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A comment on A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life. Parent comment

Re:A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Hap... by insickness on Thursday May 16, 2013 @10:21PM (#5722368)
I'd like to see your data on this and whether the studies they did corrected for genetics. A lot of these studies like where parents talked to their kids more and the kids ended up being smarter ended up being proven false because there was no 'control' in these groups, children who were adopted, etc. Check out Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. This talk sums it up pretty well:

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_chalks_it_up_to_the_b...

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Re:A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Hap... by btilly on Friday May 17, 2013 @03:07AM (#5723069)
Overly enriched environments might or might not matter. But deprived environments in early childhood demonstrably hurts. A lot.

The cause is that in the first few years of life we lose unused connections between neurons. If a child does not have a primary care giver, then a lot of the connections lost are necessary for proper social and cognitive development, and the child is impaired for life in ways which are clear in the physical structure of the brain.

This has been known for decades, yet still periodically someone somewhere that still has orphanages rediscovers this basic fact. (The most recent example that I heard about involved children in Romania.)

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Re:A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Hap... by MarkMc on Friday May 17, 2013 @12:46AM (#5722728)
I just watched the TED talk you linked to. Professor Pinker seems to completely dismiss the idea that parenting has a significant effect on the child. I wonder whether this study with rats has changed his mind - here's the relevant quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5722596
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Re:A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Hap... by Amadou on Thursday May 16, 2013 @11:21PM (#5722524)
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/the-power-of...

Sorry, I don't have time to watch an entire video. Is there a transcript?

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