How can a brain grow up in chaos and still find its way to order? There are many ways to have a bad

childhood, but why do some children break while others bend and keep going? How much of who you are

is written in your genes and how much is sculpted by your

environment. And if we could know everything about a child's genes and environment, would we be

able to predict who they would become? Why or why not? How many versions of you were possible?

And why did this one win out? When you look back at your childhood, which moments

mattered more than you realized at the time? Today we're joined by David Cicillo, who grew up in a very

tough childhood, abandoned by his parents when he was eight, and he had about 13 sets of surrogate parents over the years.

But he grew up, and he became a neuroscientist at Stanford, and then at Google Brain,

and now it met up. And today we're going to explore that unlikely trajectory and what it teaches

us about genes and brains and our own lives.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to uncover some of the most surprising aspects of our lives.

Thank you. aspects of our lives. Today's episode is about the determinants of who we become.

When a baby human drops into the world, the brain is not yet finished.

As I put this in my book, LiveWired, their brain is half-baked.

It is still in a full-tilt construction project, where you've got billions of neurons wiring themselves

together, and this wiring is guided partly by genetic instructions and largely by the

experiences they pick up. So every moment in a baby's life is laying down traces.

Every interaction they have is nudging their life trajectory to go in

...