Close Encounters with Addiction

stress. And if you look at the personalities or the life histories of people on that side of the spectrum you can see the correlation. I

There is a structure in the brain called the hippocampus, which is engaged in memory and in emotional processing. That organ is smaller in people with a strong right-wing perspective. I’ll tell you something else, what shrinkss the hippocampus is high levels of cortisol and

In such rats there are more receptors for the brain’s natural tranquilizing chemicals so they are not as stressed as the rats that are not so well-licked by the mother. It’s not genetic, because if you take the rats of mothers that don’t lick so well and put them with mothers that do, they grow up to be normal, and vice versa.

prevalent in these violent kids. And all these kids have also been abused at home. They also found the same gene variant in other kids who came from good homes, and those kids were less violent than the other kids. Now do you think the gene was coded for violence? It couldn’t have been, otherwise all the kids would have been violent.

Now let me give you a specific example of that. A study was done in Australia where they looked at violent kids, and you know what they found? They found a gene variant that was

And if you give them that, then their brains will develop properly.

Adults must understand that kids need emotional connections more than they need math lessons, more than they need standardized tests. They need emotional connections with safe and healthy adults.

has to biologically, the child will connect to whoever is around, and that is the peer group. So now you have this overwhelming influence of peers, and for the first time in history you have immature creatures being more important in each other’s lives than the adults are. These immature creatures then become the models and the mentors to each other

We need to become aware of that and of what we’ve lost and what that means for our children—and by the way what it means for our children is that when the nurturing adults are not around, since the child’s brain is wired to connect with somebody, it

What you can do is to be there and support her and accept her and not be freaked out by it.