In part one of the review of Seven and a Half Lessons About The Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Maeva covers the first 3.5 lessons about the brain, namely:
This fascinating and entertaining book takes us into how the brain develops and how it's affected by our external environment, behaviors and inputs. A lovely read for anyone interested in why their emotions and life are the way they are.
Follow Maeva on Instagram for more content: https://instagram.com/purposefulliving.co
Want some 1:1 coaching with Maeva? Fill out this form: https://forms.gle/RfBKV8MpCiZu7vBy8
In part one of the review of Seven and a Half Lessons About The Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Maeva covers the first 3.5 lessons about the brain, namely:
This fascinating and entertaining book takes us into how the brain develops and how it's affected by our external environment, behaviors and inputs. A lovely read for anyone interested in why their emotions and life are the way they are.
Follow Maeva on Instagram for more content: https://instagram.com/purposefulliving.co
Want some 1:1 coaching with Maeva? Fill out this form: https://forms.gle/RfBKV8MpCiZu7vBy8
Welcome to purposeful living the podcast that empowers you to live your life with intention and purpose. I'm your host, Maiva Cifuentes, a business owner, investor, marketer, psychology graduate, certified confidence coach, cat mom, and improviser. I'm here to break down the woo woo. Into practical strategies that make actual sense for those that love the idea of leading with their heart spirit and universal guidance, but struggle to make any logical sense of it. I'm here to talk it through in practical terms and help you put it into action. In this podcast, I talk about communication and confidence. How to communicate effectively with your body, your mind, lovers, partners, co workers, clients, and friends. Through science, anecdotes, personal experiences, and practical exercises, we'll explore how your lifestyle and habits contribute to living your best life. Hey, hey, hey. I don't actually have a way to introduce myself yet in this podcast, or I guess say hello to you. Um, in my other podcast, I used to always go, hello, hello. Welcome back to another episode. But I feel like this is a little more personal, a little more chill. I'm just going to show up and, I don't know, I kind of want to feel like I'm just talking to a friend. But normally, I don't monologue like this to friends. It's like a two way conversation. Oftentimes... Maybe I'm just not being self aware, but oftentimes I feel like the friend is talking more and I'm listening, uh, just in general across all of my relationships. I'm not sure. That's probably not fully true. Um, but it does feel weird for me to like sit here and talk by myself without another person. conversing or like adding things for me to continue talking back to. Um, so yeah, this is the seventh episode. I'm getting used to talking like this. Um, also I'm not even looking at anybody. Well, there's birds being really loud outside, so maybe I can feel like I'm conversing with them, but I'll get used to this eventually, uh, I hope so. I do enjoy doing it, because I actually don't get a chance to talk like this this much, and it does help me put my thoughts into words. It helps, like, talking, which is also what's interesting about talk therapy, helps me... process what is in my head. And by process, it's like put it together in a different structure, I guess change the format of it, get it through to the other side. Um, so I'm have this information in my head and in order to have the process of getting it out into words that come out of my mouth. It means I have to actually go through them and think about them a little bit more logically because I tend to think a lot, I do think in words, I do think in words, but sometimes it's not full sentences. Sometimes it's just feelings. Sometimes it comes with images. So having to have it come out of my mouth means I do have to process that epiphany. Um, yeah, anyway, today my episode is about this book that I just read. Um, I haven't actually fully finished it yet. I'm at the very end, but it's just so fascinating. And it's called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. And the brain is crazy. Uh, okay, so let me tell you first about the author. The author is Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph. D. She's among the top 1% of most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a university distinguished professor at Northeastern University with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Barrett was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Neuroscience in 2019, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada. So let's just say... She's a pretty big deal. She knows her neuroscience. So this book is really really cool It kind of breaks down a lot of things in the science of the brain and how we feel emotions and it just ties in a lot of things that So I like to talk about in other ways, but she really makes it science scientific So a lot of this stuff that might sound woo woo for some of us even manifesting or the words that you say The words that you say to yourself actually changes your brain. And she talks about this here. So this is a short, this book is really good. It's really short and it's informal essay. It's entertaining. Um, it's not a full tutorial on brains as she says, but it's really, really, really scientific and it has a whole pendants at the back of it. So it's seven and a half lessons in the very first lesson. I'll go through the lessons one by one and kind of give you a little. But I do recommend that you read the book, because the book is... Just fascinating. Um, and it's a really easy read and she gives a lot of good examples. It's not like a heavy duty scientific read. I also bought another book by her which does seem to be a little bit more dense. Um, but this one's a really, really easy read. So, I'll just jump right into it without saying my normal story about myself or anything today. Let's just get into the brain stuff. Um, I'm always interested in the brain. You're surely interested in the brain because you got one. Just kidding. Not everybody with a brain is interested in them. But some of us are. And I think if you're listening to this, you probably are. So the first half brain is the brain is not for thinking. Interesting. She starts to go on about like And, um, basically in the first, the first ever animal was something called an Amphioxi, Amphioxi, uh, 550 million years ago. And they basically just sat in the water and, um, They didn't have taste or smell. They couldn't really move. It kind of acted like a blade of grass and just Anything that drifted into its mouth it would start to, it would just consume that. It did have a nervous system But it was just like a clump of cells Not a brain at all and apparently this is the animal from which we Uh, so it's like a distant cousin, basically. Um, but we are very different from this animal because this animal did not need a brain. Basically, it's cells, like the cells for sensing were the same as the cells for moving. So basically it reacted and it didn't really process anything. Um, Whereas we have like this powerhouse of a brain that processes all of this sensory information and makes more of it like thoughts and emotions. And she says everybody thinks that the brain, the obvious brain, evolved for us to think, right? That we evolved like... in some kind of upward progression from to get really sophisticated thinking brain because the thinking is the human's superpower. Um, but she says, actually, that is wrong. And that is profound misconception about human nature. Um, when actually The brain has been created to survive and basically to budget your body energy. So she goes on and talks about the body budget and how the, the body actually processes information. So it's actually like a financial budget. Um, So as we started to evolve, um, predators, predators came to be. And when predators came to be, that means prey started existing. So there was actually a point in human, or in animal, just life evolution, where there were no predator and no, no predators and no prey. So, Once predators started to exist, and even a little bit before that, one of this, like, game changing phenomena that existed, that became to be, was hunting. So maybe even before predator and prey, it was like hunting for plants, or looking for things. But hunting actually is when the predators and preys came. So, that's when animals started deliberately eating one another. Not accidentally, because before that, it was accidental. Um, so, hunting yet didn't require a brain, but it was a big step towards developing one. It was, um, That blob that I see over there in the distance, that fuzzy thing, is that something I can eat? Or is that something that is going to eat me? So as, um, creatures started evolving, as they started to better and better sense their surroundings, they were more likely to survive. So while the amphioxus, which is that blade of grass blob animal from the beginning, it was great in its environment, but it didn't even know that it had an environment. sense what was around it. So these animals started to develop, um, these sensory nerves and started to be able to sense at a distance. They started being able to make more sophisticated movements and the more efficient that they became, the more likely they were to survive. So if they chased a meal, but move too slowly, something else might eat the meal first. But if they burned up all their energy from a, never came, then they wasted resources they might need later. So really the key to survival became efficiency and energy efficiency. She says you can think about it as a budget. When you have a budget, you track money as it comes in, you track it as it goes out. And a budget for your body also tracks resources like water, salt, glucose as they come in and as they go out and your body, the goal is. Can we make this budget go a longer way? So, um, the body requires biological resources to survive. Every action you take is an economic choice. Your brain is saying, is this the best choice for me to make to survive? Um, So she talks a lot about this body budget prediction. Um, so a creature is starting to predict as they get these brains, they're preparing their movement before the next thing happens. So a creature that was prepared to move before the predator struck is more likely to be around tomorrow than a creature that awaited for the predator's pounce. Um, creatures that predicted the best were more likely to survive. Um, So, this whole body budgeting thing is the brain is actually trying to prepare and plan and predict for the body's needs before they have these needs. So how are you able to predict your body's future needs? It comes from information that you have in the past. So if you did something in the past and you had benefits, like you could get a tasty meal or you successfully escaped death from somebody that was hunting you, then your brain's like, Hmm, okay, that was good. So let me try to do that again next time. But you, the brain wants to know that it's worth the effort, economically speaking. So you don't want to use all of your energy if the payoff is not going to be big. So. As these animals started becoming more and more sophisticated, the first one was obviously the amphioxus, it had, it was basically a stomach on a stick, it had no bodily systems to regulate, and just had a handful of cells. But then, animals started getting more sophisticated, they started developing intricate internal systems, they got a cardiovascular system, they had a heart, it pumps blood, the respiratory system takes oxygen, eliminates carbon dioxide, There was an immune system that fights infection. This makes body budgeting a lot more challenging. It was basically like you are a solopreneur at first, and then you are the accounting department of a big multinational corporation and you're trying to keep everything organized. So you need this kind of centralized. station that is organizing and budgeting all of these different resources. It's a command center. It is the brain. So as animals started, um, evolving, the brain was there that efficiently supervised All of these muscles in motion. It supervised and balanced all the different hormones. It pumps blood at the rate of 2, 000 gallons a day. It digests food. It excretes waste. It fights illnesses. Um, and it's all of these different financial accounts, for example, or if you can think of the analogy, in this massive multinational corporation. So Lisa says, The brain did not evolve to be rational. It did not evolve. for emotion. It did not evolve for the imagination. All it did, the reason it evolved, or there's not a reason, but it's job is to control your body. to maintain this body budget and to predict energy needs before they arrive. So the job is not thinking, it's just running a complicated body. Uh, but it does think. So all of these new capacities that we have acquired from being the beings that we are, are actually just the result, just the consequences of the mission for keeping us alive. So the things that we create, our brain creates, like memories, hallucinations, emotions, lust, ecstasy, shame is a part of this mission to keep you alive. Um, so I found this really, really interesting. It's just, everything that we experience is a part of this body budget. Right? So if you think about our body budget, it's a deposit or a withdrawal as in a metabolic budget. It's actually your brain metabolizing external information. So everything. So our feeling of happiness, our feeling of anger, when we receive a hug, when we are being kind to somebody, or somebody's being kind to us, or if somebody has insulted us. Each one of those things is a deposit or a withdrawal in our metabolic budget. And this is the key to understanding how the brain works. Um, so that's the half lesson, which is just fascinating because... Uh, it just gives us insight on, like, how this brain is working, and it's also the key of how I understood, like, actually, every little thing that we do is either a deposit or a withdrawal in the brain's metabolism, and the brain's ultimate goal is to keep us alive and do it as efficiently as possible, so it doesn't want to burn extra, like, it doesn't want to do stuff that's to high in energy, um, if, unless the payoff is really big. Hey guys, just wanted to quickly interrupt this episode to pop in here and say I am opening up slots in my calendar for one on one coaching in September of 2023. I'm only going to be taking on about two clients at the time because my time is super limited between running the business. I'm also doing a bit of marketing for another business I've invested in, plus working on this podcast. So I can only take on two at the moment, but it's going to be extremely Powerful. If you're looking for ways to feel more confident at work. Speaking to your boss or colleagues, or if you're frustrated because things just don't go your way and you want to be able to change that and take responsibility for it. Or you want to be able to speak your needs more comfortably in dating, in a relationship with your partner, or even just, you know, be that person that can receive instead of everyone always taking things from you. Um, this is going to be super valuable for you. Um, so I recommend that you jump on it as quickly as possible. You can either fill out the form in the link in my bio or just send me a DM and we can get that on the calendar, uh, booked and ready to go. So, lesson number one is we have two, we have one brain, not three. So, You guys are probably familiar with this, um, idea of, like, the three different brains. We have the lizard brain, which is called the survival brain, the limbic system, or the emotional brain, and the neocortex, which is the human rational brain. So, um, according to this, like, evolutionary story, which came from Plato initially, um, the human brain has three layers. One for surviving, one for feeling, one for thinking. thinking. And they called it the triune brain. Um, and really the, the idea, and maybe it was supposed to be a metaphor, she says, but people took it quite literally was that these different brains evolved in layers. So if you were to look back at older, um, animals, there should be these different layers in the brain. Um, And she says, yeah, I mean, people like that story. It does sound compelling to have these different brains that are responsible for different things. So like, um, you know, I, I want to have this beer. My, I don't know, animal brain wants to have a beer, but I decide not to have it because I, that's my impulsive lizard brain who wants it. And my... Emotional system pushed me towards it, but then my rational neocortex said, Let's not do that because we have work tomorrow. But she says humans brains do not work that way. Bad behavior doesn't come from ancient and unbridled inner beasts and good behavior is not the result of rationality. And, she says, rationality and emotion are not at war. They do not even live in separate parts of the brain. So this is actually a big myth that has been pushed for thousands of years. Um, but as she like neuroscientists have been studying brain evolution, they discovered that while the neurons of two species of animals can look very different, um, they, but. They still contain the same genes, which means that those neurons have the same evolutionary origin. So we, if you can find the same genes in humans and rat neurons, for example, certain of them, then that means they were most likely present in our last common ancestors, which means. Evolution did not add layers to the brain like they did, like, geological layers of rocks. Um, so, how did our brains evolve then if it wasn't by adding layers? But it really is just that brains, as they become larger, they reorganize. They become, um, you know, just a different organization, just like a company. A company doesn't grow in... layers, it just reorganizes and starts acting differently. Um, she says it's pretty tricky, like it's tricky to compare brains of different species to see what's similar because evolution is twisty and it's unpredictable. It's not, you don't always see what you get. But, um, human brains did not emerge from reptile brains by evolving extra parts for emotion and rationality. It's actually different, probably more interesting things that happened. Um, so when an embryo starts producing neurons after conception, so the brain manufacturing plan begins after conception, um, they are created in a very, very predictable order. The order is the same for most animals. For mice, rats, dogs, cats, horses, anteaters, humans, and every other mammal, the brain is created in the same order. Um, So your brain is created the same brain, in the same, with the same brain creation plan as a rat. Um, but, the brain creating stages just last longer or shorter. So while the biological blocks are the same, the time to develop the brain is different. So if you look at a horse, like who's just born, Um, they can already walk. They literally come out of the vagina and they start walking around. Whereas, first of all, babies are completely useless, like they will die when they're born. But a human's brain is not actually fully developed until they're about 25 years old. Like, until we're, like, a full, like, past adulthood, uh, or, you know, official 18 year old adulthood, you actually don't have a fully developed brain. So it just takes a lot longer for humans to develop these brains. So when you start asking, like, what is emotional behavior? What is, um, emotional behavior? Like why are we so different from animals? It's just that we have a way longer development period, uh. So, she also dives into rational behavior. Most people saying rational is the absence of emotion. Thinking is rational and emotion is irrational. Um, but that's not true, actually, she says. Sometimes emotion is rational. Like if you feel afraid because you're in danger, that's a rational emotion to be feeling. Um, or... Scrolling through social media for hours and you are feeling that you're going to come across something important, that's probably not rational. And that's a thinking thing. You think you might come across something important here. So, it's not really the same thing, but rationality, she says, is just body budgeting. How can we manage all the water, salt, glucose, and all the other resources we need to best survive? How can we spend or save our resources? to succeed in our environment. Um, so that is lesson number one. Lesson number two, your brain is a network. So, and this she says is not a metaphor. It literally is. A network. And she says that there's a lot of metaphors about the brain, like if you've heard that the left side of your brain is logical and the right side is creative, that's just a metaphor. And also the idea that your brain has a system 1 for quick and instinctive responses, and system 2 for slower and more thoughtful responses. And that comes from the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Although he's clear that it's a metaphor, but a lot of people didn't understand that it was a metaphor. But she says the brain, being a network... Is not a metaphor, it is actual fact. So the brain is a network, it's a collection of parts that are connected to function as a single unit. Um, the brain as a network is a description that comes from the best available science about how brains evolved, how they are structured. There are 128 billion individual neurons that become a single brain network. So she also explains here what it kind of, what it looks like, each neuron looks like a little tree. Bushy branches at the bottom, along trunk and roots at the bottom. Yes, she is using a metaphor here. But they basically fire off communications to each other. So, a neuron wants to send a message to another neuron. We talked about this in the first episode. The electrical signal races down. to the roots, and it connects to the synapse, which then a chemical goes across the synapse and fires onto the other neuron, and then the information has been passed to the other one. So it's an arrangement of dendrites, that knits all of them together uh, into a network. But then it starts to get, um, pretty complex. So, for each, each neuron is directly passing information to Not all of the neurons in the entire system. So one neuron will send information to like a few thousand other neurons and receive information from a few thousand others. So there's actually, this creates about 500 trillion neuron to neuron connections. Um, so there's a lot of connections. So, if you were to... If every neuron were to speak directly to every single other neuron in the network, this would require more connections than your brain can actually sustain with energy. It's just too much. So the brain actually works a bit like the global air travel system, she says. So the air travel system has about 17, 000 airports across the world, okay? Each airport It has like a hub, so an airport will run direct flights to some other airports, but not to every other airport. Sometimes you gotta have a layover. Um, if every airport sent flights to every other airport, then air traffic would get so crazy, there would be billions more flights every year, and the system would just run out of fuel and pilots and runways would collapse. So instead of doing that, some airports take the burden off the rest and they serve as hubs. So there might not be a direct flight from Lincoln, Nebraska, uh, to, to Rome, from Lincoln, Nebraska to Rome, Italy, but you can fly to Newark International Airport in New Jersey and then you hop onto a longer distance flight to Rome. So you have these layovers and the, and this is to, um, allow it to operate globally. and not collapse because you ran out of resources. So the brain is actually organized in the same way. The neurons are grouped into clusters that operate like airports. Uh, there are some local ones and there are hubs for communication and they are very densely connected to a bunch of other, um, clusters. And it makes this very, very complicated system more efficient. And it's, um, these hubs are a. Super critical infrastructure for the brain. So... The brain network is not static. It changes all the time. Some of the changes are super fast. The brain wiring, um, has a bunch of chemicals that complete the local connections between neurons, and sometimes they change. If one hub goes down, it takes another, another route, and it does so pretty fast. Um, so some of these chemicals in the brain are called neurotransmitters. So we have glutamate, serotonin, dopamine, we all know about these. And they help some of the signals pass across. So the neurotransmitters act like airport staff. They're ticket agents, security screeners, ground crew, and they speed up or slow down depending on how well they're working, but we need them for these airports, um, to work. So when brain chemicals act on other brain chemicals, so sometimes serotonin and dopamine can act on other neurotransmitters, then we call them neuromodulators. So it's kind of like... So if it's clear, the planes fly quickly when it's stormy, the flights can't go. So neuromodulators and neurotransmitters help your brain's single structure take on trillions, trillions of different paths of activity. So, it's super, super dynamic. Uh, a single neuron can take different roles. It wears many hats. So, for example, your ability to see is so tied is very, very closely tied to an area of the brain called the occipital cortex. And it's routinely called the visual cortex, but it's neurons could also carry, and they often do carry information about hearing and touch. Um, if you blindfold people for a few days, like people with typical vision for a few days and teach them to read Braille, um, the visual cortex. These neurons then start to become more devoted to the sense of touch, which is pretty amazing. So, no neuron has one single function. They can wear many hats, they can play many things, and they change depending on the sensory information that is coming in to you. So it's very complex, it's very flexible, um, and it can be very creative. Uh, that said, because of how complex and creative it can be, it can make it more resilient to injury as well. So if one neuron stops working, other collections can work for it. Um, so there's a lot of metaphors here, but the actual network is not a metaphor. So the brain is a network, and that's lesson number two. Lesson number three, and this one is absolutely fascinating. Little brains wire themselves to their world. Um... So here we're talking again about human brains because we go back to say, so if you look at a newborn snake, that's already slithering around all by itself. Horses can walk, but human newborns are pathetic. They can't control their own limbs. Can't even move their hands for weeks. Um, and the brain doesn't take on its full adult structure again until it's about 25 years old. It takes 25 years for the human brain to actually finish wiring in its process. Um, nobody knows why we have evolved this way, but what is very interesting is the baby's genes and the baby's brain development, that means, are regulated by the environment. So, you actually, it's, she says that It's really unhelpful to look at this nature versus nurture debate because it completely Um, is dependent on the environment around. For example, the, um, brain parts that are most centrally involved in vision, they develop after birth only if the baby's retinas are regularly exposed to light. So you need light to develop the vision part of the brain. You need, um, sound to develop the hearing part of the brain. And it's not only from the environment around us, but it's really, really heavily critical on the caregivers. So, when you are cradling a newborn, they don't understand faces until you present your face to her at the right distance, and she starts to process and recognize faces. When you expose your baby to boxes and buildings, you're training the visual system to see edges and corners. Uh, and the brain, as it develops as, you know, across the 25 years, it starts a process that she calls tuning and pruning. So tuning means strengthening the connections between neurons, particularly connections that you use frequently and that are important for budgeting. Um, then pruning is what she calls the neural equivalent of, if you don't lose it, If you don't use it, you lose it. So it's also critical because babies, humans are born with a lot more connections than they're going to use. It doesn't know which ones it's going to end up using. And the ones that it ends up using really depends on the immediate environment, uh, the culture that you grew up in, the, the caregivers that you have, and it's just doesn't, it just wants to be as efficient as possible. So it's going to prune the ones that aren't being used that much, just the same as you would do with the plant. Um, But you can, pruning these extra connections makes room for more learning. So, the caregiver actually regulates the baby's physical environment. So you manage your, your own body budget now as an adult, when you're hungry you can open the fridge, when you're tired you can go to bed, when you're cold you can put on a coat. But babies can't do any of these things by themselves. They can't even burp by themselves. So that's where the caregivers come in. The caregiver is managing her body budget by feeding the baby, setting sleep times, wrapping the baby in blankets, cuddling the baby. and helping the baby's internal systems operate efficiently so the baby can stay alive and healthy. And then the baby can start, the baby's brain can start tuning and pruning itself to perform healthy body budgeting itself. So as the baby's brain becomes more capable of controlling its body, then the caregiver's role becomes less and less important. But it does take many years for that to happen. Um. But little brains are also get wired by what the caregivers don't do. So if you don't let a baby fall asleep on its own and you rock her to sleep every night, the brain might not learn how to fall asleep without help. Um, If the baby is crying for a long time and you don't check in with it, then the brain might learn that the world is unreliable and unsafe, which is very interesting. And it goes back to some of these core wounds that I talked about in the last episode. And you also learn how to pay attention during this time. So if you're in a crowd and you're not really listening to any conversations, then suddenly you hear your name and you turn around. Um, that's because you've been tuned to hear your name. Um, so, it's the caregiver that teaches the brain actually how to pay attention to things. So it guides the baby attention to a point of interest and says, Look, this is the thing that you should be looking at. So, when a mother picks up a toy and looks at it and she, looks at the little baby. Then she looks back at the toy. Then she guides the baby's gaze to this toy and she says, look, it's a cute little toy. And then this back and forth scenario of the gaze and the mother's speech. This is called sharing attention and it's showing to the baby. that this thing is significant. This is the thing that you should pay attention to. And you can actually tell like the baby's trying to test, should I pay attention to this? Should I pay attention to that? Um, the infant will, something the baby is sometimes going to ask you, it's going to look at something and then look back at you and say, do I need to pay attention to this thing for my body budget? And the caregiver is the person who teaches this. So as you are growing, um, the caregiver actually, is wiring this brain for the baby and the baby is actually super dependent on social on the social world, and it's required. So, required, um, babies need to have this social world to develop normally and typically. And she talks about this story, which is pretty horrendous. Um, it had me like gasping when I read this, for examples of what happens when there are no social inputs for babies. Um, To guide their attention, speak or sing to them, or cuddle them. What happens when these needs are not met? What happens when you deprive babies of what they need to survive? So in the 1960s the communist government of Romania outlawed contraception and abortion because the president wanted to expand the population and become an economic power and therefore a world power. So it's like, I'm just gonna have a bunch of babies born, and then we're gonna have a huge population. So when they banned contraception and abortion, there was a bunch of new babies, and most of these families could not afford them. So they put hundreds of thousands of children in orphanages. And people could just not take care of them. They were appallingly mistreated. Um, and so she actually had this like case study of these children who were in the orphanages, which was basically the babies warehoused in rows of cribs with no stimulation, little stimulation, no social interaction. The nurses would come in, feed them, change them, put them back in the cribs. That was it. Nobody cuddled with them, nobody played with them, nobody talked to them, or shared attention. They were just completely ignored. So these babies grew up to have, to be intellectually impaired. They had problems learning language, they had difficulty concentrating and resisting distractions, because nobody had shared attention with them. So their brains never developed the wiring to have an effective spotlight. And they had trouble controlling themselves. So they had mental and behavioral issues. But also, their bodies were stunted, because their caregivers could not keep their body budget solvent. So, their brains never learned to budget effectively. Um, so this is really a shocking effect, but it's consistent with what scientists know about other babies raised in severely socially impoverished conditions. So, the brains tend to be smaller, the key brain regions are smaller on average, and um, some of these are reversible. If you can change it in the first few years of life, apparently, but if it goes for too long, then these ill effects possibly permanent and very, very, very likely. So, it's just a very interesting study of saying what can happen to the body, um, when babies, or to the, to humans, when babies are not put in the right environments. Uh, when they're put in poverty, when there's loud noises that don't allow them to sleep, when they're, um, you know, poor temperature regulation because they don't have, uh, heat or ventilation. So, She asks, how did evolution get our species into this situation in the first place? Why does a baby brain wiring depend so critically on social and physical input for it to develop? And this is mostly humans because other animals they develop as soon as they come out. And it's just basically this, we don't know why, but it helps our cultural and social knowledge flow from generation to generation and Um, we pass on culture, basically, this way, and we're social creatures. It is important, and the baby's brain wire themselves to the world. It's not wired before you come out, for humans. It, it wires themselves according to the world, and it helps us create that world. And, um, if we are good to our babies, we can grow their brains healthy and whole. So, I think I've been going on for long enough. for this. So I'm actually going to continue part two, which is going to be, um, lessons four, five, six, and seven. Um, I'm going to finish that in another episode. I still have to finish the book anyway, so that's going to give me some time to finish the last chapter. Uh, and so I'm going to leave it there for now. Watch out for part two or just get the book yourself because it's really fascinating. And, um, that's it for me today. Thanks for listening. Goodbye./ Outro Music