“There are good behavioral, genetic, epigenetic, psychiatric, and social reasons to clean up neighborhoods and to treat vulnerable children with an extra bit of love. It doesn’t mean your kid will turn out to be perfect.”
The brain is organized in a bewildering number of ways, even to a silverback neuroscientist. The researcher Floyd Bloom once called it an “electrified jelly,” which is certainly what it seems like to a first-year medical student.
When a neuroanatomist sees a pattern, he goes crazy. I could have been studying butterflies and I still would have gotten excited. Patterns are where we get our buzz.