Yeah.

So experience in your life molds you, but not just social experience.

You are molded by the diseases that you have fought off, even those that were fought off by your mother while you were in utero.

You are molded by the temperature in the first few years of your life and by the foods you eat and by the bacterial community in your gut and other parts of your body.

So experience is a much better term than nurture because it subsumes nurture within it and then includes all these other things that are so deeply important to our individuality.

And then the other reason I don't like it is because if I were to place nature versus nurture, I would say genetics coupled with the experience throughout life that is as broadly considered, but then there's a third thing that people don't talk about.

So imagine we've got monozygotic twins, what people like to call identical twins, and I think if anybody has ever actually been around identical twins, even as infants, you know they're not really identical actually, either in their bodies or in their personalities.

Mm-hmm.

This is a new phenomenon, and just the internet in general, it's a new phenomenon that we are grappling with and that we don't completely understand.

Yeah, well, I'd say this is particularly important all through life.

Touch is a fundamentally emotional sense, and we tend not to think about it.

It's probably the least discussed, least understood sense.

It doesn't have the primacy of vision or hearing.

But you can be born blind and have a perfectly rich, terrific life, and you can be born deaf and have a perfectly rich, terrific life in many ways.

But if you're deprived of touch at an infant, say in the first year or year and a half of life, and this happened in the orphanages under the Ceaușescu regime in Romania in the 1970s and '80s, when there weren't enough caretakers to hold and snuggle these babies, these babies developed chronic neuropsychiatric diseases that unfortunately have seemed to be lifelong.

Um, did human beings always love or was that something that we learned over time?

Well, you know... (sighs) That's a hard thing to know.

We can't look at the fossils and know whether people loved.

What we do know about humans is that our mating system is really, really, really unusual.

All right? So humans have a- a system where, uh, in one, uh- uh, woman's cycle, she usually is only mating with one guy.

Uh, paternity is usually pretty accurate.

Like, if you go all around the world and you do genetic testing on kids and you say, "Is the- is the- is the- is the father really the long-term partner or spouse, whatever, of- of the mom?" About 90%, 95% of the time, paternity is accurate.

about.Why do you think it's so important for the human brain or humans to seek meaning in life?