If I had $37 billion to give to charity, I'd give some of it to a foundation that would invent an Meter. That way we could predict who is headed for success and who for failure. We could figure out which organizations are and which are sick.
In humans, oxytocin levels rise during childbirth, breast feeding and romance. Humans with higher oxytocin levels are more likely to trust other people. They are more to stress and social phobias. Humans seem to experience delicious oxytocin floods in the brain after being with someone they love. It's no wonder neuroscientists — displaying the genius for which they are famous — have nicknamed oxytocin "the .
I figure if we can hang Oxytocin Meters around people's necks, we can tell who is involved in healthy relationships 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 organization and it's time to get out of there.
Now I'm not really trying to reduce all human relationships to one hormone. But I am trying to emphasize the importance of human . We in the policy world debate education, rates, poverty, productivity and competitiveness, and we try to figure out which qualities individuals need to thrive in the new economy. But often it's the space between individuals that really matters, the nature of their attachments.
Attachment theory has been thriving for decades, but it's had little impact on public policy. That's because the policy world is a for people who are emotionally . If you go to a Congressional hearing and talk , you are treated like a serious policy , but if you start talking about relationships, people look at you as if you're Oprah.
But everything we're learning about the brain confirms the of attachments to human development and the wisdom of Adam Smith's observation that the "chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved." (Brain research rarely anything new about human nature; it just tells you which of the old are most important.)
And so maybe it's time to focus a little less on individual and more on attachment. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
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Over the past few decades federal and state governments have spent billions of dollars trying to improve high schools. Much of the effort has gone into trying to improve individual math and reading scores. But the effects have been modest and up to 30 percent of students drop out — a social .
The dropout rates are because humans are not machines into which you can input data. They require emotion to process information. You take kids who didn't benefit from stable, nurturing parental care and who have not learned how to form human attachments, and you stick them in a school that functions like a factory for information transmission, and the results are going to be horrible.
The Gates Foundation recently sponsored focus groups with dropouts. The former 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 emotional : teachers were burned out and boring; discipline was lacking; classes weren't challenging; there weren't enough tutors and wasn't anyone to talk to; parents were uninvolved.
If school is unsatisfying but having a child or joining a gang seems as if it would be emotionally satisfying, then many students, especially those with attachments at home, are going to follow their powerful drive to go where the attachments seem to be.
If I had $37 billion, I would focus it on the node where attachment skills are formed: the parental relationship during the first few years of life. I'd invest much of it with organizations, like Circle of Security, that help mothers and fathers develop secure bonds with their own infants, instead of just the behaviors of their own parents. I'd focus on the real resource crisis that the country. It's not the oil shortage. It's the oxytocin shortage.