This is On Beings Unheard Cuts. I'm Krista Tippett. You're listening to my unedited conversation with

Adele Diamond. She's a professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience at the University of

British Columbia. I spoke with her on September 30th 2009 in Vancouver, Canada. Download the

MP3 of our produced show with her at onbeings.org. So Mitch, I am hearing this echo thing again.

I'm almost worse than before. Yeah. Should we just forget it? I'll just live with it. Do you hear it?

I don't want to spend too much time on it. It should be exactly the same as the horror.

All right, okay. All right. Well, let's just let's do this. Okay. I'm not sure what you'd like me to

talk about. What did you have for lunch? What I had for I didn't have anything for breakfast, but for

lunch I had a sandwich with avocado and lettuce and tomato and a salad and perilla. Are you still

getting an echo or you can't tell? I'm good. Yeah. Okay. I'm the only one who's getting an echo. Okay.

I think it might be just the hardware. Okay. All right. All right. So, um, don't start quick. We should

Okay. So whoever I'm speaking with whether I'm talking to a quantum physicist or a religious leader,

I was like to like to hear a little bit about the spiritual background of your life of your childhood.

What you grew up in. I grew up in a reasonably reasonably religious Jewish home. So it was

conservative Jewish, which my mother defined as meant our house was kosher but our stomachs weren't.

Okay. So we observed the Jewish holidays. We kept kosher in the house. I was botanist

food. I learned I went to Hebrew, I learned to read Hebrew, but not understand it. So I can

still read it and not understand what word I'm reading. And Judaism is a fairly important part of

who I am. I'm married to a Mormon. So we have a Mormon Jewish home. And I think that's a

that's enough of that. All right. I've read in other interviews you've given or things that

you've written that you didn't aspire to be a scientist in your early life, but that you did

love, you always loved learning. Is that right? That's right. What did you study when you went to

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