BATMAN became a vigilante after watching his parents get murdered. Wonder Woman’s crime-fighting abilities stem from her supernatural creation and her childhood of athletic training. Many of us mortals also have origin stories, albeit less dramatic ones. She may feel, for example, that she has inherited her mother’s intelligence or her father’s confidence, or a love of cooking from fun times in the kitchen with grandparents.
One of the most fascinating questions about what makes us who we are is how much of our personality, abilities and interests is due to our genes and how much to our primitive environment: nature or nurture. But there is a third influence that, until recently, has gone unnoticed: randomness. Specifically, chance events that affect nerve cells as the brain develops. That is a colossal oversight. The latest research suggests that the role of this randomness in shaping who we are could be far greater than environmental factors, and in some cases as much as genetics. If so, we really should see ourselves as the product of nature, nurture, and “noise.”
This is not just of interest to neuroscientists: it has profound implications for all of us. We might stop caring so much about our parenting choices and, sorry Freud, we might also have less to blame our own parents for how we’ve behaved. “We have a tendency to develop narrative explanations for the differences we see in people,” he says. Benjamin of Bivort …
