The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #273 - Mar Hauser

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Melanie Avalon:
Friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited and honored about the conversation I am about to have. So the backstory on today's conversation, when I was presented with the opportunity to interview this fabulous human, it was an immediate yes. Just seeing the title of the book, which is vulnerable minds, the harm of childhood trauma and the hope of resilience, that is something that I'm so passionate about and is so important to me. And what I was really excited about with this interview is I feel like trauma comes up a lot on this show and it normally comes up in a sort of vague way in relation to health issues and such. Oftentimes, we'll talk about the role of trauma leading to the way people act today or their health conditions or things like that, but rarely have I dive deep into the actual mechanics of trauma and what trauma actually is. And I am here today with Mark Hauser, PhD. He has just overwhelming resume in this work. So 30 years of experience as a research scientist, an educator, a consultant, a public speaker. He has a bachelor of science from Bucknell University, a PhD from UCLA, which by the way, I went to USC, but it's fine. We can accept that and a postdoctoral fellowship from the University of Michigan, Rockefeller University and University of California, Davis, that is so many things. And from 1992 to 2011, he was a professor at Harvard University and in 2013, he founded the company called Rick Eraser, which is dedicated to providing software and consulting to programs focusing on students in special education, which is super cool. But he has so many books and his work is honestly profound and friends reading this book, it was really, really mind blowing. It was the deepest dive I have ever read into what actually happens with the development of the brain with kids in different situations and what leads to these potential traumatic signatures in the brain. So environment, genetics, epigenetics, socioeconomics, all of these things, fascinating things about developmental windows of time. And depending on when trauma occurs, how does that affect different processes that we need as humans in life and also this concept of resilience and it ends with hope and the potential for addressing all of these issues that are happening with trauma. So I have so many questions. Mark, thank you so much for being here.

Marc Hauser:
Thank you, Melanie. That was an awesome summer. You did that so well and so quickly, so I'm delighted to be here and looking forward to speaking with you.

Melanie Avalon:
Thank you. No, I've really, really been looking forward to this. Like you should see my notes. There's so many, I guess. Okay. So the title is vulnerable minds and you are a bit vulnerable in the book about, you know, your own life and your own trauma that you've experienced here. I think you're one ace from childhood, which was, you know, bullying. And I guess we need, we need a lot of definitions here, I think, to start. So the idea of trauma, I mentioned in the intro how I feel like we kind of throw that word around and use it sort of vaguely, but we don't really talk about what it actually is. So what is trauma? What's the difference between trauma versus traumatic stress versus I don't know, like, like, what is it? What's the role of definitions here?

Marc Hauser:
Well, okay, I mean, so I you know, let me give kind of a short kind of summary from from my perspective. And, you know, I should say this is maybe Kevin just to the listeners too, is that I just started today at a conference in Boston called the International Society for traumatic stress studies, and was in a session all morning almost most of the day on moral injury was called moral injury, which is kind of the pain from experiencing something that's kind of a moral challenge to one's beliefs and values. The reason why I think it's kind of helpful to think about the term is because like many other terms, I think, so unfortunately, sadly, in the mental health arena, traumas become part of the kind of common vernacular so that we now talk about, you know, I missed my plane to the Caribbean, I'm so traumatized. Well, I'm sure you're upset. But but that but that's definitely not what people in the clinical, you know, arena are speaking about. I think the interesting thing maybe for many of your listeners is that historically, the term was really kind of grew out of the kind of the 60s and war veterans coming back from war with, you know, at that point in time, what was being called, you know, they're just crazy. I mean, that term was bandied about and, you know, kind of George Carlin, the comedian, kind of made fun of it, you know, we should say these guys are crazy. Now it's like post traumatic stress disorder, it takes too long. So the problem is that the term went from a descriptor of individuals who were exposed to violence of some form, either committing it or witnessing it. And that it was a response of the body and brain to those experiences that often caused great harm, psychologically, which would disrupt things like sleep, cause great stress often take people out of just daily function and flourishing. And over time, as with many other aspects of mental health, the term got clarified at some level, because people started understanding more and more about the underlying changes that arose when people felt they were traumatized by an experience. Where we are today is the term continues to be kind of used in this colloquial sense. But in the clinical arena, it's gone from being used almost selectively for again, exposure to violent types of experience, be they domestic violence or sexual abuse, physical abuse, community violence, war, to being broadened, I think in a helpful way, to experiences that are perceived by the individual and often by society, as kind of out of the norm, and that cause psychological, physiological harm. So the term trauma itself really derives from the grief of scarring. And that's exactly the idea. The reason why I think will be helpful today and for your listeners to be clear about the term is because trauma is the response to an experience or experiences that are perceived to be adverse, and often typically out of the norm. My focus in the book, of course, is for children. So it's looking at children who may be severely neglected, deprived, children who were sexually abused, physically abused, who had a parent who was maybe who died or went to incarceration. So there are different kinds of adverse experiences, which can lead to a traumatic response. So importantly, for today, the traumatic response is a scarring to the body and brain to either the autonomic system, the immune system or the nervous system or all three as a result of a particular experience.

Melanie Avalon:
This is so interesting. So with that lens, because I'm just thinking about, like you were saying, how people throw around this word so much. And I think a lot of people today will be like, oh, that was so traumatic. But in theory, so you might think at first, well, that's misusing that word because it wasn't actual trauma. But if the creation is in the response, in theory, a person could casually say something was traumatic that might not seem traumatic, but could it be traumatic because they responded that way from their perception.

Marc Hauser:
Yes, and I think that's and so that's the case. So I think you know, we'll start unpacking some of these pieces. But I think they're very relevant to both how to think about, you know, the hopeful piece, which is how do we help people who have had a traumatic response. And one of the pieces that I think is going to be really important for today is there are experiences that we have that can be very short lived, but that can nonetheless leave important marks on how we feel, how we think how we act. And there are others that are maybe very, very long live. So for example, some of the work that I'm involved in, we work in sub Saharan Africa, in particular in Kenya, where there's extremely large population of orphan children, Kenya itself population of approximately 40 million people, there are 3 million orphans. Now those children have been abandoned effectively, for many reasons, some due to violence in the community, some due to HIV AIDS, some due to poverty and neglect. Those children are often living with a long period of deprivation, they've not only lost parent or parents, but they may have been on the streets, they may be living in abject poverty, and those may continue for a very, very long time. Contrast that with, for example, a child whose parent or parents may be incarcerated. That event happened, but now there is kind of a long tail to how they may be experiencing that, which of course is also a form of neglect, because now they don't have the parent or parents. So it's really important to think of the length of the time that the adversity lasts, because that will also shape the nature of the response. Also to put into the mix here, because this is going to get us a little bit towards the hopeful part, is that not everyone who experiences adversity has a traumatic response. Some people are resilient, they bounce right back from it, or they're exposed to it, and they seem to hang in there. So you who's read the book, you'll have recall that my father, who's 92 today, was a child during Nazi occupied France. And for four plus years of his life, was running through Nazi occupied France, was only with his parents for maybe two or three months at a time. And when that was deposited with a family or the Jesuits, and so for four years of his life, it was constantly attachment interrupted. And so he is, you know, kind of the most robust person I probably know my life. And yet he was exposed to four years of war during a very critical period of development. So we want to be really careful here about the experience, which in the case of children goes often under the acronym of adverse childhood experience or ACEs, and the responses one can have to that, which may be either traumatic or resilient.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, speaking to that, I actually have a personal question that I'm dying to ask. So I have a, they're essentially like my niece and nephew, but they're technically cousins. But they, they're young, and they go back and forth between my aunt and uncle who take great care of them. And then their mother who is, it's really, I think the correct use of the word, a traumatic homestyle environment that they're in there. I'm always, we're all, honestly, all of us were so intrigued by how, how seemingly unaffected they are. Like they are so sweet and kind. And they seem to be, they seem to be doing great when they're with my, my family that takes care of them. But I know they're going back and forth between this really, really horrible other home environment. When I was reading your book, so because I've been thinking, okay, well, it's really great that they're being taken care of half of the time by wonderful, supportive family. But then I was reading in your book about the turbulence piece and how, you know, going back and forth between those two extremes can also leave a traumatic signature. Because you mentioned that the length of time in your book, you talk about the adverse T framework and all of these different teas that affect trauma. So I'm really curious with the turbulence piece, can it seem like they're doing fine because they seem so great, but could that turbulence be having an effect in the background?

Marc Hauser:
Great question. And the examples are really nice one in many ways and challenging one, of course. Let's put a kind of an anchor here on this piece, which is a really important piece that you mentioned. People who are undergoing what, at least from the outside, looks like adversity, you know, something that's challenging, perhaps beyond what is typical or common, whatever the, you know, the best adjective would be. Certainly bouncing back and forth between caretakers has its challenges, although, you know, I think it's helpful to think about how in, you know, let's say our hunter-gatherer past, kids are often kind of bouncing around between different caretakers. That was kind of a part of the way society worked. So it's not necessarily the case that moving between caretakers is necessarily kind of a difficult or turbulent situation. So that's the first piece. The second is that just because things look okay on the surface doesn't mean things are okay beneath the surface. And I think one of the great things that we've learned over the last several decades is not to be misled by what looks okay at the surface. And I'm just going to illustrate this by two examples that are in the book. But one of the people who was kind of fundamentally responsible for putting the idea of these adverse childhood experiences kind of on the medical community's map, Dr. Vincent Felitti, tells the story of a woman who contacted him after he had published, you know, several articles on the topic. She writes to him and says, you know, I've been really, really appreciative of your work. And I just wanted to share my own story. So she was a seventh court appeal court judge. So by any, you know, definition of success, at least career wise, had really made it. So clearly, she had gone through undergraduate and law school and gone way through, you know, the legal system to become a judge. And yet she was sitting on top of four different types of cancer. And the history of this woman was that she had been sexually abused as a child, her basically, you know, father had kind of pimped her out as a child. And so she was able at some level to maintain things internally, while the stress system was effectively eating her immune system up. So, and yet, again, on the surface, you know, once the medical stuff started happening with these cancers, of course, you know, now we see what happened. But the point was that she looked okay. Okay. So, so that that's the first example. The second one, which is most likely known from many of your listeners is Sinead O 'Connor, who of course died, you know, a couple of years ago. What I encourage every listener to do, and I kind of described it in the book, but it's worth looking at, is look at Sinead O 'Connor, just look, just do a Google image search on her and look at her appearance when she was a young teen already successful, right? She was successful under 18, 19, 20-year-old teenager as a singer, songwriter. Look at her face. Her eyes are absolutely sparkling. She's alert and alive. As we now know from her autobiography, she was being absolutely, harmfully abused by her mother and was often running away to escape, to play her music and get away from the home. And yet when you look at those eyes, you would not know. And so that is an important message, I think, for anyone who works with, whether it's adults or children, not to be misled by what's happening at the surface. Because a lot of times the effectively resilience or self-control of an individual may be covering things up that are ultimately harming those autonomic and immune systems. With respect to your niece and nephew, the notion of turbulence really reflects the idea that some kinds of adversity are really uncontrollable and unpredictable. And everyone here listening today understands that when there are things that are uncontrollable and ambiguous and unpredictable, it is incredibly stressful. One of the reasons why Moving Homes is like the second runner-up to anxiety-ridden, stressful situations is because we have so little control about how it's going to unfold over time, even if it's a move that we care about. So for children, if I have a drunk father who is going to abuse me, hit me when he comes home, I just don't know when that's going to happen. So that's an added layer of stress that I'm living with because I am trying to anticipate, but I don't know. And so that level of stress, again, is compounding itself over time. And for the developing child, that is adding a layer of stress, and we know how the stress system, when it's constantly being hit, undermines healthy development. So bouncing back and forth to different homes, as in your niece and nephew, it really depends on whether the different homes, they may well provide different kinds of experiences, but if one is harmful and the other one is not, that's when the stress levels ramp up. And we certainly see this all the time in schools, where we have children who may be living with one parent during the week, and then on the weekends is with the other parent. And on Fridays, before they're going to go home for the weekend, the stress levels go through the roof, and when they come back in on Monday, they're also a disaster, because they've been teeter-tottering between these different worlds.

Melanie Avalon:
Wow. Yeah, so much of this resonates when you were talking about the, you know, the sparkling eyes and having no idea. I just like I remember when my niece and nephew, the, the home situation that's bad, it's really not good. Like they got, they got tested for drugs and they all had, they had like cocaine in them because it was in the environment. And my niece, I was talking to her once and she was talking about her cat that she used to have. I hope this isn't too intense for listeners, but she was talking about her cat that she used to have and she didn't have it anymore. And when we asked why she said, because like the dogs killed it, like the dogs in the house. And I was, and, but she had such a, like, she said it so innocently and seemed completely fine. And I've been like haunted by that idea. Cause I'm like, that's so much trauma. And where is that trauma going to come out in the future? Like I'm just really, really fascinated by it. And then hearing what you're saying about the, the turbulence, I'm assuming that even though the turbulence is adding more stress, that it still would be better though to alternate between a better situation or not. Can it be better just to be in one toxic environment?

Marc Hauser:
I think that depends. I mean, so as you know, I'm sure you're fully aware of and probably 99 .9% of your listeners are the attachment that all children have and want to have with their parents, their biological parents, of course, is huge. And that is even in the face of adversity, right? And so, I mean, the parallel here at some level, is how someone in a abusive, you know, romantic relationship, a marriage, other kind of relationships, well, nonetheless, maybe stick with it, right? way too long, potentially, because that attachment is there. And so for the child, you know, that is also because that's often that's not often that is the first relationship, right? And so, even when it's not good, it's what it's what the baby is designed to do is attach themselves to their primary caretaker, which is the mother and the father. And so that attachment kind of instinct, right, is very, very powerful, it can certainly be knocked out. And one of the most extraordinary results from the work that came out of the Romanian orphanages was the fact that the scientists who ultimately did, you know, the extraordinary work, you know, people like Charles Nelson and Charles Zine and others, was the finding which shocked everybody at the time, including some of the most distinguished developmental psychologists that about 10% of these children who had been severely deprived in these orphanages, or what they were called, there were institutions, and that's what they were institutional, showed no attachment at all. And that was a shock to many, because everybody thought, well, it's just completely innately specified, it's mammalian, right, all mammals attached to their, you know, mothers, in most cases. So, of course, it's possible to in some ways, knock it out early on. But for most of those children who were deprived of that early attachment, they showed attachment disorders, either completely disinhibited, they were attached to anyone, or kind of reactive, they wouldn't attach to anybody. And depending on the timing of how long they were institutionalized, some of that can recover. So, in some ways, going back to your question, you know, in part, it's going to depend on how toxic the negative relationship with parents and poor parents are, about whether it's better to have both, or it's better just to have one that is at least loving. But for many kids, of course, that desire to be with a mother and or father is very, very strong and powerful.

Melanie Avalon:
This is so interesting. And it makes me think about, so those studies where the kids don't have any attachment, does that sort of address a question you asked in the book, because you have a section on imprinting in animals and how, you know, animals will, they'll imprint on their mothers. And then if they are exposed to something not their mother, they'll like a ball, imprint on the ball instead. And you were mentioning how we can't really, we can't do that. And that would not be ethical. But does that kind of speak to that that maybe humans don't imprint, they just don't get, they just lose their attachment if they don't have their mother.

Marc Hauser:
I would say that the general rule of thumb, and certainly the data support this from both studies of other animals, specifically mammalian animals, right, are part of the animal kingdom that we're part of. The imprinting piece that you mentioned, those experience are beautiful, and they really go back to the Nobel Laureate Conrad Lorenz. Those are on birds, and birds that are what are often called precocial, which is they basically are a hatch, and they're moving right away, and they're kind of moving around the world. We are not precocial. We are what are called an alterical species, which is we depend on being kind of carried around. That's largely like all the primates, right? The babies are born, and they immediately cling to the mom, and they are carried around by the mom until at some point they become weaned off and independent. In mammals, and specifically let's talk about non-human primates, the monkeys and the apes, the attachment is a very, very powerful bond, and it's very difficult to kind of like completely wipe it out. I think what we saw in the Romanian orphanages, and this was, by the way, paralleled by these famous and very upsetting, ethically, studies that were done by Harry Harlow, the psychologist, where he took baby monkeys away from their mothers at birth and reared them in a variety of conditions from complete social isolation to a caged kind of wire mother, so to speak, in quotes, sometimes with a cloth, sometimes with just food, so they at least had the nutrition, but there was no kind of physical contact. You saw the real decay of any kind of social attachment and also any kind of social skills. So what was shown experimentally by Harlow was in some ways replicated, quote-unquote, naturally by the Romanian orphanage studies, and it showed that a small percent showed no attachment at all, but most showed some kind of attachment, but it was often very, very kind of disorganized or was really lacking in some of the key social elements of attachment or relationships that under certain circumstances can be recovered, but timing here is critical. The other piece of this, and this goes to some of the work that I'm involved in, as well as our youngest daughter, who was adopted from a Russian orphanage, and she's a thriving, successful 23-year-old now, is that depending on how early the child is taken from, let's say, a pretty austere environment where deprivation occurs, the attachment can recover perfectly. So typically under the age of about two and a half, if that child is placed in an environment where things are very nurturing on all levels of nurturing, then the attachment and relationships can build themselves back up. Interestingly, when you look at some of the orphanages that are in, let's say, places like Kenya, where I work, they're very, very different than what was seen in Eastern Europe in particular, where basically the orphanages have been shut down because they were so severe and austere that they were really harming kids. In countries like Africa, in countries in Africa such as Kenya, Tanzania, and East Africa, where the work has been done, you tend to get staff who work in these orphanages who are very loyal and stay in the orphanages and function like aunties. And so they're very nurturing, and these kids do remarkably well. And so that shows it's not the orphanage per se, but it's the nature of the love and care of people working there that can nurture that system despite the loss of a parent.

Melanie Avalon:
Wow, okay. I have some more questions about that. But first, two quick pop culture references with it with the imprinting thing. I've been this has bothered me for so long. You know, Dr. Seuss, the book, Are You My Mother? Yes. It's bothered me for so long because I've been like, if imprinting is a thing, then technically the first thing that bird saw, he would have thought it was his mother, he wouldn't have kept going around asking. I'm back checking that book.

Marc Hauser:
Yes.

Melanie Avalon:
Also, I'm curious, have you seen the movie Old by In Night Shyamalan? No. Okay. Trying to decide if I should ask you the question because it gives away something.

Marc Hauser:
Why, why, why relevant? Yeah. Yeah. Tell me, why, tell me why we'll cue that up.

Melanie Avalon:
trying to figure out how to give this away without teasers. There's a scene, basically in the, it's called old because people get, because of whatever mechanism in the plot, they age rapidly and it continues to escalate. So as the characters go on, they start aging faster and faster. And then it gets so fast that there's a scene where, listeners, if you want to watch this and you don't want spoilers, skip ahead a little bit. There's a scene where a woman has a baby and it immediately gets that thing that makes it age. So it ages so fast that it basically goes through the whole developmental period without experiencing any social connection because she has the baby and then it's just sitting there and then it ages quickly and then it actually dies because it didn't get the social exposure because the age, it could age so fast without that.

Marc Hauser:
Yes, so that's so that's that's interesting because it really it really depicts a critical ingredient that I spent quite a lot of time talking about in the book, which is timing and this these this china brought these broad ideas of these critical or sensitive periods of development where certain kinds of experiences. Are not only necessary, but in some ways expected by the developing child because of our evolutionary history. And so one of the examples I use and this speaks to something that we are now living through and witnessing, which is that what coven did. To teenagers is that stripped them of the social interactions that as I just said, they not only need, but they expect and interestingly for those who are parents and concerned about social media. Social media was of course completely available to these kids, including my daughter who came home from college because of coven. And the interesting thing here is in the best way for me to put this is teenagers need social interactions the way that babies need milk. And in the absence of milk babies do not thrive and in the absence of social interactions teenagers do not thrive and what we are now seeing in schools all over the world, by the way, is we are seeing developmentally immature teenagers who in terms of their social skills are way behind. And it's an absolute kind of experiment global experiment to see what is going to take to get these kids to catch up. I work in schools with children who have emotional and behavioral disabilities who already have delays for other reasons in their social skills. And now what coven did was it pulled them even further back and we're seeing that so the speed it up aging, of course, means that in a movie case, they're blowing by these critical period these windows of opportunity and that's why it's so important that when people working with children. Who have been exposed to different kinds of adversity that we try to understand as best we can some as we know some as we often don't when those experiences occurred because childhood as we say it's childhood. Well, that doesn't tell us much because you know in the adverse childhood experiences study childhood is from birth to 18. Well, there's a lot going on between birth to 18 and if we don't pinpoint when things occur for how long we're going to miss out on the opportunity to better understand how the body and brain respond. Because either the lack of experience in the case of deprivation neglect or harmful experiences that can impede the development of core functions like the emotions thinking decision making planning memory and so forth.

Melanie Avalon:
Question there about the COVID thing. So you mentioned they did have access to social media. So is social media not a surrogate at all or a replacement for social interactions?

Marc Hauser:
That's that's the idea that the that the i mean you know my daughter for samples on face time with friends and she was on instagram she was on snapchat noise other things right so she was seeing her, you know friends i didn't do it now she was already you know twenty so she's you know a little bit is a little past the kind of critical sensitive period first teenagers but for many of them they were on those social, media devices but that didn't supplant the actual social interactions of hanging out with a friend sitting on their beds together going out and playing or doing whatever they're going to do physically with another human being that social media did not do the work. That the experience system needs to mature on time in appropriate way.

Melanie Avalon:
What do you think we would have seen if not that we could do this, but if there had been the pandemic without social media versus the pandemic with social media, do you think we would have seen a difference?

Marc Hauser:
Yeah i think it would have been a lot worse i mean so worse without social media without social media i think i think for many yes i mean because well for one of the schools would have been me without any kind of the schools would have been completely locked out right so there been no mechanism to or very little mechanisms to teach kids besides saying them you know books and ask you know praying that they'll read so that would have been a downer the you know i just think of my own daughter but anybody else is right being at home with your parents i mean we're pretty good parents but we're but we're not a replacement that was clear we were doing everything we could to kind of engage her but you know it's just not the same and so i think you know for many it would have been far worse i mean of course depending on where you are in the world some kids didn't have social media and so you know the question there is i don't think we have the data yet to compare and contrast but because there's so many other competing variables but you know i had friends who were in kenya who did not have social media because they didn't have a phone but they were living in small villages and they were interacting with their friends in the villages so i think you know whether there's a clean comparison scientifically to kids who did not have social media but also were you know effectively not in a kind of a small little community where they could socially interact i don't know if we have those data but that's what you would need

Melanie Avalon:
What about the effect of babies not seeing as many faces during the pandemic with all the masks?

Marc Hauser:
Yeah, I think some of that's beginning to come out that I mean, that that is another level of kind of, you know, deprivation. I don't think there's yet the studies on face recognition, which is a very, by the way, prolonged developmental process. And so we know, for example, these are kind of, you know, nature's experience, but children born with cataracts, sometimes those cataracts can go untreated for quite a long time in the cataracts removed. And so what effectively has happened is the child has been deprived of facial input. And what you, of course, see is you see significant delays in kind of the core signature of face recognition. So, you know, for typically developing children, you know, who get the facial experiences input, we are slower to recognize faces when they're upside down when they're when they're up, you know, right up, typically developing children when they scan a face will typically look to the eyes first and then kind of down to the mouth and then the nose. So that's the kind of the typical scanning routine for typically developing. Now, when you've got a mask on the mouth area, of course, is removed. And so that is a kind of an experience, which has been taken away in terms of facial recognition. So whether those children now have, you know, delays or deficits in face recognition, I'm not aware of those studies, but I'm sure they're coming.

Melanie Avalon:
You talk in the book about how there does seem to be some innate understandings of the world with when we're born. Basically, and you can tell it better than me, but we seem to know certain things about reality even without being exposed to that through the environment. I don't know if you remember what I'm referring to. Are we born knowing faces exist or do we have to see faces?

Marc Hauser:
I'll put a little flag here that I lean kind of philosophically theoretically in this direction that biology kind of builds our brains with certain capacities that then kind of orchestrate or constrain how experience is kind of taken on board and then further shapes those systems. So you know I think of face recognition as being one of those that is kind of biologically set up evolutionarily by the way because and we know this because you can record from neurons cells in a particular area of the brain in monkeys where this was kind of first discovered and you see that in this particular area when you show the system faces those neurons are completely active they're you know firing off all the time if you show those same neurons you know other parts of the body they don't respond and so you can see that's one kind of key characteristic right we see in other animals particularly primates. Secondly we see patient cases where there's been an accident or damage to a particular part of the brain that or developmentally by the way where the person is affected what's called face blind they are incapable of recognizing familiar faces and what I mean by that is people that anybody who's kind of in the world today if you show them the face of Joe Biden you know Donald Trump Kamala Harris Bruce Springsteen I mean Beyonce Taylor Swift you know whatever pick your favorite you know well-known person they would say that's who it is right for these people those faces that they don't have any meaning for them they just don't see them and pin them with a name or a familiar any kind of recognition and that it can get so significant that that it can include themselves okay interestingly and again pinpointing it to faces as opposed to kind of any old object is that if you show these people who have this disability which is often called not often but it is called prosopagnosia face blindness they would potentially recognize oh I don't know who that face is but that's my mom's you know dress that's my mother must be my mother right so they recognize other features associated with that individual including their voices but not their face and so it's a specific kind of signature of a deficit in the same way that we get specific kinds of signatures or deficit in the language area people who for example can't produce words so it's a production problem they have no problem comprehending the meaning of words or vice versa and so bringing it back to the innate piece for children there is a lot of work suggesting that early early early in infancy children come infants come into the world with certain kinds of conceptual structures about faces about the nature of kind of certain social interactions about what is language about the way the world works physically that you know when two objects that are solid roll towards each other two balls they're not going to go through each other they're going to stop and so they set up these expectations which are done by these beautifully clever experiments by developmental psychologists suggesting that there are these kind of innate systems those innate systems of course mature and grow over time and are shaped by experience so when i say for example that there is a kind of innate language system what i don't mean is that we come fully equipped with our entire vocabulary and syntactical structures but we come with a capacity to for example distinguish what is language input from other input and we know that must be true because what you do not hear babies doing is when they first start producing languagey like sounds they're not barking like dogs or meowing like cats or making vacuum cleaner sounds and ditto from the dogs and cats right they're making dog bark sounds and not not cat sounds so there's these systems which are set up to distinguish the sounds in the environment some are languagey and some are not

Melanie Avalon:
I am haunted by why people seemingly can't lose their accents. Is that part of, there's some part of the brain that is the accent part of the brain?

Marc Hauser:
Yeah, yes. So yes and no. So, you know, do you speak a second language? I don't.

Melanie Avalon:
I took French in high school and college.

Marc Hauser:
Okay. All right. So you probably know how hard it was to learn French, and you probably also know that if you are in France or a French-speaking country and you speak French, you speak French with an American accent, right? So my father, being French, and my mom, who also was an American, but learned to speak French, but later in life, spoke French with an absolutely powerful American accent. But she was fluent in French. Me, who grew up in France when I was a little kid, speaks with a much cleaner French accent when I speak French. What that tells us is that there are these windows for acquiring the accent, right, the native accent of the language, in the same way that I don't know where you grew up, but I'm going to guess maybe somewhere in your middle of the country, maybe, or California? I don't know. But you don't have a strong, like, let's say, Boston accent, right? If you had grown up in Boston, I would hear it in your voice. And so I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but we moved around a lot, so I'm kind of a non-really describable, clear accent. So depending on where you grew up, both in terms of the language, but also the accent of the language, those accents will stay and will not change if you're in that environment, you know, kind of post-puberty, typically, is kind of somewhere around the cutoff, where those things begin to crystallize and become kind of firmly in place. The interesting thing about this, because you asked about the brain, is there's these quite extraordinary studies where people are born into a bilingual environment, let's say Spanish and English, and keep them. And so they're completely fluent and effectively accent-free into adulthood, so that you can be kind of completely bilingual if you've learned it early in life. And there are these really interesting cases where someone is in an accident, and it hits areas of the brain involved in language. And in these cases, they're striking, where they were, let's say, bilingual English-Spanish, and the Spanish system goes away, and now they can only speak English, as if there was like a drawer, you know, for Spanish, and that one got wiped, and the English one was preserved. So, but you know, but the key thing is the accents are really developing, you know, maturationally over time, but the system is ready to take on the accent because we are vocal learners. We are going to learn the accent of the local culture that, of course, plays a huge role in tribalism, and those accents, if they stay without any kind of alteration based on experience, they become fairly entrenched, and they're very, very hard to lose.

Melanie Avalon:
So basically, there's some part of the brain involved in that, and there's a very specific timing of window when it's developing, and wherever you are during that window is going to determine ongoing the accents that you have with your language.

Marc Hauser:
Yes, the accent, but many other parts of language as well. So for example, there is a different kind of window of experience when it comes to the kind of phonemes, the sort of the small segments that make up ultimately are, you know, kind of our words that seems to close down between the ages of about 10 to 12 months of age. So for example, when babies are born, of course, no baby knows what language environment they're going to be born into, but they can discriminate all the different phonemes from all the different world's languages when they're babies and young. But about the age of 10 to 12 months, the window closes down and now what they can discriminate are the phonemes of their native language. So for example, a baby born in Tokyo who then moves to New York City when they're five months and stays in New York City will be able to discriminate the sound ra from la. But that same baby who stays in Tokyo until their 10 to 12 months, ra la is now no longer distinguishable, discriminable. And that's because in Japanese, the RL distinction is not an important one. So phoneme, the kind of critical period for phoneme discrimination shuts down early 10 to 12 months in the same way that sort of the syntax or the grammar of language has a much later critical period. And so the different pieces of language are associated with different kind of sensory critical periods. And again, coming back to our kind of core topic, that's relevant in terms of how different kinds of traumatic experiences may affect different systems of the developing brain.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, to that point, because you talk about how deprivation and neglect forms of trauma tend to, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but slow down the developing brain and then harsh environments tend to speed it up. So if that's the case, does that slowing down or speeding up affect the placement of the timing of these developmental windows that may be more rigid, like in the timeline of the human? So like if a person, if a child is experiencing a trauma and it's a certain type of trauma, either deprivation or neglect versus a harsh form, would that change the timing of those windows?

Marc Hauser:
Yes, absolutely. So, you know, again, there's a lot of richness that your question is really your statement near and your questions are really well put and you kind of got it. Well, typically speaking in kind of all mammals when there is a lack of resources. So deprivation or neglect of some kind developmental systems tend to slow down kind of waiting for better times. And that makes sense, right? Slow down. You know, you don't want to hurry up because you need the resources to hurry, you know, to grow. So slow things down and wait for better times. In contrast, when you are exposed to threatening environments and for, let's say, non-human animals, monkeys, you know, rodents and so forth. If there's threats in the environment, you better hurry up and grow up because you got to get out of there, right? You got to be able to recognize the fear, the threats, and you have to be able to defend yourself or get away from it or whatever it's going to be. So what you find, for example, that in situations where there is a threatening environment and for us, this might be a child growing up under physical abuse or sexual abuse or domestic violence. Recognizing danger is going to actually develop faster. So they're, at an earlier age, better able to recognize the threatening environment. What is both interesting and sad but also informative about those things is that it provides a guideline to how to think about hopeful interventions to help the child. So let me give an example from, you know, kind of multiple personal experiences, but one in particular that's, you know, I had about 14 years ago now. I walked into a classroom with children who were kind of middle school age that I didn't know and I was going to be doing some teaching. And as I walked into the classroom, this little boy ran out of the classroom. Like it was, I couldn't step more than two steps into the classroom. And I looked at the teacher and she came up to me and said, look, I'm really sorry. You know, I knew you were coming today, but I forgotten that for this little boy, you just happen to look exactly like his father who beats him all the time. So my heart sank, of course, because I felt like I was the trigger for his running out of the room and the harm he felt. And so what this little boy had learned completely adaptively was anyone who looks like my father is not good. That's exactly the right move for him, right? Completely adaptive. You know, the analogy I like to give is like, if you're a gazelle on the Savannah and a lion approaches and tries to attack your group and you run away, your conclusion isn't that lion is bad, but all lions are bad. Good move, gazelle, right? You don't care. Lions are bad for you. What in the teaching moment has to be done is that we need to teach that child that not all men are bad, that unlike most of teaching, which involves generalizing from the example to other things that are like it. Here we have to kind of minimize that generalization so that child can feel safe. So the next time I came to that classroom, I sat down on the ground, made myself smaller than that little boy. I didn't look at that little boy and I waited for him to approach me. And that was the beginning of building up his sense of safety, but also not generalizing. Okay, so that's the kind of the speeded up sense. And again, depending on when that might occur and for how long, it might make the generalization either extreme, because it's been going on for a long time. And so the adaptive habit has really been wired in. And now it needs to be kind of undone. If it's just happened, that child is a little bit older, and their capacity to self regulate these strong emotions has maybe matured a little bit, that's going to look quite different. Okay, on the deprivation, neglect side, and again, here, a lot of what we've learned about kind of the mechanism or how this all gets kind of under the skin of a child comes to a large extent from some of this work with these Romanian orphan children, who've now been studied, you know, for about 40 years almost. The situation there seems to be, you know, broad stroke response here. If the child is in the orphanage or was in the orphanage longer than about three years, the delays in many of the core, processes of the brain involved with memory, learning, attention, self-regulation and planning get significantly delayed. If the child comes out of that orphanage before that age and is in a loving, nurturing environment, broadly speaking, not just the parents but schools, communities, then many of those functions can recover.

Melanie Avalon:
What if a child is in a situation where they have both signals that would be delaying and signals that would be speeding up?

Marc Hauser:
Yep. And that happens. You know, I've kind of given you kind of the pure cases. And obviously, the world is much more complicated than that. So many of the children that I, you know, work with and the programs I work with in Kenya, for example, are children who have not only been neglected, and maybe have lost their parents, but they've probably also been exposed to many of them to domestic violence, community violence. And so for these children, there are many systems which are not working in a healthy, typical way. And therefore, the interventions are again, are have to be far more, you know, nuanced, far more sensitive, and needing to fill in the experiences that are A, going to give that child the sense that this environment now is safe. And how can we fill in the experiential parts that are going to nurture those systems for memory, learning, self regulation and attention. And so the the idea, this comes back to our earlier conversation, is rather than speak about trauma, what I like to talk about our traumatic signatures. In other words, what are the signatures that we're seeing in the individual's autonomic, immune and nervous systems that can guide us to the right kinds of intervention. If we just speak about trauma, that's like me going into a doctor having been in a car accident, and saying, you have a brain injury. True. But we have this massive landscape in our brain, which does different things. Some have to do with vision, some have to do with various kinds of emotion and so forth. I need to be much more precise about where that injury occurred. So that you know, A, is it an area that might recover with plasticity? Is it an area that might get kind of reorganized over time? How old am I? What can we recover? What can't? What experiences can I give you to help? If I don't know the signatures of the function of the areas that have been damaged, or in the case of a traumatic experience, what has been either delayed experientially, or been a harmful experience, I don't really know what to do.

Melanie Avalon:
If you know the signatures, as far as implementing recovery strategies, are there timing windows for that as well? I know you talk in the book about puberty maybe being a window of sorts.

Marc Hauser:
Yes. So I'll give you kind of two examples. So one of the things that I kind of push back on in the book, and this is really, I think, hopefully to help both. Well, this is to help the variety of people that are trying to help individuals with traumatic experiences. And I see this as a very large community of different kinds of experts that include doctors, social workers, clinicians, counselors, therapists, teachers, parents. So what we want to be able to do is understand that a child who has been, for example, deprived for the first few years of their life, that there are certain parts of the brain that are going to show delays. And these are what are often clustered into the term executive function. The executive functions are attention, self-regulation, working memory, planning, and so forth. Okay. Knowing that gives you a signature that if you're a teacher, for example, you know that this child's ability to attend and form associations between an action and a consequence are going to be challenged. And therefore that's what has to be thought about when you teach that child. Okay. A child who has been abused is on constant high alert. Their emotional system is very heavily elevated almost all the time for some. And that's especially going to be powerful when it happens early in development because the ability to regulate our emotions takes a long time to mature even under ideal conditions where there's been no traumatic experience. So when the child is feeling the world is unsafe and they're very young, they don't have the tools to break their emotions, put the brakes on and regulate themselves. So we need other kinds of strategies to help them with that self-regulation. If a traumatic event happened later, now you're talking about a child whose ability to self-regulate has already begun to mature fairly well. I should note, and for many of your listeners you will be aware of this, that executive system, which is typically kind of anchored at some level in these frontal areas of the brain, the frontal lobes doesn't fully mature until about 23 to 25 years of age. So childhood, if you want to talk about change and plasticity in the brain and maturation, at least for those frontal systems which are involved in memory, attention, self-regulation, key to all kinds of functioning in the world are not really fully mature until about 23 to 25. So understanding the developmental landscape is helpful for treatment when it gets linked up to the kinds of experiences that a child has had and the response that their body is having to those experiences.

Melanie Avalon:
Is it the same for men and women with those ages?

Marc Hauser:
Ah, so there are some very interesting sex differences that have emerged over the last several years, like almost any sex difference study, you know, there's a overlap area, obviously. Let me give you kind of a kind of a general kind of rule of thumb or response that has been seen in many, many studies, and I'll link it to a fascinating study that came out a couple of years ago. As a general kind of way of thinking about male versus female, females tend to internalize more of the traumatic experiences, and males tend to externalize more of the traumatic experiences. Here's an example. A couple of years ago, a group of clinical scientists looked at data from mothers who were pregnant during Hurricane Sandy, and they followed the children who were kind of in utero during Hurricane Sandy up until they were about five to six years of age. And here's what they found in terms of that distinction between boys and girls. Girls who basically experienced the stress of their mother through the cortisol physiology in utero emerged at the age of five to six, this is kind of irrespective of the socioeconomics of the parents, with a five to six-fold heightened increase in anxiety and depression, whereas the boys showed a comparable increase in ADHD, attention disorder deficits, and oppositional defiance. That was simply exposure to the stress of the mother during Hurricane Sandy, which of course didn't last years or even months, but the stress physiology gets into the developing fetus. And that's not only important for the result it achieved in terms of the sex differences, but equally that this whole notion of childhood must be considered prenatally because the environment in which that child is developing in utero is being shaped by the mother's experiences.

Melanie Avalon:
Wow. Does that relate to the MAO gene that you talk about in the book?

Marc Hauser:
So the MAOA gene, so that's a gene with these, again, just a quickie on this, is that there are these kind of two variants, which variant you get is kind of luck of the draw from your parents, obviously. The key result there is that this is a genetic variant that has an impact on serotonin, a neurochemical, that we know plays a very important role in kind of self-regulation, self-control. And the result from this pioneering study, which has now been looked at in a lot of different ways, but the short version of it, which I think is what you're trying to get at here, is that when you look at children who were raised in an environment where they were heavily maltreated by the parent, the children who had the variant with high serotonin had a far lower level of juvenile delinquency when they were 16 than the children with the low expressing variant of serotonin who were also heavily maltreated by their parent. In other words, the variant seemed to have a strong association with later life effects in terms of ultimately criminal behavior. If they had no maltreatment, that genetic variant played no role at all. So this is what's typically considered a strong gene by environment interaction. And what this points to as just one example is that our biology sets us up in life somewhere on the spectrum between vulnerable and resilient. Our biology does. And then life takes its shape. Some experiences increase that resilience and some experiences increase that vulnerability. But biology places a framework or a set of constraints that shape how that experience going forward is gonna yield certain kinds of results or outcomes.

Melanie Avalon:
Gotcha. So like in that MAOA gene example, men are more likely to have that be a factor for them, right? So they're set up more likely, if they're in this situation, to possibly manifest those issues.

Marc Hauser:
Well, so that's tricky. It's a great question. It's tricky because the the main studies have focused on boys We know far less about how this works with girls But you know again in general The externalizing tends to be much more what we see in boys And the internalizing tends to be much more common what we see with girls So, you know again, these are kind of general things What I would say is, you know, there are shifts in what we're seeing also for example in many of the schools where I work which are Not all but many that are focused on children with emotional behavioral disorders When I first kind of started doing this work about 14 or so years ago I would say that the it was a very strong bias towards Boys in these schools and now we're seeing a much higher proportion of girls coming in again The girls when they're coming into these schools for emotional behavioral disability, they tend to be internalizers things like depression Anxiety and so forth and the boys tend to be much more externalizing You see that pattern manifest in terms of various mental health issues Autism as many of your listeners will know tends to be a strongly biased towards males as opposed to females Whereas things like depression and anxiety again tend to be tilted more towards girls than it does towards boys Or men and women so again these patterns, you know are there again These are not, you know discrete boxes in terms of the disabilities at all But those, you know, I think I don't know what the most recent Numbers are for autism. But at one point it was an eight to one ratio of boys to girls. So You know those patterns are there and I think it's helpful in terms of thinking about them because again it guides Interventions it guides how we respond to the responses

Melanie Avalon:
Similarly, what about, and I understand that it's complicated and there's lots of factors, but as far as the actual type of abuse, because you talk about sexual abuse, is sexual abuse, quote, I don't even want to say it this casually, but worse than the other types, or have a more likely to have a traumatic effect?

Marc Hauser:
Yeah, so so the notion of worse is always kind of difficult. Yeah, it's not a good word, poor word choice. But yeah, no, no, no, but it but it but it but it's, it's the right, it's the right lens in some ways. Because here's where the science has gone in this sense. We didn't spend too much time talking about it today. But this adverse childhood experiences concept, which, you know, goes back to kind of 1990, at least in terms of the acronym itself, ACEs, the original work focused on kind of 10 different types of adverse childhood experience. So it was emotional neglect and physical neglect, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and then a category which was called family kind of dysfunction. So maternal, you know, separation, divorce, incarceration, mental health of the parents, substance abuse and domestic violence. So you know, there's 10, 10 types. So you filled out this questionnaire, which is did you experience any of these things? If you did, you put down one, if you didn't put down zero, so you could have an ACE score of zero to 10. Well, without going into kind of any more of the details of that, that's just a cumulative score. And it sort of treats each of those as equally weighted, right? It's, it's a one, if you had it, it's a zero if you did, okay, so they're equally weighted. What we've now learned is that sexual abuse actually has a kind of disproportionately negative impact on some of the outcome measures for health. And it's often what's referred to as synergistic. In other words, it has this kind of interactive effect, where it can make other kinds of adversity worse in terms of health outcomes. So when you said worse, you're actually correct kind of physiologically in that sexual abuse can have this disproportionate impact. But, and this is where I want to come back to several of the themes we've touched on today. Much depends on these other dimensions of the experience, when it occurred for how long sexual abuse and I think this is something that I want to speak kind of carefully about. But the level of kind of severity or toxicity of the abuse in the ACEs original questionnaire, there's very little distinction because it's just a score of one between having been raped repeatedly, and being touched inappropriately. And if we go back to the period of the kind of the the heart of the kind of the me to movement, I believe it was Matt Damon, who said, you know, don't we want to distinguish between an inappropriate sexual joke in the workplace and being raped. And he was kind of taken to task for that. But in terms of the body's response, and I mean, the body in the broadest sense, the autonomic immune and nervous systems, we do, because how the body is going to respond to that is going to be impacted by that. The notion of helplessness of being raped by somebody repeatedly, especially as a child is very different than a father telling sexually inappropriate jokes at the dinner table. And so sexual abuse has, as the literature suggests, this kind of outsized impact on outcome. But here again, we want to think about how these different kinds of abuse shape different kinds of responses. So just as an example, being emotionally abused, belittled, denigrated, dehumanized, verbally, some of the work coming out from Martin Teicher at Harvard Medical School suggests that a key link between the production and perception or comprehension systems of the brain and language, that bridge is kind of negatively impacted by emotional abuse, which shows up as problems of language processing. You don't see that for sexual abuse. So sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse seem to lead to different kinds of signatures in terms of what's being affected. Okay, they can, they certainly will have overlapping ones, emotional dysregulation is certainly a common theme of response to any kind of abuse. But each of these types of abuse will also lead to different kinds of responses. There was an extraordinary article in the New York Times Magazine section a couple years ago, about how Commonly, in legal cases where a woman was raped, there would be commentary to the effect of why did you just kind of lie there, this kind of feigning response, almost lying dead. That is a common response to being overwhelmed by an overly powerful, effectively predator. We see that in animals. It is effectively playing dead. It is an adaptive response. It was really important to make that point so that the legal community becomes aware that that response is not something to demean, it is an adaptive response. As we learn more and more about different responses to different kinds of traumatic events, when they occur, for how long, how much control the individual has over it, this turbulent aspect, the more we are learning about these fine level signatures that ultimately are going to help us, the broad community, help people recover from what they've experienced.

Melanie Avalon:
Two quick comments. One, I thought it was really fascinating. You talk in the book about the sexual abuse timing and how the timing of it pre or post puberty actually affects the woman's clitoris size, which I just thought was really fascinating. And then two, what you were just saying about the having a broader understanding of this. So I actually, this actually is a nice way to provide a reflection on everything. So I recently, it was years long, but I had an incident with sexual battery from a massage therapist about two years ago. And it finally just came to the court a few months ago. And if listeners want to, I talk about it in my interview with Alana Stott. So listeners can check that out if they want more of that story. It's interesting because in the courtroom, they said that exact thing to me. They asked me why didn't I leave? And I was like, why did I just, you know, stay there? And it was so interesting because I was just thinking, isn't this known that this is like a, that it's a common response to not move? But all of that to say, the hopeful thing about all of it is I don't personally perceive having a, I really don't think I have any residual trauma from that event because of the timing of when it happened in my life and also just the overwhelming support. And I'm really fascinated by, you know, the timing of when these things happen and the effects and all of that. It's really, really interesting. And your book was so enlightening for all of that.

Marc Hauser:
Thank you for that and thank you for sharing that experience and I think it's so sad to hear stories like yours where there's so little kind of validation or reflection or sensitivity to the experience and I think what this really speaks to it, I'm really glad you kind of brought up your own case and that there's a legal piece to it, is that it just shows the level at which there needs to be kind of broader education and awareness of kind of what has been discovered kind of in the sciences about these topics because you just mentioned a legal situation and that's exactly right. I mean most prosecutors or judges do not know about the way in which childhood adversity shapes individuals and what we can what we've learned about that in the same way that the kind of the law enforcement area doesn't and of course these are broad generalizations of course some people certainly do but there's a sense in which there's such a broad level of professional work in the world where knowledge about how these experiences shape people could so greatly help how we respond and what we can do to help.

Melanie Avalon:
I could not agree more. And that's why I'm just so I'm so grateful for your work. Like, it should be required reading for everybody. I mean, honestly, definitely for the legal system and then teachers, you know, if teachers could be trauma informed, and it's really incredible what you're doing. And I really can't thank you enough. I could keep talking to you for hours, but I want to be respectful of your time. Speaking of gratitude, actually, the last question I ask on this show is just because I do realize more and more each day how important gratitude is. So with all of your work and everything, what is something that you're grateful for?

Marc Hauser:
You know, I find that every day, even though it's such difficult, where I am grateful for letting, for the children who let me into their lives to work and help with them. Just yesterday, I'll just tell you, maybe we can end on a lovely story. As a young boy who's had a very, very challenging difficult life of trauma, I've known him since he was the age of six, and he's now a senior in high school. He is someone who has struggled with hygiene issues, been raised by a grandmother, quite elderly grandmother, and he's always worn this sweatshirt. And the other day, and he's also, I just mentioned because it's very relevant for his response, he's on the spectrum, autistic, and I saw the same sweatshirt in a store, and I bought it, and I came into the school, and I said, I've got something for you. He goes, what? He goes, I said, I saw this sweatshirt in the store, and I immediately thought of you, and he was wearing it that day, and he gave me the biggest, he picked me up, he's a big kid, hugged me like he would never let go, and picked me up off the ground, and goes, best day of my life. That's somebody who let me into his life, and so I feel grateful for all the kids who have allowed someone else into their lives to work with them and enjoy them.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that. Thank you for sharing that. And thank you, honestly, Mark, for everything that you're doing. How can listeners best follow your work, get your book, all the things probably

Marc Hauser:
my author website, which is just Mark with a C, Mark D. Hauser, so M-A-R-C-D-H-A-U-S-E-R dot com. You know, the books I've written are there, ways to get in touch, talks I've given, papers and things like that. And I love to interact with people, so people who want to reach out, happy to talk.

Melanie Avalon:
Awesome. Are you currently writing your next book? I'm thinking of it. Well, I'd love to have you back in the future for anything else you'd like to share. This was amazing and really thank you. You're doing incredible work.

Marc Hauser:
I'd love to thank you for your time and thank you for the terrific conversation

Melanie Avalon:
Thanks, Mark. Have a good night. You too.

Marc Hauser:
Bye-bye.