David Brooks has a fascinating article book pitch in the New Yorker where he distills all the amazing research in neuroscience to help explain our ice cream choices. Sorry, I meant gelato:
To give a sense of how this inner story goes, let's consider a young member of the Composure Class, though of course the lessons apply to members of all classes. I'll call him Harold. His inner-mind training began before birth. Even when he was in the womb, Harold was listening for his mother's voice, and being molded by it. French babies cry differently from babies who've heard German in the womb, because they've absorbed French intonations before birth. Fetuses who have been read "The Cat in the Hat" while in the womb suck rhythmically when they hear it again after birth, because they recognize the rhythm of the poetry.Fascinating! Even though actual linguists revealed that accent study to be a steaming pile of merde concocted from ein Grosse Scheissemethodologie. And theAs a newborn, Harold, like all babies, was connecting with his mother. He gazed at her. He mimicked. His brain was wired by her love (the more a rat pup is licked and groomed by its mother, the more synaptic connections it has). Harold's mother, in return, read his moods. A conversation developed between them, based on touch, gaze, smell, rhythm, and imitation. When Harold was about eleven months old, his mother realized that she knew him better than she'd ever known anybody, even though they'd never exchanged a word.
Social Animal | How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life. [newyorker.com via @jadabumrad]
