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Nov. 16, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:28
1510 Babies, Brains, Nature and Nurture - An Introduction to the Interview with Dr Stuart Shanker

A brief discussion of the article that first prompted me to contact Dr. Shanker for the interview.

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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. This is a prequel to a fascinating interview that I had with Dr.
Schenker, who is a professor of philosophy and psychology at York University.
I found out about him November the 3rd, 2009, a paper in Toronto here called the Toronto Star.
There was an article, Newborn Brains Profoundly Similar.
I'll just read a few excerpts from it, and then I'll explain why I thought it was so important to have a chat with this fellow.
Many scientists attribute 20% of a person's outcome in life to nature and 80% to nurture.
This is a huge change from the 60s and 70s when it was considered to be mostly nature that was the determinant in how we turned out in life.
But we really, we, not me, they have done a huge amount of research on the actual physical brain and viewed the development of the brain.
Through prenatal, through the womb, through early childhood and so on.
And they found that our personalities, our characters are so immensely formed by our environment that it is a single greatest and deterministic factor about how it is that we're going to turn out in life.
We're all born with the same number of brain cells, about 100 billion.
Poetically enough, the same as the number of stars in the Milky Way.
But it is the connections between the neurons which characterizes us as human beings, gives us IQ, gives us language skills, gives us mathematical skills, social skills, empathy skills, deferral of gratification skills, all of those things which are so important to success in life.
And they've really done a lot of work to map this kind of stuff.
It's no longer just theory. They've lifted the lid on the brain so that we can really see what's going on.
In early childhood, and it is so absolutely essential what happens in early childhood, as I've argued for many years.
The peace of the world depends on the quality of the parenting.
It is the caregivers who literally shape and mold the mind of the child that they have been given to care over and to love.
And it is the development of the personality, particularly the development of dysfunctional aspects of the personality, narcissism, sociopathy, lack of empathy, selfishness, all of these things, this doctor argues, is nurture, not nature. And so I think that hopefully it places some of my focus on the family in some perspective.
And this is all new stuff.
It's really over the last 30 years, we've learned more as a species about how the mind develops than over the previous 2,500 years.
And it has a lot to do with the new technology that is available to map the brain and much more inventive tests.
and certain female psychologists have argued it is the entry of women into the psychological field that has provided more of a focus on children, for obvious reasons.
So these are a few things that were mentioned in the article, and then I hope that you will sit through the interview.
I found it absolutely fascinating, and that a man is a wealth of information.
It used to be said that biology is destiny, as if each human brain contained its own personal genetic limitations.
Today, breathtaking findings by neuroscientists are showing that biology is the ultimate level playing field.
The human brain at birth holds within it, untold, often untapped, equal opportunities only slightly influenced by genetic prophecy.
So we're all born equal.
We're all born equally smart.
We're all born equally mature.
We're all born with equal potential.
But when you look at the staggering peaks and valleys of human achievement that comes down, it comes down to how you're cared for as a child.
Many scientists now believe that 20% of a person's outcome in life is the result of innate brain capacity.
The other 80% is based on what happens after birth, and to some degree before birth.
It means, controversially, that nurture is far more important than nature alone, though of course the two work in tandem.
And that means that changes to nurturing, particularly parenting and schooling, can affect whether a child becomes a surgeon or a slacker.
Quote, Most people think of biology as a limit, but I think of it as a platform, says Zachary Stein, a PhD candidate in human education and development at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education.
These findings, that there is no essential biological differences at birth between a boy brain and a girl brain, raise questions about the plan for an all-boys elementary school.
This guy, Bruno Della Chiesa, author of OECD's book, Understanding the Brain, The birth of a learning science says he's been confronted many times.
Is there a female brain and a male brain?
That does not seem to be. Functioning MRI studies show that there's no difference in young male brains that would explain why boys might have more trouble reading.
This is a modern take on the Renaissance concept, which has really fallen out of favor of tabula rasa, right?
The blank slate.
And it's not quite as simple as that.
Babies are born with quite a huge amount of innate knowledge about the world.
Like if you take a newborn, And you stick your tongue out at a newborn, the newborn will stick their tongue out back at you, which makes no sense because they've never seen a tongue.
They don't even know what a tongue is.
They've been in a womb the whole time, but they know.
So we're born with a huge amount of knowledge about the world and ability to process that knowledge, but in terms of our potential and our development as social beings, as moral beings, as thinking beings, as learning beings, that is entirely, it would seem virtually entirely, dependent upon the environment that we're raised in.
The newborn's brain contains about 100 billion neurons, the nerve cells, capable of communicating with each other electrochemically.
You don't get more, you don't lose any, I mean, unless you get half decapitated.
The difference between the baby and the adult brain is the amount and locations of connective tissue, the synapses, among the neurons.
So it's the degree to which the cities have highways between them that creates capacities.
An adult brain has perhaps 100 trillion to 500 trillion synapses, right?
That's a huge gap, or a huge spread, I suppose you could say.
It's capable of pruning and building the new ones throughout life.
And we go through these, you know, functionally babies are literally geniuses in terms of their ability to learn.
I can tell you that as a new parent.
But our capacity to learn new things in the same way diminishes over line.
The brain plasticity, right, which is the degree to which the brain can adapt to new things, learn new things and wrap itself around new environments, diminishes and our brain hardens over time, like our arteries, I suppose.
And that's a good thing. Because if the brain remained as plastic as it was when we were newborn, we would forget where our house was, like we would get a new brain every month or two, and that would not be good for our existing memories.
So the hardening is good in terms of memories, but it's bad in terms of the bad habits that we may have received or the lack of development we may have received as children.
Conceptually, given the same stimulation, any brain can be pretty much as smart as the next, except in real life that doesn't happen.
What gets in the way? That seems to be connected mainly to social factors, including how you perceive your own ability and how others do, however prejudiced, as well as the amount of experience and opportunity you get throughout life, and such things as how well you eat.
That means two brains that can start out the same way can be dramatically different at the age of two.
If one has been deprived of play, talk, touch, food, and love.
Multisensory cuddle input.
Love, affection, mirroring, eye contact, enthusiasm, excitement, play.
Whether the child gets these or whether the child doesn't get these fundamentally changes who they are, and it would seem almost permanently.
By the age of five, when most children start school, the difference in the connective tissue in the brain can be even more startling.
The level playing field that they started with is no longer level.
Some children can read fluently by kindergarten, and others still don't know their colors.
The 2000 book, From Neurons to Neighborhoods, edited by Jack Shonkoff and Deborah Phillips.
Notice these striking differences, which are connected with levels of household wealth and status.
These end up predicting how well the children later do in school.
That is, unless the child can make up the disparities through terrific teaching and other factors.
Not really going to happen in poor schools, poor public schools.
Yeah, Arthur Jensen, since the late 1960s, he's been a prolific and persuasive researcher who maintains that much of a child's ability to think is hereditary.
So this is the fellow that I ended up getting in touch with, and I'm going to try and get in touch with more of these people because this is absolutely essential when it comes to making the world a better place, in my opinion.
These put together the findings of hundreds of research studies for this report went to the US National Research Council.
It concluded that non-genetic influences are the main reason for differences among adults and that interventions to help shape children's brains are critical.
Infant brain imaging, baby brains, wave studies, and even autopsies of infants show the profound similarities among newborn human brains.
They're all born the same. Adult brains, however, are profoundly different biologically.
And this is really fascinating. Stuart Shanker, and this is the guy I talked to, a research professor of psychology and philosophy at York University in Toronto, says that brain surgeons have concluded that every adult brain is so different that even basic landmarks can be hard to find.
We're so different.
Now, I would think that philosophy and science leads us to be the same because it points us at reality and so on, but...
If we are prejudiced, if we are raised badly, if we are given to addictions to illusions like statism or collectivism or religiosity or whatever it is, we're going to end up with very, very different brains.
And I would submit there's nothing more alien and more foreign We're good to go.
But when we look at somebody from our own culture who speaks the same language, we think they're the same, but if they have a fundamentally different kind of brain based on their experiences, there's nothing more foreign.
And this explains to me a lot of the confusion and the frustration and the conflict and so on that occurs, and why people who bring rational and empirical arguments to bear on particular problems end up with so much bang, bang, bang, bang, bang against the wall.
Because we're dealing with people who are like a different species in terms of their brain structure.
But because we don't see them as a different species, they're even more foreign than a different species because we don't waste time trying to reason different species.
Stuart Shanker says the idea that there are brain topographies turns out to be nonsense.
This guy says, and he'll go more into this in our interview.
Anyway, so then, you know, of course, everybody says, well, we need more government to solve with this.
And of course, that is absolutely not the case.
So, I hope that you will enjoy this interview and I hope that you will read up more on this absolutely fascinating and essential, essential topic.
Those of us who are working for a free and peaceful world really need to understand the science that is occurring that is new from when most of us learned about this stuff in school or grad school because it's really only coming out now.
And so I hope that you will have a chance to listen to this interview which I'll post right below here on YouTube or in a related field if it's on another site.
And thank you so much, as always, for watching and for listening and for donating.
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