What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

This chapter focuses on the role that early experiences, particularly love and caregiving, play in the formation and development of the human brain, attitudes, behavior, and personality.

Winfrey describes how, over all the interviews she has done, she has found one thing to be common among all her guests: “All of us want to know that what we do, what we say, and who we are matters” (75). Every single person she has interviewed, from presidents to pop stars to former convicts, always asked how they did at the end of the interview, displaying their longing to be accepted and affirmed. Winfrey believes this desire to be common to all people, and it comes down to how one is loved.

In keeping with this, Perry talks about a specific quality of the human brain: neuroplasticity. It is the capacity of the human brain to change and adapt to one’s individual world and is reflected in actual physical changes that take place in neural networks when they are stimulated. The brain changes in a “use dependent” way, meaning that neural networks form and adapt based on which skills are used. This relates to a key principle of specificity, in that for a particular part of the brain to change, that specific area needs to be activated by introducing corresponding stimuli or input.