Dr. David Linden: Life, Death & the Neuroscience of Your Unique Experience

There's something about mom being stressed and carrying the fetus at a particular stage that seems to impact brain development in a way that then makes that child more likely to be schizophrenic or autistic when they grow up.

If you look, again, in countries like the US or in Western Europe that are fairly affluent where people tend to have good access to nutrition and medical care and schooling... then IQ test score is heritable in the ballpark of 60-70%. But if you look at people who don't have those benefits... then IQ is less heritable.

It's well known, particularly in males, that chronic masturbation can produce desensitization of sexual sensation in the penis. And that could be as a result of a physical change, a morphological change in the Krause corpuscles, but it's more likely to to be a change in their function that you wouldn't be able to simply see by looking at an outline of their structure in the microscope.

So much of science is designed to try to find general principles of a function of the brain, of physiology, of genetics and to ignore individual variation. But individual variation is so important to our human experience ... It's something that that requires a lot of attention.

Every adult finds poop odors unpleasant, but babies happily play with their own poop. They have to learn that that's disgusting ... It is not innate. They're only a few innate odor aversions and a few innate taste aversions that we're born with...

One way in which experience modifies the visual world has to do with how much light you're exposed to in the first 5 years or so of your life. And so, kids that don't get outside are much more likely to be myopic... when they grow up than kids who got outside.

One of the most heritable traits that we know about in humans is height. And in the United States, height is about 85% heritable. 85% of the variation in the trait of height can be explained by what you inherit from your mother and your father.

If 5% of the variation in these personality traits is not from your genetics and it's not from your family, where does it come from? And the answer seems to be is that it comes from the random nature of the development of the body and the nervous system.

When you look at the variation in the way sense organs function, it's almost a miracle that we can agree on a common reality at all, even within the human species.

If people receive ear training starting at a young age, the chance that they will develop perfect pitch can improve drastically.

What is now, I think, fairly well-established is that you can transfer things epigenetically over a single generation as a result of experiences that the mother has during pregnancy.