If I had $37 to give to charity, I'd give some of it to a that would invent an Meter. That way we could who is headed for and who for . We could figure out which are and which are sick.
In humans, oxytocin during , breast and romance. Humans with higher oxytocin are more to other people. They are more to and phobias. Humans to delicious oxytocin in the after being with someone they love. It's no neuroscientists — the for which they are famous — have nicknamed oxytocin "the .
I figure if we can hang Oxytocin Meters people's , we can tell who is in healthy and who isn't. If you walked into an office where nobody is having an oxytocin moment, then you'd know you're in a and it's time to get out of there.
Now I'm not really trying to all human to one hormone. But I am trying to emphasize the of human . We in the world education, rates, poverty, productivity and competitiveness, and we try to figure out which need to thrive in the new economy. But often it's the space between that really matters, the of their attachments.
Attachment has been thriving for decades, but it's had little on public . That's because the world is a for people who are emotionally . If you go to a Congressional hearing and talk , you are like a serious , but if you start talking about , people at you as if you're Oprah.
But everything we're about the confirms the of attachments to human and the wisdom of Adam Smith's observation that the " part of human arises from the consciousness of being beloved." (Brain research rarely anything new about human ; it just tells you which of the old are most important.)
And so maybe it's time to a little less on and more on attachment. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
Over the past few decades federal and state governments have spent of dollars trying to high schools. Much of the has gone into trying to math and reading scores. But the have been modest and up to 30 of students drop out — a .
The dropout rates are because humans are not machines into which you can input data. They emotion to information. You take kids who didn't from , nurturing parental and who have not how to form human attachments, and you stick them in a school that like a factory for information transmission, and the are going to be horrible.
The Gates Foundation with dropouts. The students knew how dropping out would be. Most were convinced they could have graduated if they wanted to. But their descriptions of school amounted to a portrait of : teachers were out and ; discipline was ; classes weren't challenging; there weren't enough tutors and wasn't anyone to talk to; were uninvolved.
If school is unsatisfying but having a child or joining a as if it would be emotionally , then many students, those with attachments at home, are going to their to go where the attachments to be.
If I had $37 , I would it on the node where attachment are formed: the parental during the first few years of life. I'd invest much of it with , like Circle of Security, that help mothers and fathers develop secure bonds with their own infants, instead of just the behaviors of their own . I'd on the real crisis that the country. It's not the shortage. It's the oxytocin shortage.