 Highbridge, a division of recorded books, presents Innate, how the wiring of our brains shapes who we are, by Kevin J. Mitchell, read by Michael Page. CHAPTER 1. ON HUMAN NATURE How would you describe yourself? If you had to list some personality traits, say for a dating website or a job application, what words would you use? Do you consider yourself shy or outgoing? Are you cautious or reckless, anxious or carefree? Are you creative, artistic, adventurous, stubborn, impulsive, sensitive, brave, mischievous, kind, imaginative, selfish, irresponsible, conscientious? People clearly differ in such traits and in many other aspects of their psychology, such as intelligence and sexual preference, for example. All of these things feed into making us who we are. The question is, how do we get that way? This has been a subject of endless debate for literally thousands of years, with various prominent thinkers from Aristotle and Plato to Pinker and Chomsky lining up to argue for either innate differences between people, or for everyone starting out with a blank slate and our psychology being shaped by experience alone. In the past century the tradition of Freudian psychology popularized the idea that our psychological dispositions could be traced to formative childhood experiences. In many areas of modern academic sociology and psychology this belief is still widespread, though it has been extended to include cultural and environmental factors more broadly as important determinants of our characters. But these fields have been fighting a rearguard action in recent years against an onslaught from genetics and neuroscience, which have provided strong evidence that such traits have at least some basis in our innate biology. To some this is a controversial position, perhaps even a morally offensive one, but really it fits with our common experience that at some level people just are the way they are, that they're just made that way. Certainly any parent with more than one child will know that they start out different from each other in many important ways that are unrelated to parenting. This notion of innate traits is often equated with the influences of genes, indeed innate and genetic or often used interchangeably. This idea is captured in common phrases such as the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, or he didn't lick it off the stones. These sayings reflect the widespread belief that many of our psychological traits are not determined solely by our upbringing, but really are, to some extent at least, in our DNA. How that could be is the subject of this book. How could our individual natures be encoded in our genes? Sample complete. Ready to continue?