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