: and it reads out your muscle signals so that you can,
Speaker 2: for example, control a computer, or if you're betting on
Speaker 2: computers that are wearable like for example, glasses, that you
Speaker 2: could control the glasses in a way that's more intuitive.
Speaker 2: So that's an interesting applied machine learning problem because well,
Speaker 2: you want it to work for everybody. So that's that's
Speaker 2: what I do there at Stanford, I'm an adjunct professor.
Speaker 2: I work on computational neuroscience problems. So basically, how do
Speaker 2: our brains use electrical activity to compute in such a
Speaker 2: way that leads to behavior, computation, emotions, and so forth.
Speaker 2: And so we're looking at this intermediate layer between say
Speaker 2: the neuron and the big computations of mind so to speak.
Speaker 1: Oh great, okay, so you and I spin in a
Speaker 1: lot of the same world, and I was surprised and
Speaker 1: pleased to find out that we both grew up in Albuquerque,
Speaker 1: New Mexico in the seventies. Yea, So let's start with
Speaker 1: what Albuquerque was, like, what do you remember about Albuquerque
Speaker 1: at that time childhood?
Speaker 2: You know, well, I go up very poor, but I
Speaker 2: my memories of Albuquerque and New Mexico more broadly are
Speaker 2: I think it's beautiful. I agree with you.
Speaker 1: And I was surprised when I got older and learned
Speaker 1: that Albuquerque had the highest violent crime rate in the nation. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: because where whatever you grew up, that's just reality what
Speaker 1: you do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Okay, So what we want to get into is your childhood,
Speaker 1: because ending up where you are, you had very unusual childhood.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about that. Tell us that story. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so my parents were both drug addicts. They were both heroneutics,
Speaker 2: which was common, which apparently was common back back in
Speaker 2: the day. Now it's all phyl hentyl and other drugs.
Speaker 2: But so they I think my parents, my sister and
Speaker 2: I I had a sister esther. You know, they loved us,
Speaker 2: they you know, but they were negligent parents, and so
Speaker 2: I sort of grew up in an environment where their addiction,
Speaker 2: not that I understood it as a kid, sort of
Speaker 2: overshadowed every single thing, growing up in very deep poverty,
Speaker 2: growing up in very bad neighborhoods. Ultimately there was a divorce,
Speaker 2: and so you know, the whole thing is just sort of,
Speaker 2: you know, like the bird just never made it out
Speaker 2: of the nests for the family, so to speak, that
Speaker 2: because of the drugs. How did they become addicted? Do
Speaker 2: you know? I don't know the story of my mother
Speaker 2: at all, honestly with my father, his siblings were able
Speaker 2: to shed some light on it. And basically my father
Speaker 2: is part of generational tragedy. His father died in a
Speaker 2: Navy plane accident. And so now five kids ages three
Speaker 2: months through seven are all living with a single mother
Speaker 2: in the fifties, right, So that's he was the middle kid,
Speaker 2: if you put any stock in that, and he just
Speaker 2: got into huge arguments with his mother. They were in Tucson, Arizona,
Speaker 2: and they moved back to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. None of
Speaker 2: the kids had ever dealt with like Brooklyn and asphalt
Speaker 2: and brownstone, and so I think my father just fell
Speaker 2: through the cracks and by the time he was thirteen,
Speaker 2: he was experimenting with heroin. By the time he was fifteen,
Speaker 2: he probably had a habit. So he just never he
Speaker 2: just never made it out of the gate. And what
Speaker 2: did your father and mother do? Sort of jobs? I
Speaker 2: don't remember, Like they kind of didn't work, okay, in
Speaker 2: the fact, I'm not even sure how they made the
Speaker 2: bills pay that there might there might have been some
Speaker 2: work as a taxi driver for a little bit, but
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure that my mother's parents were keeping us
Speaker 2: afloat financially.
Speaker 1: I see. Okay, So back to the story. So that's
Speaker 1: who you were born to, and then what happened with you?
Speaker 1: And asked your sister, so, well, my mother tried to.
Speaker 2: So there was a big fight, my mother divorces my father,
Speaker 2: and so we're now living with my mother. She tries
Speaker 2: to get her act together. Actually she moves up to
Speaker 2: Santa Fe, tried, goes and gets a nursing tries to
Speaker 2: get a nursing degree. That very quickly becomes clearly that
Speaker 2: not going to work. So we a year later moved
Speaker 2: back to Albuquerque into a very very bad neighborhood colloquially
Speaker 2: known as the war zone on the map it's called
Speaker 2: La Mesa, And so, you know, this was kind of
Speaker 2: the first time I kind of now I'm like eight
Speaker 2: years old, right, so kind of the first time like
Speaker 2: wait a minute, this isn't a great area, this isn't
Speaker 2: you know. But still I'm in that like childhood innocence
Speaker 2: phase where I don't really understand what's going on. And
Speaker 2: so while that didn't work out either, and eventually my
Speaker 2: mother was actually contending with very serious depression. So she
Speaker 2: went into the hospital and my sister and I ended
Speaker 2: up on the west side of town in what we
Speaker 2: now call a group home, basically a modern day orphanage
Speaker 2: called the Albuquerque Christian Children's Home, which is still there
Speaker 2: today celebrating it's like fiftieth or fifty fifth anniversary or something.
Speaker 2: So how long were you guys there from that orphanage.
Speaker 2: We were there for five years. It's a long time.
Speaker 2: It was never really meant to be a long term facility.
Speaker 2: And what was that like for you guys? You know,
Speaker 2: it was like being alone. My example is, you know,
Speaker 2: imagine you're a kid and you get lost at them,
Speaker 2: all right, what do you do? After an hour? You're
Speaker 2: freaked out, You're wigging out, to two hours. What if
Speaker 2: you lost for a day, Like, what do you do? Right?
Speaker 2: And so eventually you figure out that you're just kind
Speaker 2: of by yourself, right, and so it you know, we
Speaker 2: had house parents, and the house parents are well meaning,
Speaker 2: practicing Christians. They believe in the work. They're there for
Speaker 2: a reason, right, But it's an impossible job, like a
Speaker 2: truly impossible job. Imagine all the problems that all these
Speaker 2: kids are coming in with at the time there, it
Speaker 2: could have been at any point ten to sixteen kids
Speaker 2: in a student home in one of the little cottages.
Speaker 2: There were three cottages there, so at any given time,
Speaker 2: it's like thirty to fifty kids there. Everything's turning over constantly.
Speaker 2: The kids are coming and going, the house parents are
Speaker 2: coming and going. So there's really no sense of stability
Speaker 2: at all. There's nothing you can sort of lean against.
Speaker 2: And so that was you know what that experience was like.
Speaker 2: And you were in elementary school at that time, you
Speaker 2: go to the public schools, that's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, sister Esther, you guys were close.
Speaker 2: Uh no, not really, we you know, we just we
Speaker 2: were pretty close in age, actually a year and a
Speaker 2: half year and a half apart. And she was older,
Speaker 2: far more mature than me, and I think very much
Speaker 2: more attuned to frankly, just how screwed up our situation was.
Speaker 2: I had my head down. I was just I was
Speaker 2: just curious about video games. I was just I was
Speaker 2: just a dumb kid, right, And so I think that
Speaker 2: for me was actually really lucky, a real blessing. Which
Speaker 2: video games or Esther's maturity? Oh oh no, sorry, the
Speaker 2: video games. I think I think it was a bad
Speaker 2: outcome for Esther to have been as mature as she was. Ah, okay,
Speaker 2: because she was facing all this stuff at uh, you know,
Speaker 2: it just wasn't like imagine middle school and everything in
Speaker 2: your life is terrible, right, like actually terrible, and not
Speaker 2: just because you're in middle school. So you guys were
Speaker 2: at that home for five years and then you moved on,
Speaker 2: that's right. Yes, So so my mother passes away, right,
Speaker 2: so she hadn't been living with her, but she was
Speaker 2: still involved in our lives. She would take us out
Speaker 2: every couple of weeks, so for a weekend or a day.
Speaker 2: Was that like when she would come by and you'd
Speaker 2: see her. You know, it's it, you know, as a kid,
Speaker 2: it's I think you don't really understand your emotions when
Speaker 2: you're a kid, right, So what I would say as
Speaker 2: an adult is like, it was clear that I loved
Speaker 2: my mother, But I wouldn't have never I would have
Speaker 2: never said that, right. I would just been like, well,
Speaker 2: this is here's this, here's the mom coming to come
Speaker 2: see me.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: But so now she passes away, and I was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: my whole my life, like life just kind of falls apart.
Speaker 2: You know, I've had behavioral problems because I'm basically feral
Speaker 2: for all of my childhood and now I really you know,
Speaker 2: I'm in seventh grade here, So eleven twelve, Right, how
Speaker 2: did you find out she died? Did somebody come out? Yeah,
Speaker 2: our grandparents came and told us at the group home. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Were you close with your grandparents? Not particularly? No, they
Speaker 2: were sort of they were running the uh they're basically running.
Speaker 2: They were quarterbacking the whole thing from a distance. So
Speaker 2: you know, we'd spend we'd go to church with them
Speaker 2: on the weekends on occasion and like you know, maybe
Speaker 2: go out to have a hammerger or something. But no,
Speaker 2: not really, And how does your mom die? Medication makes
Speaker 2: up So basically methadone meets whatever, like a tailored suite
Speaker 2: of medications she was on for her mental health.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, yeah, okay, so your grandparents come and tell you,
Speaker 1: and then I assume the orphanage wasn't the place to
Speaker 1: stay anymore.
Speaker 2: Yes, So, well what happened was, it's this weird thing
Speaker 2: where her passing away, my father is just not in
Speaker 2: the picture. Right, So her passing away actually makes life
Speaker 2: easier for us because my extended family and my keep
Speaker 2: in mind, my father has four siblings, they feel like
Speaker 2: they can get involved now, right because there's this like
Speaker 2: sacred bond between the mom and the kids. And like,
Speaker 2: you know, again, my grandparents were quarterbacking the whole thing.
Speaker 2: They may have like kept us in that group home
Speaker 2: on the hopes that we would like help get her better. Right,
Speaker 2: So there's a lot going on there. But now she's
Speaker 2: passed away, and so one of my uncles gets involved
Speaker 2: and he offers to take me, and he's a newlywed.
Speaker 2: He offers to take me, and he does not make
Speaker 2: this offer to my sister, which was crushing, you know.
Speaker 2: And so what ended up happening is she ended up
Speaker 2: going to a boarding school in New York and I
Speaker 2: ended up going to live with my aunt uncle in Virginia.
Speaker 2: When you say it was crushing, do you mean to
Speaker 2: you or to her? I mean I had I was
Speaker 2: guilt ridden over the whole thing as well, but it
Speaker 2: was like really crushing for her. In the end, it
Speaker 2: didn't work out. I ended up going to a boarding
Speaker 2: school within a year of living with my ount uncle.
Speaker 2: Got it is a lot. I mean, they weren't prepared
Speaker 2: to have a kid, especially kid the kind of background
Speaker 2: I'm coming in with, you know. So I ended up
Speaker 2: at this boarding school called the Milton Hershey School for
Speaker 2: my high school years. Got it?
Speaker 1: And then, sorry, am I remembering correctly though? That you
Speaker 1: ended up at many different what would you call it
Speaker 1: foster homes?
Speaker 2: It only two. But so the real turnover is that
Speaker 2: the house parents are there for anywhere from six months
Speaker 2: to a year and a half. So in my time there,
Speaker 2: I'm boy ten twelve thirteen sets of house parents. So
Speaker 2: there's a real there's a real sense. The only stable
Speaker 2: thing there is me. You're talking about the orphanage, now, yeah,
Speaker 2: I got it, got it, yep, yep, right, And you
Speaker 2: know there was some turnover at Milton Hershery School too,
Speaker 2: But so, so that's the sense in which there's just
Speaker 2: nothing stable about any of it, right, got it?
Speaker 1: Okay, so you did that through high school and then
Speaker 1: you left for college. Okay, that's right, Yeah, okay, And
Speaker 1: where'd you go?
Speaker 2: Carnegie Mellon. I started off in physics and then I
Speaker 2: took an experimental physics class. It was like, oh no,
Speaker 2: so I moved to computer science and mathematics.
Speaker 1: Great, And how did you know that you were going
Speaker 1: to thrive in those? Was it just something that resonated
Speaker 1: with you?
Speaker 2: Well? So I had been told my since my very
Speaker 2: early childhood years that I was a smart kid. And
Speaker 2: that's something you really focus or fixate on, even when
Speaker 2: you've got nothing else. So, like, you know, I was
Speaker 2: tested for the Gifted and Talented program when I'm in
Speaker 2: third grade, you know, and I pass the test, and
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, I'm different classes and I'm special.
Speaker 2: And so I built this whole sort of psychological shield.
Speaker 2: I call it, like my patronis Charm from Harry Potter,
Speaker 2: like just to protect me from all the dementors out there. Right,
Speaker 2: So I had a whole story, a whole narrative about myself,
Speaker 2: you know, a real decision like to go become somebody
Speaker 2: who was smart. I don't think at the age of ten,
Speaker 2: which is when I was making all these decisions, I
Speaker 2: had the vocabulary for it. But I figured out that,
Speaker 2: you know, college was a thing and that you could
Speaker 2: get a scholarship if you worked at it. And so
Speaker 2: from basically the age of ten, my life goal was
Speaker 2: to go to college. So then coming to your question,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm in high school now, and you know
Speaker 2: I had the goal to go to MIT. I was
Speaker 2: grossly unprepared for that and did not get accepted. But
Speaker 2: still Connie Millon's is fabulous school. I'm super happy about that.
Speaker 2: And so it's in that sense that like, yes, I
Speaker 2: was attuned to that experience. I was ready and prepared
Speaker 2: for that experience at least emotionally great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so going to Corneie Melton, that's a big deal.
Speaker 1: Who is advising you at the time in your life,
Speaker 1: Who's telling you about college and here's how you apply
Speaker 1: and here's how you get there.
Speaker 2: You know, I think it was just part of so
Speaker 2: at Milton Hershey School is a very different organization than
Speaker 2: the Albuquerque Christian Trones Home. It's explicitly meant to serve
Speaker 2: kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, whatever you want to call that,
Speaker 2: And so there were many sort of avenues you could
Speaker 2: go down or well trodden roads at that school about
Speaker 2: like college prep or business prep or vocational trades or
Speaker 2: something like this. So by that time I just knew
Speaker 2: I was going to apply to colleges.
Speaker 1: So you wrote a wonderful book that just came out
Speaker 1: called Emergence, about this path from your childhood to where
Speaker 1: you are now. And one of the stories you tell
Speaker 1: in the book is that you gave a talk at Princeton.
Speaker 1: I guess it was your first talk on your life
Speaker 1: and how you got where you're going, and you relate
Speaker 1: that a young woman came up to you afterwards and said,
Speaker 1: how did you do it? Yeah, and you said to her,
Speaker 1: persistence and a lot of luck. But then you said
Speaker 1: you sort of regretted that answer because it.
Speaker 2: Just it was a sort of an answer. Yeah, it
Speaker 2: was the only thing you could think of at the moment.
Speaker 1: So my question for you is, and then you sat
Speaker 1: and wrote the book for years and you've really thought
Speaker 1: about this lot. So my question for you is when
Speaker 1: you think about what answer you would give her now?
Speaker 1: Besides you know the full book. What percentage is persistence?
Speaker 1: What percentage is luck? And how has your answer changed?
Speaker 2: I think a lot of it is luck, if I'm
Speaker 2: being real, because even persistence or resilience, which I apparently
Speaker 2: have a lot of, I don't know how I got
Speaker 2: it right.
Speaker 1: So that's like genetic luck.
Speaker 2: In yeah, genetic luck. I think it was important to
Speaker 2: be smart, I mean the answer I would give her,
Speaker 2: and resilient, Yeah, exactly, that's right. And resilient. I think
Speaker 2: resilient is far more important than being intelligent. Honestly, you
Speaker 2: know what I would say to her now is I
Speaker 2: found a way to become whole. Right. There was a
Speaker 2: whole series of events, including people I have never met
Speaker 2: in my life who developed technologies that I used, to
Speaker 2: people in my family, to mentors and therapists, my PhD
Speaker 2: mentor Larry Abbott, you know all these things what I
Speaker 2: would say. And thus the title of the book is
Speaker 2: we are all, you know, greater than some of our parts.
Speaker 2: And so the telling of this story is just a
Speaker 2: in depth example of this.
Speaker 1: Now I want to stick with your story, but let's
Speaker 1: pull out for one second. Let's talk about the concept
Speaker 1: of emergence. The scientific concepts, so give us a sense
Speaker 1: of that. Yes, so it means a few different things
Speaker 1: to a few different people. For me, it means that
Speaker 1: when you take a bunch of sort of simple parts
Speaker 1: and you allow them to interact, then what can happen
Speaker 1: can sort of be profoundly different than what you would
Speaker 1: expect from just those simple things alone. So classic examples
Speaker 1: of this are like the schooling of fish. You would
Speaker 1: never think that fish would school by looking at a fish,
Speaker 1: or the murmuration of starling's a tornado or hurricane. So
Speaker 1: these are examples, right, and so I'm making the analogy
Speaker 1: that our lives are like this also, Yeah, and just to.
Speaker 2: Dive into emergence for a more second.
Speaker 1: Right, this is one of the key principles in science
Speaker 1: is that you put a bunch of small stuff together
Speaker 1: and you get things at a higher level that you
Speaker 1: cannot explain.
Speaker 2: With this small stuff.
Speaker 1: So just back up for a second, because I think
Speaker 1: this is such a great concept. You know, the idea
Speaker 1: of reductionism in science is okay, you know, if you
Speaker 1: figure out the atoms or the transistors or whatever, we'll
Speaker 1: have an explanation for the thing. But that essentially doesn't
Speaker 1: work for most things. For example, you can't explain something
Speaker 1: like resilience or your love for your wife, or something
Speaker 1: predicated on just if you studied the neurons. In my
Speaker 1: book Incognitos some years ago, I wrote about emergent properties.
Speaker 1: I use the example of you know, if you look
Speaker 1: at a single bar of metal, it doesn't have the
Speaker 1: property of lion tightness. But if I put a bunch
Speaker 1: of those bars in a certain configuration, that I've made
Speaker 1: a cage and it can hold a lion. But that's
Speaker 1: not a property of any of the individual bars. Or
Speaker 1: you know, a molecule of H two O is not wet,
Speaker 1: but you put a bunch of them together, you have
Speaker 1: the property of wetness. Okay, So this is the concept
Speaker 1: of emergent properties of one of our favorite things in science.
Speaker 1: About how you kidd great? Okay, So and so, how
Speaker 1: did you choose that as the title for your life story?
Speaker 2: So well, the play on my life story is pretty clear.
Speaker 2: I'm basically saying I'm more than the sum of my parts.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to figure out how I made it, and
Speaker 2: it's highly nonlinear. There's you know, I can X y Z.
Speaker 2: These things all came together and also then what I
Speaker 2: do professionally, So the book is really a braided memoir, right,
Speaker 2: So I'm in this book. You also get a general
Speaker 2: audience introduction to the history of artificial intelligence, which is
Speaker 2: what I do professionally, right, AI applied to neuroscience or
Speaker 2: biological signals is what I do. So the reader will
Speaker 2: understand where I'm coming from because of these scientific interludes.
Speaker 2: That then, so when I say, oh, you know, in
Speaker 2: my postdoc years I trained are with current neural networks
Speaker 2: and that led me to do this, then the reader
Speaker 2: is just along with it. So because of those two
Speaker 2: things and how they synergize, that's why I named the
Speaker 2: book the way that I did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what do you think about this issue that
Speaker 1: whenever we try to explain our own lives, it's always
Speaker 1: a made up story in some ways in the sense
Speaker 1: that was just as you were saying, like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: this came together, and this came together, but.
Speaker 2: Who the heck knows? Right there are?
Speaker 1: You know, we come together as a combination of genetics
Speaker 1: and experience, and the genes that you come to the
Speaker 1: table with you had no choice over that, and for
Speaker 1: that matter, all your childhood experiences you really had no
Speaker 1: choice over that, and somehow those.
Speaker 2: Braided together to make you who you are.
Speaker 1: So when what was the experience like for you telling
Speaker 1: a narrative of your life. Did you feel like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I've pretty much nailed this or did you feel like, wow,
Speaker 1: who the heck knows how I got here from there?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, the way I would explain it is like, so,
Speaker 2: just coming back to this idea of emergence, I'm pretty
Speaker 2: confident that I got all the components right. But what
Speaker 2: I can't say is how they all combined right, that
Speaker 2: there's as a kaleidoscope or a crazy quilt. Somehow it
Speaker 2: all just came together right, And a lot of really
Speaker 2: lucky things had to happen for me, like extremely lucky things,
Speaker 2: that's right.
Speaker 1: So, so this young woman at Princeton who was serving
Speaker 1: the food right, serving the food, Yeah, she was a waitress,
Speaker 1: and so she came up to you and said how
Speaker 1: did you do? Because she was interested in going into
Speaker 1: a life of biology, but she had had a disadvantaged
Speaker 1: childhood and she saw you give the talk as she
Speaker 1: was serving the food, and she felt like, wow, that
Speaker 1: is that's what I want to emulate. So what would
Speaker 1: you tell her, now, now that you've done the work
Speaker 1: of writing the book and putting this together, what would
Speaker 1: be different?
Speaker 2: What would be different bout your answer? Yeah. So, you know,
Speaker 2: it was very clarifying to me when this happened, because
Speaker 2: it made me realize like who I was actually talking to,
Speaker 2: you know, because I'm out there talking to, you know,
Speaker 2: basically about two hundred Princeton neuroscientists and they're all listening,
Speaker 2: they're captivated, but the wait staff is actually stopped serving
Speaker 2: you know as well. And so I was like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I see what's going on. So that was very clarifying
Speaker 2: for me. You know what I would say to her now, honestly,
Speaker 2: you know it would it would boil down to bullet points,
Speaker 2: but I would I would say things like, find your people,
Speaker 2: you know, find your mentors, you know, be who you are,
Speaker 2: but don't don't lead with this kind of vulnerability because
Speaker 2: people aren't going to handle it. Let's unpack the find
Speaker 2: your people part. Yeah, what do you mean? Well, so
Speaker 2: I can't think of a single thing I've done in
Speaker 2: life that had any impact on anything that didn't involve
Speaker 2: other people, Right, I really mean that, Yeah, including that
Speaker 2: book which I did the line share of the writing.
Speaker 2: There's editors, there's there's all kinds of people who are
Speaker 2: supporting me along the way, my wife or the whole thing.
Speaker 2: So that's what I mean by that, Find people who
Speaker 2: can support you, find people who you can collaborate with,
Speaker 2: and sort of grow with those people. And I would
Speaker 2: say that's the thing that I was able to do.
Speaker 2: And when I look at people who have similar backgrounds
Speaker 2: to my own, what we're really primarily contending with is
Speaker 2: emotional dysregulation. Right. There are mental illnesses around emotional dysregulation,
Speaker 2: primary either anger, anxiety, depression. Right, So what will happen
Speaker 2: is if you don't have somebody you're talking like, I
Speaker 2: don't call my parents are both dead. I don't call
Speaker 2: my parents on a weekly on Sunday, and like, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of get some low key therapy or at least
Speaker 2: some you know, auta boys. So I think people with
Speaker 2: my kind of background can make mistakes very very quickly.
Speaker 2: And those mistakes can be small, but they accumulate, right.
Speaker 2: And so when I say, you know, find your people,
Speaker 2: find your mentors, it's my way of saying, like, you know,
Speaker 2: if you can do that implicitly, there's some emotional regulation
Speaker 2: going on. Yeah, oh that's lovely.
Speaker 1: This is a tangent. But how do you think about
Speaker 1: the Internet. Because you and I both grew up in
Speaker 1: a world without the internet, then it came along. There's
Speaker 1: lots of people talking about all the disadvantages of kids
Speaker 1: growing up with social media.
Speaker 2: And so on.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that's extraordinary is that people
Speaker 1: can find their people in a way that was never
Speaker 1: possible before.
Speaker 2: So let's say you're a kid.
Speaker 1: Growing up at Albuquerque, New Mexico, and you love some particular,
Speaker 1: you know thing or whatever your thing is. It's trivial
Speaker 1: to find people online who might live across the world
Speaker 1: who love that thing.
Speaker 2: Also, I think that's great. I mean, so I didn't
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm a real counter example. I for me,
Speaker 2: technology was a savior right now. Granted, get video games
Speaker 2: in the eighties were very different. They didn't have this
Speaker 2: social component where you could sort of rage out of
Speaker 2: control while you're playing Fortnite or something like this. But
Speaker 2: so for me, you know, I feel like I don't
Speaker 2: really have a prism of you into that world so much,
Speaker 2: because I mean, like, I hop on Twitter and I
Speaker 2: feel like shit after I afterwards. Right, So, I'm aware
Speaker 2: of that experience, but you know, I'm also able to
Speaker 2: to turn turn off the app, close the books, so
Speaker 2: to speak.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's go to video games for a moment.
Speaker 1: So you grew up with video games. What did that
Speaker 1: mean to you in your life?
Speaker 2: So for me, video games were simultaneously really two things.
Speaker 2: One was escape and fun. Fun. First, they were fun, right,
Speaker 2: but by via that fun, they were an escape and
Speaker 2: you know, and that was I think clear to me
Speaker 2: pretty quickly, even you know, they got a little bit
Speaker 2: older into my teenage years. But they were also a
Speaker 2: set of rules. I would say that they were a
Speaker 2: structure in my life, and that they might have even
Speaker 2: been the beginning of my interest in research. How do
Speaker 2: I beat this level? Right? How do I you know,
Speaker 2: like or just so I'm you know, like, I have
Speaker 2: a really obsessive mind in a good way. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: And so surely that all started when I'm spacing out
Speaker 2: in class and thinking about how I can go play Cubert. Right.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating because one of the things that's happening now
Speaker 1: with AI, the existence of AI against the backdrop of schools,
Speaker 1: is teachers and lots of people are starting to worry
Speaker 1: about does it make sense to teach kids all this
Speaker 1: stuff when AI can take care of it for them.
Speaker 1: But then I saw someone tweet something the other day
Speaker 1: that I thought was quite funny. He said, he said, yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree, and they shouldn't go to gym class because
Speaker 1: ubers can take them where they need to go, so
Speaker 1: they shouldn't run. And I thought that was a very funny,
Speaker 1: snarky comment, because what he was pointing out is it's
Speaker 1: worth the struggle and going through things.
Speaker 2: But I hadn't thought of that un till just now,
Speaker 2: that maybe video.
Speaker 1: Games provide that in a way that unfortunately kids are
Speaker 1: not going to sit and write essays and go through
Speaker 1: the hard work of something to solve a problem, in
Speaker 1: the way that video games might provide that.
Speaker 2: That's right, Yeah, it was sure surely that way for me, Right,
Speaker 2: it was surely. But I also did the hard work,
Speaker 2: I mean, part of the thing of growing up. It's
Speaker 2: true that I was feral as a young child, but
Speaker 2: I was also in a like religious, militaristic group homes
Speaker 2: and boarding schools. Was that useful? Yes? I mean I
Speaker 2: hate to admit it because I hated it, but like, yes,
Speaker 2: it was, you know, I was like movies nailed the
Speaker 2: chores thing and orphanages, like we were doing chores constantly
Speaker 2: all the time, and religion was a very strong force
Speaker 2: in our life. And so that I was I was
Speaker 2: socialized that way, right. But returning, returning to your question,
Speaker 2: I think that with respect to the social media and
Speaker 2: the internet and AI, at least let's focus on AI
Speaker 2: that my view is a little more nuanced, which is,
Speaker 2: I think you have to learn how to think, but
Speaker 2: the actual skills in and around thinking why I go,
Speaker 2: I don't want to pick on handwriting, but like, if
Speaker 2: you know you're never going to handwrite, why would you
Speaker 2: focus on that? Right, So there's a little nuanced. Yes,
Speaker 2: you need to think, but let's use the tools that
Speaker 2: we're developing that are modern, right, Right, This is a
Speaker 2: tough one for educators, you know.
Speaker 1: I recently interviewed Saul Kahn and lots of lots of
Speaker 1: people about this issue.
Speaker 2: And some people believe in look, let's go through.
Speaker 1: The hard work of let's say, geometry proofs sign cosine tangent.
Speaker 2: Who cares?
Speaker 1: Except it is an example of getting a kid to
Speaker 1: work hard on a problem that they might not otherwise do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I My way of relating to that is
Speaker 2: how I use chatbots right now, Like I have these
Speaker 2: like what I think are fabulous conversations going on with
Speaker 2: these chatbots. Me. We're going to you know, me and
Speaker 2: me and Claude are going to figure out consciousness. You know.
Speaker 2: So we're going back and forth on this. And the
Speaker 2: point I want to make is that, like I know
Speaker 2: how to use that chat bot because I'm trained, I
Speaker 2: have a PhD. You know, like I know where my
Speaker 2: well I'd like to think I know where my my
Speaker 2: weaknesses are. I'd like to think that I can, you know,
Speaker 2: take steps forward in the thinking or the conversation that
Speaker 2: we're having instead of just being spoon fed by this bot.
Speaker 2: But if you hadn't been brought up in a sort
Speaker 2: of rigor of thinking in a way to train yourself,
Speaker 2: that may not be available to you. I see.
Speaker 1: So somebody who doesn't, who doesn't grow up with a
Speaker 1: good education, might put in a question, get an answer
Speaker 1: and think great, that's that's the final answer.
Speaker 2: Is that what you mean? Oh? For me, I always
Speaker 2: collect my thoughts first, nice, always, always, always, because I
Speaker 2: want to contribute, right, And then you see how that
Speaker 2: I'll say, hey, clean up my thoughts because they will
Speaker 2: and then frankly do a better job. Right. So, but
Speaker 2: I'm in that sense, I'm always contributing with every query.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, I see from a neuroscience perspective, why do
Speaker 1: some kids survive trauma and do fine and other kids don't?
Speaker 2: I have no earthly idea, you know, So do you know?
Speaker 2: Do you know? Let me ask Let me ask you
Speaker 2: a much broader question. I'm a diet in the will neuroscientist.
Speaker 2: I love neuroscience. I find neuroscience answers to these kinds
Speaker 2: of questions almost uniformly unhelpful.
Speaker 1: Here's here's the part I find helpful is this new
Speaker 1: area of genetics times environment interactions. So there are studies
Speaker 1: by Casspy and others where they look at what are
Speaker 1: your genetic components that you're born with, and then what
Speaker 1: are the experiences you have. So they'll take let's say,
Speaker 1: young monkeys with two different flavors of serotonin receptors, you know,
Speaker 1: by which I mean you have slightly different genes here,
Speaker 1: slightly different genes there, so it's the same serotonin receptor.
Speaker 1: But here you've got the short what's called an allele,
Speaker 1: and here you have a long allele. The allele means
Speaker 1: it's the same thing that it codes for, but slightly
Speaker 1: different ways. Okay, Now you take these monkeys and you
Speaker 1: put some of them with their mother so they have
Speaker 1: a good childhood. And you take some of them and
Speaker 1: you put them off where they're just among their peers,
Speaker 1: which is pretty lousy even just for a baby monkey.
Speaker 1: And then you look at the outcome is measured by
Speaker 1: stress and anxiety and behavior measures. Okay, and what you
Speaker 1: find is that particular genes give resilience depending on the
Speaker 1: environment that they grow up in. So I think those
Speaker 1: kinds of things are very promising. They're very complicated in
Speaker 1: terms of understanding. These studies are very hard to pull off.
Speaker 1: But it's this sort of new area called, you know,
Speaker 1: gene times environment interactions.
Speaker 2: I'm all in. I mean, you know, the immediate critiques
Speaker 2: would be like, if you have to look at a
Speaker 2: social animal like a monkey, then you really have a
Speaker 2: very long time horizon to get ever, which is not great.
Speaker 2: The other the other thing is, again I'm not an
Speaker 2: expert in this, but my understanding is that for complex traits,
Speaker 2: my understanding is that genes and their interactions are incredibly incomplex,
Speaker 2: so it can be hard to say absolutely this thing
Speaker 2: is a direct uh causes directly this outcome, or even
Speaker 2: even if you added like and like, it would be
Speaker 2: to me an amazing outcome. To say this gene A
Speaker 2: and this environment be result in outcome x like that
Speaker 2: would be astounding to me.
Speaker 1: Absolutely what it maps onto is probabilities. So, for example,
Speaker 1: optionalom Caspi has done a bunch of studies looking at
Speaker 1: He asked this question probably back probably twenty five years ago, now,
Speaker 1: this question of are there genes for depression? And what
Speaker 1: he found is sort of It turns out that if
Speaker 1: your carrier of particular genes versus closely related alleeles, your
Speaker 1: probability of getting depression predicated on the number of really
Speaker 1: stressful life events you have goes way up if you're
Speaker 1: carrying a certain set of genes, and not if you're
Speaker 1: carrying others. So but but again it's probabilistic. But what
Speaker 1: he looked at is how many really traumatic life events
Speaker 1: like a horrible car accident or a death in the
Speaker 1: family or whatever. And it turns out that the more
Speaker 1: of these you have, if you're a carry of this
Speaker 1: you know set, then you've got a higher probability of
Speaker 1: presenting with clinical oppression. But of course you're right, it's
Speaker 1: not binary.
Speaker 2: Like even probabilities. I can work with it, just so
Speaker 2: so you know, like for me, these ACE scores adverse
Speaker 2: childhood events, they correlate. There's no genetics involved in this.
Speaker 2: They correlate with outcomes like you know, my sister and
Speaker 2: I have like we scored like an eight or ten
Speaker 2: on these things right, like just way off the charts.
Speaker 2: And you know what I would say is, if you know,
Speaker 2: I come back to the question you posed, what do
Speaker 2: you say to to the woman who's coming up? Hey man,
Speaker 2: how did you do it? Well? You know, I had
Speaker 2: a combination of genes the Ilo blah and the Aleo fu,
Speaker 2: and those really kind of helped me out. And I
Speaker 2: really hope you have those. That's kind of messed up. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it may be true.
Speaker 1: That's the problem is it may be true. The genes
Speaker 1: we land they matter. I mean, for example, you know,
Speaker 1: I would like to be a really great swimmer, but
Speaker 1: I don't have Michael Phelps's wingspan, and so there's no
Speaker 1: way I'm going to compete against him.
Speaker 2: So genes do matter, for better or worse. But I'm
Speaker 2: not disagreeing with that for the record. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 2: when it comes to when it comes to these life
Speaker 2: outcome type of traits, it is a tough conversation.
Speaker 1: So the only part that we can ever influence, and
Speaker 1: by we, I mean like even you and I as
Speaker 1: adults looking at new kids coming onto the scene, is
Speaker 1: the environment. So what lessons do you have in terms
Speaker 1: of how to influence other kids' lives? Not just this
Speaker 1: woman at Princeton in her twenties, but like small kids,
Speaker 1: the religious upbringing, the what do you call it, militaristic
Speaker 1: that brings yes, the or other versions or ways of
Speaker 1: going about it, what.
Speaker 2: Do you think about Yeah, So I have certainly benefited
Speaker 2: from a strong work ethic because of some of those
Speaker 2: group home experiences. I don't think they had to be
Speaker 2: quite so crazy to benefit from it, but I did
Speaker 2: benefit from that. I was on a podcast Reality Reality
Speaker 2: with Kate Casey. She went to Milton Nursery School with me,
Speaker 2: and so she hosted me on the podcast to talk
Speaker 2: about the book, and in the conversation she says, you know,
Speaker 2: I had this experience when I was I don't know
Speaker 2: if she was ten or twelve. I saw like a
Speaker 2: poster of a girl who was thirteen, and like, I
Speaker 2: should be on that poster, and you know, so she
Speaker 2: started having this fantasy. So what was the poster a
Speaker 2: post of some basically like I don't know if a
Speaker 2: team yeah, Jim Dropper, like doing like tennis star or something,
Speaker 2: whatever the case was. She related to it as a
Speaker 2: as an adolescent girl in a way that gave her
Speaker 2: a vision for what she might be in the future.
Speaker 2: And so here here I am talking about, well, I
Speaker 2: was told I was smart, and I created this sense
Speaker 2: of my future, and she's relating effectively the same story.
Speaker 2: So having so coming back to your question, having a
Speaker 2: sense of what the future might look like an idea
Speaker 2: that you can contribute to it. Even if it is
Speaker 2: you know, at least in my opinion, slightly pathological that like,
Speaker 2: you know, kids from these backgrounds have to be amazing
Speaker 2: in order to be anything at all, it was still
Speaker 2: better than nothing. So what I would say, you know,
Speaker 2: if if as to adults who might find themselves around
Speaker 2: these kids, it would be be a pillar of stability,
Speaker 2: Like less over a longer period of time is way
Speaker 2: way better than more over a shorter period of time,
Speaker 2: And this circles back to find find your mentors, you know,
Speaker 2: find people.
Speaker 1: Yes, And by the way, I love I'm coming back
Speaker 1: to this point because about the Internet, we're able to
Speaker 1: do that. Kids were able to do that now in
Speaker 1: a way that was never possibly for so growing up
Speaker 1: in Albuquerque, the number of people we met who we
Speaker 1: would feel like, wow, that's a real aspiration limited, right,
Speaker 1: But now I meet kids who are growing up, let's say,
Speaker 1: on Ted Talks, and they watch these talks, they see
Speaker 1: the best version of the world, give me the best
Speaker 1: part of the last for fifteen.
Speaker 2: Minutes, and they're like, Okay, I could do that. I
Speaker 2: could do that.
Speaker 1: I could do that Aspirationally, they're not dependent on just
Speaker 1: seeing a poster on the wall. But they can go
Speaker 1: and search and find the best tennis player, the best
Speaker 1: scientists and watch that. I just love that about this
Speaker 1: modern world. Yeah, okay, So a zooming back out.
Speaker 2: If you could go to that.
Speaker 1: Group home when you were younger and whisper one sentence
Speaker 1: to that little boy, who is you? What would that
Speaker 1: be and would it matter to him?
Speaker 2: Yes? And yes it would certainly matter. Keep your head up.
Speaker 2: You got this simple as that.
Speaker 1: Because did you feel at the time, like you don't
Speaker 1: have this and it was scary and worsome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that question is so adult that you know,
Speaker 2: it's not well formed in the sense of how a
Speaker 2: kid would relate to I'm just being tumbled around in
Speaker 2: a dryer for five years, right, So what I would
Speaker 2: say is anything that causes someone to look forward in
Speaker 2: life or any form of stability would be helpful. Honest,
Speaker 2: I would say, you got this, kid, buck up, you
Speaker 2: got it. You could and I would I would suggest,
Speaker 2: like to every adult out there listening to what I'm saying,
Speaker 2: say this to kids. I really think it matters, really truly,
Speaker 2: and will a kid believe you? Hell? Yeah? Kids anything
Speaker 2: that Kids are totally egotistical.
Speaker 1: But what's the thing you're saying to them is the
Speaker 1: future will be good, stay stay strong, stay.
Speaker 2: On the path. Yeah, the future will be good, stay strong,
Speaker 2: stay on the path. And you have agency.
Speaker 1: If you could redesign something about the child welfare system.
Speaker 2: What would you change? Oh, that's very easy. The number
Speaker 2: one thing that comes to my mind is the transition
Speaker 2: out of that system into adulthood. I think that's just
Speaker 2: a gross gap. You know, it's it's well known parents
Speaker 2: these days are supporting their kids into their mid twenties
Speaker 2: as at least, right, so's there's no financial support. This
Speaker 2: may be changing a little bit, but this would be
Speaker 2: my answer to you. There's no financial support, there's no
Speaker 2: emotional support, there's no structure. I mean, keep in mind,
Speaker 2: like you know, a lot of kids coming out of
Speaker 2: these kinds of systems are dealing with major emotional problems,
Speaker 2: dealing with educational lack and so support in through the twenties.
Speaker 2: I feel early twenties just feel so important for myself.
Speaker 2: When I finished so college was you know, they really
Speaker 2: work hard. There was an orientation. I met all these
Speaker 2: great people, I went into these classes. It was just
Speaker 2: seamless right into this beautiful college experience. And then I
Speaker 2: left college and my life fell apart. I had the
Speaker 2: worst year of my life. Right, so again, I'm not
Speaker 2: calling my parents, I'm not talking to people and finding
Speaker 2: a way to support kids in that kind of space
Speaker 2: I think is important. The other thing I would say,
Speaker 2: I have one more which is this may have actually
Speaker 2: already changed a little bit. When I was coming up
Speaker 2: in the eighties and early nineties, we were ten kids
Speaker 2: to a set of house parents that or sixteen at
Speaker 2: Millen Nursery School. That's crazy, right, that that is not
Speaker 2: the kind of attention, that is not nearly the amount
Speaker 2: of attention. It's not adequate for what kids actually need.
Speaker 2: And so if they you know, if this is a
Speaker 2: financial constraint, really, but if there was a ratio that
Speaker 2: was closer one to one between the kids and the parents,
Speaker 2: I think that would make more sense. Those those are
Speaker 2: my answers to your question. Got it?
Speaker 1: And this may come back to what we were talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, but is there anything that you're able to
Speaker 1: identify between the kids that you grew up with who
Speaker 1: did not make it?
Speaker 2: However we're defining that versus the kids who did. What
Speaker 2: I would say is there's a lot of sad tragedy,
Speaker 2: tragedies actually people in prison, a lot of suicide that's
Speaker 2: just real, a lot of lives that just kind of
Speaker 2: don't go anywhere. What I would if I had to
Speaker 2: pick one thing, it would be that the kids who
Speaker 2: I'm aware of making this is going to be inevitably reductive.
Speaker 2: But here we go. They all had a sense of
Speaker 2: where they were going to go. Yeah, they were future thinking,
Speaker 2: they were oh yeah, or had a solution to their
Speaker 2: world as a childhood that at least could potentially map
Speaker 2: out into early adulthood, as opposed to the kids who
Speaker 2: just didn't think about that or thought, here I am
Speaker 2: and in the war zone. Yeah, so you don't think
Speaker 2: about it at all, or you actually have some kind
Speaker 2: of survival strategy that's actively harmful. Oh like, if you
Speaker 2: want to go and eat people up, maybe you're a
Speaker 2: bully because it makes you feel better. Right, And this
Speaker 2: kid bully has a life like mine where that behavior
Speaker 2: developed before they even realized they were doing it. Right,
Speaker 2: So this is the this is the awful thing of
Speaker 2: the developing childhood mind. You are formed with this kind
Speaker 2: of psychology before you even know what happened. And now
Speaker 2: you're eighteen nineteen and you had better have some perspicacity
Speaker 2: to figure out that, Like, these behaviors are not the
Speaker 2: thing that are helping me, and changing that around is
Speaker 2: extremely difficult. A lot of the kids who did who
Speaker 2: had positive outcomes, did not have a self model that
Speaker 2: was highly problematic right in terms of either their behaviors
Speaker 2: or how they thought about themselves. So for myself, I mean,
Speaker 2: when I was ten years old, I told myself I
Speaker 2: was Einstein. I'm sad to say, I'm not Einstein. Einstein, right,
Speaker 2: So that really was a major problem for me to
Speaker 2: reckon with when I got out of college.
Speaker 1: Oh, you're saying you used that as a way to
Speaker 1: exact to a Positi outcome, but at some point you
Speaker 1: had a reckon.
Speaker 2: Has to reckon with the fact that it's not real.
Speaker 2: Oh fascinating. Yeah. So there's there's all kinds of games
Speaker 2: that are happening. Right, So my buddy Omar, he was
Speaker 2: the bully, my sister was the hot model, right, and
Speaker 2: and and so like, these are strategies that, depending on
Speaker 2: exactly what happens, can either be adaptive or not adaptive.
Speaker 2: Or what happened to your sister Ultimately she killed herself
Speaker 2: at what age? This was about five or six years ago,
Speaker 2: so yeah, into I guess her in her forties. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of that. It's shocking how much suicide
Speaker 2: there is.
Speaker 1: Does the word resilience cover up something as much as
Speaker 1: it reveals something.
Speaker 2: I don't take any meaning from the word resilience at all, zero,
Speaker 2: because it's all it is is a word, right, because
Speaker 2: I can't point to those I wish I could point
Speaker 2: to those genes because it would be an answer. Right,
Speaker 2: All I can do is pieces scraped together the components.
Speaker 2: It mattered that I was smart. It mattered that there
Speaker 2: was religion in my life as a kid, even though
Speaker 2: I couldn't stand it. It mattered that I was doing
Speaker 2: chores even though I couldn't stand it. It mattered I
Speaker 2: had a best friend when I was in second grade.
Speaker 2: The psychological ability to relate to somebody, Right, that was
Speaker 2: one of the most important things that happened to me.
Speaker 1: And so those things matter. That was my colleague David Cicillo.
Speaker 1: Whenever we talk about development, it's always tempting to draw
Speaker 1: straight lines. This is not just for neuroscientists, but for everybody.
Speaker 1: We say, look, this childhood is probably going to lead
Speaker 1: to that outcome, or we say these genes lead to
Speaker 1: those traits, but real outcomes are always much more tangled
Speaker 1: than that. As I emphasized in my book LiveWire, you
Speaker 1: can't think of genes like blueprints. At best, they're setting
Speaker 1: ranges and propensities. And really the only way to think
Speaker 1: about environment is that it's a shifting landscape of pressures
Speaker 1: and opportunities, and we always have signals that can arrive
Speaker 1: at just the right moment or just the wrong moment.
Speaker 1: So what emerges from the interaction of genes and environment
Speaker 1: is something even more complex than either alone. And all
Speaker 1: this converges in the way that a brain builds its
Speaker 1: SOLF over time. In a child's brain, synapses or strengthening
Speaker 1: and weakening, such that some circuits stabilize and others kind
Speaker 1: of dissolve a way. And what is so artistic and
Speaker 1: mysterious about life is that a million little things can
Speaker 1: change the trajectory. Anything from a chance encounter to having
Speaker 1: a best friend to having a mentor These things can
Speaker 1: all redirect the trajectory in ways that are invisible at
Speaker 1: the time and are detectable, if at all, only in retrospect.
Speaker 1: And this is the nature of nonlinear systems like life.
Speaker 1: You get lots of diverging paths. And this is what
Speaker 1: makes stories like David Cicillo's so compelling, because his story
Speaker 1: illuminates the vast space of possible outcomes that exist inside
Speaker 1: every developing brain. His story reminds us that what we
Speaker 1: see as a finished life is only one path through
Speaker 1: a landscape gape of branching possibilities. Other trajectories could have
Speaker 1: unfolded if the inputs were just slightly different, different timing
Speaker 1: or different people, or different.
Speaker 2: Doors that open or closed.
Speaker 1: So this all has implications for how we understand ourselves
Speaker 1: as individuals and also for how we think about society.
Speaker 1: How many minds never got the right conditions to express
Speaker 1: what they could have become. How much potential gets lost
Speaker 1: in every generation because of a lack of alignment between
Speaker 1: brains and their environment. So I love when we get
Speaker 1: to pause and ask these questions about who we are
Speaker 1: and how we got here. And I've always found the
Speaker 1: most mind bending one to be out of all the
Speaker 1: versions of you that could have existed, what were the
Speaker 1: elements that led to exactly this one? Go to eagleman
Speaker 1: dot com slash podcast more information and to find further reading.
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Speaker 1: David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.