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Episode 197: Myelin sheath and child development, Are private ppl missing out, Measuring genes
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you've talked about the myelin sheath development so I'd like to know does the myelin sheath development also apply to more purely mental abilities like reading and comprehension or the ability to imagine and come up with inventive solutions to a problem for example how much can learning and practice be helpful in growing infants and children will a baby that is spoken to for five hours a day learn to speak significantly faster than one exposed to only an hour of language a day or our parents kidding themselves when they spend so much effort to give their child an edge in cognitive development really fine question and actually there's several different questions that are embedded here I don't know the answers to some of them the I believe that I know but I I don't want to act like I know the the overarching question that the person is asking is whether or not a bunch of early practice will help essentially prepare the brains you know evolution in personal evolution into being more effective and the answer to that is no so parents are kidding themselves that it doesn't matter what you're going to do to this little mind and how much you drill it and you're not going to turn it into anything fancy as a result of tremendous amount of effort now the there's the question though another question in here is about myelin sheath versus the the other there's other ways that the brain changes its structure in order to become a more effective information processor so that's the most fundamental level is at the level of the dendrites that's the at least the most important part that we know and I believe that that's that's going to be mostly involved with essentially the kind of information that you learn declarative information as opposed to motor patterns so I think the myelin sheath is much more involved in motor and the skill development specifically with respect to you know movement of your body and in complex ways very efficiently with low error the I believe that the myelin sheath wrapping is mostly involved there and not so much involved with higher-order brain function like algebra I think that's going to be more dendritic the in either case the certainly wrapping myelin around motor development will make a difference so if you if your child is if you if you aspire for your child to be a great concert pianist then it's a good idea to start early so just how many years you wrap the myelin and how well you wrap it would would make a difference the I think is of course absurd to be worrying about it because I think the secondary consideration that overrides everything will be the person's motivation so there is nobody motivated like someone who is naturally motivated to do something so the sort of tiger mom attitude that we're going to turn this kid into a into concert mistress you know viola knows someday and we're going to start at three is a is a brutal way to treat somebody in the early childhood which almost in every case will wind up with a situation where the kid has no interest in what this thing is as time goes on and so it doesn't matter how much how much you push early and wrap some myelin sheath the truth of the matter is is that people wrap myelin where they want to wrap Milan and the the Great's have a rage to master they find something that is so inherently fascinating some movement that they love for Chris ever it was tennis and so she just could not could not stay out of tennis and she was just inherently fascinated with the geometry of tennis with Tiger Woods who was hitting a golf and so there's people that just have a rage to master a given area and that's what they do the so you can't make your kid into a chess champion and you can't make them into great anything that this will emerge however in principle if you had if you happen to have a situation where you had a rage to master and you had early childhood exposure it might be helpful so for example Mozart certainly had that situation of course he wanted said dead an unmarked grave when he's 30 [Laughter] so the personality winds up causing a bunch of outcomes maybe get murder murder by ciliary we don't know probably so the but yes they a conclusion that the person is that the the questioner is asking is our parents kidding themselves the ones that are putting any pressure on kids to learn to get ahead or absolutely kidding themselves so it's going to turn out that essentially through through childhood through the through the early grades and in high school about 20% of the variants and outcomes of educational achievement will be attributable to their environment in other words the parents are pushing and pushing and pushing they can make a bit of an impact they can probably increase a person's educational scores by maybe 10 percentile points or so the however that all comes down in the first year freshman year of college so as soon as you move away and mom's no longer doing your homework the tiger mom is just you know pushing like crazy to get you into UC Berkeley when the truth is is that you're you're more of a UC Riverside kid the she may get you into Berkeley but you're in trouble you're you're know swimmin with fish that have a little more chops than you have and your you're heading for the bottom of your class that's because by the by the freshman year of high school once once the kid leaves home and they're actually on their own or they're studying subjects that that mom and dad can't help him with it turns out that there is no longer any environmental impact that's discernible so the genes become the only systemic source of variance explaining outcomes so that's lit that's it so you're kidding yourself don't push your kids your job as a parent is to have your kids enjoy their existence not become achievers okay they will achieve things to the extent that they are motivated inherently to achieve them you don't have to push them and pushing them isn't going to do us any good Wow it's fascinating so hmm it's a lot of implication stuff but yeah to the parents that say that tell you oh well you know if I push them you know and they get 10% fancier now they get into a school that's maybe a little bit above their ability but at least they got there mm-hmm right well what do you say to them well you know that's one way to play life so I can remember a counselor that that I worked with at the University of Virginia was pushing her son to get into Duke and I knew he wasn't that smart and he was a he was an athlete and he was handsome and the I don't know if he ever got to Duke but that was the idea was to just get him in the door so that he could have the social connections in the cachet that would help him later in life and you know I consider this to be an interesting concept that is probably a problem I I mean it might not be a disaster might be fine but the but this this operates on the assumption that the world is so rigidly rigidly stratified that people are looking at your pedigree and they're not going to let you in the door unless you unless you are at some level of the pedigree and that there's no other way to signal the pedigree this is ridiculous there's there's people will go up against harvard-educated somebody and they'll beat him out on a job interview because of other things that are on the resume or just their interpersonal capabilities and so obviously you are you're an academic pedigree can be useful but it's by no means the only thing they guarantees any kind of success in the world if that were true nobody would be employed if they didn't come out of the Ivy League for God's sakes it turns out that we now know at this moment in American history that ninety six point four percent of everybody that's looking for a job is employed so that means that what you really need to be is you need to be safely at the 4th percentile and you're employed so certainly if you're at the 20th percentile you are way easily employed and that means you didn't don't even have a college education in terms of educational attainment so you don't even have a high school diploma for god sakes so the so the the notion that that we're going to try to cheat and slither or Bluff our way into a higher category than we belong is you know one way to play the game but it's certainly not necessarily justified by any outcome data and also I had a man that was that got as a result of like a military record he got admitted to Harvard Business School and in sort of midlife he was maybe 40 and when I met him he was maybe 55 and I had the same reaction that everybody had he was having some employment difficulties and so I kind of cross-examined him and and you know he had an MBA and I said I don't know I don't remember what I said it was 20 years ago but it would have been something like know you know words go to school well Harvard well when you hear Harvard MBA on the other side of the table you're thinking basically genius okay this has got to be 145 IQ this is got it has to be easily in the top one percentile of the world's brains because there's no other way to get into Harvard MBA and so I had that reaction and he rolled his eyes and he said that's the reaction everybody has and I it's just not it's not real says I I you know because I'm you know I'm not a I'm not an idiot but I got in because of a military record and they kind of gave me a pass but you know I'm not that sharp basically and so he'd been living his life dealing with the fact that everybody's expecting greatness out of him and he's just not delivering because this guy was a solid 125 IQ dude whose MBA should have come from I don't know Pepperdine in Malibu or something you know the should have been a decent solid school but not Harvard and so what we would think would be this magnificent advantage for his life turns out to be an ongoing source of frustration and in confusion in his career so yeah I don't think that that any parent who's you know desperately aiming at one notch higher in some academic food chain than your child really has the chops to do is doing that child any favors at all yeah you're reminding me of a book I read a long time ago by a radio host Larry elder mmm-hmm and he talks about a story of a full mad philanthropist who went around to disadvantaged kids and said that you know during high school I said I'm gonna pay for your education and he's going to get him into the best colleges and pay for everything all the way at the free ride mm-hmm and it turned out that that even despite that they were able to get into certain colleges that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to get - but they ended up dropping out at a far greater rate than they would have mmm and so it just set them up for well yeah I don't think it set them up but it's more so use describing how they they were in the college but they really actually didn't you know couldn't have gone there on their own and so therefore they were just dropping out and failing out and it was just you know just another not ask oh yeah a fiasco totally fast kill I saw this at Stanford as a prof. that that I would see kids that were famous or legacies or spectacular athletes and they're in my classes and I remember very clearly one of the guys that was in my class I had to fail him and he went on to be an NFL lineman and the so he basically flunked his way you know through Stanford trying to to weld together enough GPA points to remain eligible for long enough to display his wares on the football field at Stanford but why you know what why weren't you somewhere else quite quite frankly I mean not to not to disparage other institutions but why weren't you at Washington State because if you were Washington State you're still in the in the pac-10 or whatever they call it these days that I'm aging myself but the point is you're you're still on a nationally caliber football program but you're in a classroom that you're very possibly can hack and so that that I don't know maybe he wears his Stanford alumni shirt you know proudly but maybe he doesn't and my attitude is hey you know go to where your you've authentically earned things don't be reaching for pseudo esteem that you don't deserve and and so that's I would absolutely tell a parent that you know of which there are high percentages that that will listen to this and have a go in one ear and out the other as the esteem seeking ferocity will push their children into situations where they're uncomfortable and they're in over their head so yeah this this winds up being an interesting question that the is derived from the observation that even from the jump there are highly conscientious highly competitive parents that are pushing children to try to get competitive advantages which is of course makes sense from a from a gene side point of view it's like hey this is all about competition for God's sakes and you know we're out here to get the last genetic nickel on the table and don't try to talk me out of it the the the reason why I'm trying to talk to you out of it and try to talk people out of this is as follows and that is is that the evidence says that the achievement levels will not change that it's determined by genetics so all that hustle and stress is for nothing second of all it undermines the relationship between parent and child so the parent becomes this watchdog sitting there you know with a with a monocle and one eye in a record book in the other essentially desperately trying to push these children ahead of their competitors in a dominance hierarchy yet you know it's just a very uncomfortable situation and and we are not in dire straits these days where 50% of the population is going to die so you need to make sure that you're you're signaling that you're at least at the 55th 51st percentile so that you don't miss the cut okay know there's places for everybody at every level there's people that can barely speak and can push a broom so there are there are places for everybody and there will be a place for everybody's kid and and so we don't need to be pushing and shoving and essentially having a ferocious process of which I know is widespread widespread in some communities far more than others but this widespread fascination with the competitive hierarchy it's a race to nowhere and instead you actually should be understanding that you know the first 20 22 years of life or whatever this is your educational process is that's like 25 percent of your life that's a huge percentage of your existence and so the notion here is to if your hair have this kid enjoy their existence that is the purpose of we are subverting here on this program we are directing wisdom at the notion that the purpose of life is not to most effectively compete for gene survival instead we're trying to subvert that genetic design and say what we're really trying to do is try to optimize our life experience and maximize the needs of happiness so that means looking at a problem like this where the genes are saying compete compete compete cheat cheat cheat you know shortcut shortcut shortcut whatever it is that we can do to you know maneuver ourself into a little fancier stripe on our head that that makes a lot of sense that people would do that and I'm Tara to tell you why it's a mistake ok the mistake is for your kid to enjoy their existence maximally during these years that are that are just as valuable your child's thirteenth year is just as valuable as their 43rd year just it's actually more valuable because it's certain because it's here right in front of us today and we don't know that we're ever gonna see 43 so today is very important and the year that they have an eighth grade is very important for the enjoyment of the process itself it is not simply a stepping stone towards you know genetic grandeur that's going to happen later forget about it and so that's why the correct way to parent ok literally the right way to parent ethically is to be trying to think through what's in how to engineer the maximum happiness for that child that we can while not subverting our own happiness but if our own happiness is being derived from their genetic grandeur then that needs to be stamped out with a ball-peen hammer ok what I mean by them not compromising your happiness just don't work yourself to a bone to give the kid access to some soccer camp they want to go to if you can't easily afford it forget about it there's compromises here your happiness is marry their happiness is also primarily their long-term achievement is not primary you leave that to them because they will be motivated by competitive issues that will that will arise in their future that will lead them to need to make the best decisions they can later let's not worry about it when they're a little kid or even when they're a pretty big kid fascinating now speaking of engineering and maneuvering would you know I read this I think Jordan Peterson had this in one of his books there you know Jordan Peters got some great information out there but I don't agree with everything that he says but one of the things that I wanted to get your take on dr. Lyle is is the idea that you we should be engineering our way so that we are the top 20th percentile of whatever village we're creating so and then that way we feel like were the most valuable coalition member or something like that mm-hmm that's interesting it's bizarre sounds like the kind of thing that I've thought through from time to time so I've never read a sentence by Jordan Peterson so I can't you know I can't speak to anything else that he's ever said but that's an interesting idea and I can I can understand why that why that would make some sense and so yeah obviously if you're in the bottom 10 percentile of any of a fancy coalition you're feeling like you don't quite belong and you're about ready to get kicked out Allah my Harvard MBA guy so the yeah I like that idea just as a general principle I think that I think that's true I think that that I can think about times when I play basketball when I've been on the court with extremely competitive people and I'm the weak player on the team and the other teams looking to exploit me that's not a good feeling to be in that those circumstances much better to be in circumstances where I'm at the 80th percentile of people on the court and I feel like I'm a contributor and I'm a you know real positive you know real there yeah yeah so no I think that that's actually a very interesting insight and it reminds me of a of a moment in in a brilliant movie as good as it gets where Jack Nicholson yeah who has now adopted and in loves this this little dog they forget what the dog's name I can't remember the dog's name but he's taken it to the bed or something or he's taken it to drop it off for daycare and he says put him in with that one help his self-confidence he was bigger than the other little dog I just loved that so yeah I think there's I think that's a sort of a good general principle the swirl around in the back of your mind that you can't always execute on but that might not be a bad a bad rule of thumb I see some value in it fascinating yeah this has a lot of implications but I wonder dr. Lyle if you think that there's a you know like you were talking about Mozart no you know he ultimately succumbed to his personality mmm-hmm looks like but do you think there's a perfect personality for you know these you know the the kids who just get fascinated by something and just can't stop training oh yeah I mean there is one and that is that these are they can't help themselves they're just they're just fanatic nuts and that that's their part of what makes the world interesting and so the it lets us see sometimes the limits of what humans are capable of doing when we run into these little people and so the fair enough but you don't just because they become world famous or County famous or whatever it is and you see parents you know with their tongues out and envy wishing that their child could could be such a create such a spectacle the to my way of thinking is hey you know it's it's kind of like I don't know it's kind of like going to going to lion country safari and seeing the the big the big bad lion that's in charge just like hey that's pretty cool you know there's somebody had to be the big bad boy to charge and that's the one somebody has to win you know the Olympic ice skating competition and if it's Tara Lipinski because she was a fanatic from the time she was 2 so it is and so the but yeah we don't we don't morph people into this that's that's not how it works they they have a rage to master and it's just it's just in them and it's just a curiosity of the genetic code that it emerges mm-hmm all right fantastic all right our next question mm-hmm dear dr. Lyle I'm a private person and I cringe when people air their dirty laundry or have what to me are very private conversations in social media Facebook comment sections I don't signal affiliation or loyalty the way most people do and I tend to minimize advertising even when it would be seemingly beneficial I recall declining someone wanting to write an article about me back in high school because quote I felt it was nobody's business I realize I'll always be like this but the way you and Jeffrey Miller talk about advertising opened up a new perspective do you think I'm missing out somehow and if so how could I improve where it matters well I can only well if we quickly scanned down where it matters if you're a salesman in this your attitude you're in trouble if you're if you're not shacked up then it's a potential trouble and if you don't have any friends it's trouble so you're driven to advertise in spite of the fact that you may be very introverted and not very open ie a private person so yeah I would just be a little bit glib and say well you you it's a matter of what needs you have that are not being addressed and that you're getting signaled tapped on the shoulder by your nervous system telling you that you're you've got a deficiency in an area of life now in terms of missing out [Music] but the way that person asks the question I would I would be tend to think that they're not overly lonely or overly needy in any of those areas that aren't being addressed or they'd be being pushed harder so I and I would also agree with their the inferences that they're making that you're not changing it so you could obviously if you are introverted and private and you don't have a date and haven't had one for three and a half years not a bad idea to go on an online dating site and choke out a profile and take a couple of pictures as flattering as possible and then see what happens and sort of enter the arena the but otherwise I don't really see what you're missing out in other words many of us who are I look at I look at my own career for example pretty introverted not very open and as a result you know not particularly well known and relative to my skill level do a dr. Phil is a joke okay but this is me like I I wouldn't have been comfortable out there in the world talking to huge amounts people trying to be a spectacle it's just it's not me I'm I'm private quiet introverted much like this person very private person and and so this is the is it dissing hamper you professionally yeah it does same thing with Alan Goldhamer he we really looked at where it is that we thought we wanted to kind of live our lives as young men and we looked around and we both grew up in Los Angeles and were both uncomfortable with large city atmosphere and so he he met his wife Jennifer and they they actually did a pretty systematic assessment of where it is that they thought they wanted to live their lives and let me just say that where he lives on a street that you can't find his house [Laughter] Nathan you out there for four years did you ever go to his house once ah there you go one said he drove it either yeah it's way off the road and it's behind a guard gate so this is how you you have one of the greatest innovative ideas in the history of healthcare and almost nobody knows about it and that's because Allen despite his complete and capability of speaking he's a very fine speaker and he's a tremendously intelligent however he is introverted and so it has been in spite of himself that the world has gotten enough news about what it is that he does to true north that it's busy and so finally in his sixtieth year and I'll go right ahead and name his age it's fair a little mini mine right back the point is is that finally at sixty the world is is beating a path to his door and but it was a very slow dance you know this was not Flashdance this was just sort of one one quiet educational exposure at a time so this person's question to answer your question if you are introverted and you're not up and it will reduce your opportunities for exposure in multiple markets that is true and you are quote missing out but I'm not really sure what's to be done about it per se because it is part of who it is that we are and so had had Allen been thrust more into the limelight early he wouldn't have been comfortable he would have been like a tortoise who would have pulled his head back because he he could you can only handle the limelight of the noise for very brief periods of time and then he's going to want to retreat he could never been dr. Phil never would have happened yeah that sensors we would probably have a not that he swears at all but no no berries guy he's just got a way of exams yeah all right that's it one more question I think so sure hmm all right dear dr. Lyle and dr. Hakka thank you so much for the valuable information look forward to great anticipation every show each and every episode solidifies previous learning and the most recent episodes get even more interesting so the question I've been having is how do scientists go about measuring genes how do they identify and associate them with human behavior is this something they can see with petri dishes and a microscope and what would a behavioral scientists day look like good good questions first of all they can actually identify specific genes because they can actually read the code so they have the ability to there they can read the stop and start in the DNA sequences so they they've identified what set of nucleotides represent a gene a gene is a stretch of DNA that that codes for a specific protein and so so they they can they can number those genes in principle from one to twenty five thousand or whatever many of them there are on that human genome something like that the then after that what they do is they can see when when they're looking at a at a gene they can they can actually they've got it sequenced in terms of nucleotide pair by nucleotide pair they can literally tell you that gene this is how it this is what makes it up and so they can also tell that that same at that same location on a different person's genome they can see that there's a different gene there and they could say AHA that one has that gene that that other person has that gene and gonna turn out that you're gonna see like the same genes often in a population so let's just talk for fun here so let's suppose that at a given place on the genetic code there's a spot on chromosome 12 okay and so we know that there's a gene there that's oh I don't know 2,100,000 16 nucleotide pairs long we know what it is and we can see that a lot of people have exactly the same gene and then there's other people that have exactly the same gene but it's a different chain so that we're going to call it gene a gene B gene si Jin de GE like there's 10 different genes that are commonly seen in the world's population at that specific site okay so now we see what we got there so now let's suppose that 28 percent of people have gene a and 16 percent of people have G and B and you know 11 percent of people have gene C and then 4 percent of people have gene D and another 4 percent have gene e etc and then 1 percent has gene K all right so one percent of people have G and K at that site so now it turns out that we're running correlation coefficients on a million people battle bunch stuff we know like how smart are they you know whether they got diabetes you know whether or not they're left-handed etc etc all kinds of stuff and then what we do is we're going to run the the gene frequencies against all of these things that we know about people and it turns out that let's suppose pancreas cancer happens seven percent of pancreas cancer turns out to be coming from people with gene K but only one percent of people in the population have gene K so when you get the computer printout you're like whoa what is that about seven percent of people that have that gene wind up a pancreas key over there they're seven percent of pancreas can cases whereas it shouldn't be that much it's way higher than would be expected by by nor if the gene was not associated with the with the creation of pancreas cancer it wouldn't be showing up in in seven percent of the cases should be showing up in one percent of the cases so this is how they do it so the the what they're doing they're not down in the lab that's somebody else's job you know or some equipments job or computers job at this point identifying the genes and the different the different gene types at the different you know at the different locations on the genetic code that's somebody else's job but if you're a behavioral scientist behavior geneticists you're looking at correlation coefficients that's one of the ways that they would go about doing their research it's not the only way so that's that that's the way that looks you're looking at a bunch of numbers and you're looking for striking correlations that look like wait a minute that doesn't look like it stood a chance so because they're you're running so many correlation coefficients an awful lot of things that look really exciting come popping up out of the data but but they are due to chance and so then what you have to do is you got to go look at a new sample and see whether or not it's holding in a new sample or not so that's how we we track down clues and it if you saw something like that with with gene K and pancreas cancer it wouldn't it wouldn't be quote the cause of pancreas cancer but it might be a contributes it's very likely to be a contributing cause of pancreas cancer and and so how that would be possible or why starts to be an interesting issue so and it's an and maybe for example it could be you you could get fooled if you just thought oh well there's the cause of pancreas cancer or there's a very significant issue it could be that that gene winds up being associated with openness and it winds up causing people to smoke more okay and therefore through the smoking it causes more likelihood of pancreas cancer so that would I mean not know this is true by the way but the truth is is that that's precisely how it can work so just because you see a correlation coefficient between a gene and a variable of interest doesn't mean that there's a direct causal pathway between that gene and the variable the pathway could absolutely be convoluted and still be scientifically causal so that's how that's the the gold-mining process or a part of the gold-mining process that it is parked parcel of modern behavior genetics and genetic science in general
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