Hiroo Onoda - II

By the time Onoda returned to Japan, he became something of a legend in Japan. People wanted to see a  man who was still living in 1944! Or at least only a few days out of it. A man who for the past thirty years must have been carrying around in his head the forgotten wartime propaganda of those times. Japanese publishers were keen for the rights to Onoda’s story. He astonished most of them byturning down some of the more handsome offers and choosing a publisher whom he admired because of its youth magazines, which he had enjoyed in prewar times. 

Onoda kept neither diary nor journal, but his memory seems to have been remarkable. Within three months of his return, he had dictated two thousand pages of recollections ranging from the most important events to the tiniest details of jungle life. In July, 1974, articles began running in serial form in a weekly. His memoir, entitled No Surrender: My Thirty - Year War was published in Japanese and English translation. He himself made sketches for all of the diagrams and drawings in this book, as well as for many others appearing in a Japanese children’s edition.

He writes in his memoir that in a normal military school in Japan, recruits were taught not to think but to lead troops into battle, resolved to die if necessary. The sole aim was to attack enemy troops and slaughter as many as possible before being slaughtered. Soldiers were supposed to give their lives for the cause, not grovel in enemy prison camps. However, he was recruited for secret operations and the training he got was different: the aim was to stay alive and continue to fight as guerrillas as long as possible, even if this entailed conduct normally considered disgraceful. He says: 

I came to the conclusion then that I would probably go off to the Philippines and carry on my guerrilla warfare in the mountains until I died there all alone, lamented by no one. Although I knew that my struggle would bring me neither fame nor honor, I did not care.

In 1959, 15 years after he went to Philippines, a search party left behind newspapers and magazines. Onoda and his surviving friend thought that the newspapers were doctored up by the American secret service to eliminate any news they did not want them to see. For them, the newspapers seemed to confirm that the war was still going on. Why? Because they told a lot about life in Japan. Their thinking was that if Japan had really lost the war, there should not be any life in Japan. Everybody should be dead.

When they arrived in the Philippines in 1944, the phrase ichioku gyokusai (“one hundred million souls dying for honor”) was on everybody’s lips in Japan. This phrase meant literally that the population of Japan would die to a man before surrendering. They took this at face value. They sincerely believed that if one Japanese were left alive, Japan could not have surrendered. The wartime newspapers all played this idea up in the strongest possible language. He writes: 

I was virtually brought up on this kind of talk. Reading the 1959 newspapers in this same frame of mind, the first thought I had was, “Japan is safe, after all. Safe and still fighting!” The newspapers offered any amount of proof. Wasn’t the whole country wildly celebrating the crown prince’s marriage? ... There was nothing here about one hundred million people dying. Japan was obviously thriving and prosperous. Who said we had lost the war? 

They had been stuck in 1945. Only after Onoda returned to Japan and looked out the window of his hotel at the streets of Tokyo did he realize that he had been living in an imaginary world. On his return he was cheered by a crowd of up to 8,000 people – a moment that was played out live on NHK, the country's national broadcaster. At that time, more progressive views of the war, which included atonement for crimes, were becoming more widely held. His re-emergence offered a useful propaganda tool for the country's powerful conservatives about old Japanese virtues of bravery, loyalty, pride and commitment that had been widespread during wartime.

He returned to a hero’s welcome in Japan, but found himself unable to adjust to modern life there. He received back pay from the Japanese government for his twenty-nine years on Lubang, but it amounted to very little. He moved to Brazil for a calm life of raising cattle on a ranch. In May of 1996, Hiroo Onoda returned to Lubang, and donated $10,000 to the school there. He then married a Japanese woman, and the two of them moved back to Japan from Brazil to run a nature camp for young people. On 16 January 2014, Onoda died of heart failure at the age of 91.

Onoda wasn't the only soldier who found it difficult to believe that the war had ended. Many Japanese groups continued fighting long after the country's surrender. Twenty-one soldiers were rounded up on the island of Anatahan in 1951. Teruo Nakamura, a Taiwanese-Japanese soldier, endured 29 years in the jungle after the end of World War Two, on Morotai, in present-day Indonesia. The key difference, says Seriu, is that many other Japanese holdouts "found ways to live in the formerly occupied country," and even started families in some cases. Onoda, on the other hand, "refused to live in collaboration with the inhabitants [of Lubang]."

Hiroo Onoda - I

On December 17, 1944, the Japanese army sent a twenty-three year old soldier named Hiroo Onoda to the Philippines to join the Sugi Brigade. He was stationed in the Philippines, and his orders were to carry out guerrilla warfare. At that time, the Asian leg of WWII was raging and his mission was to destroy Lubang island's (approximately seventy-five miles southwest of Manila) airstrip and the pier at its harbor ahead of the Allied invasion. 

Before leaving, his division commander told him that under no circumstances was he to give up his life voluntarily; however long the war lasts, so long as he has one soldier, he has to continue to lead him even if he has to live on coconuts. It turned out that Onoda was exceptionally good at following orders, and it would be 29 years before he finally laid down his arms and surrendered.

A couple of months after Onoda came to Lubang, the Allied forces defeated the Japanese. As they moved inland, Onoda and the three other guerrilla soldiers in his group retreated into the dense jungle. They survived by rationing their rice supply, eating coconuts and green bananas from the jungle, and occasionally killing one of the locals’ cows for meat which would sometimes bring them into conflict with the locals. It was upon killing one of these cows that one of the soldiers found a note left behind by a local resident, and it said, “The war ended on August 15. Come down from the mountains!”

The guerrilla soldiers decided that it was an Allied propaganda trick to coax them out of hiding. They got several such messages over the years - fliers were dropped from planes, newspapers were left, and they got letters from relatives with photos. Each attempt was viewed by the soldiers as a clever hoax constructed by the Allies. They braved jungle heat, incessant rain, rats, insects, and the occasional armed search party for years. Any villagers they sighted were seen as spies, and attacked by the four men, and over the years a number of people were wounded or killed by them. 

In a few years, one of the soldiers left and one was killed. The two remaining soldiers operated under the conviction that the Japanese army would eventually retake the island from the Allies, and that their guerrilla tactics would prove invaluable in that effort. On October of 1972, one of the remaining soldiers was killed by a Filipino police patrol. Onoda escaped back into the jungle, and was now alone in his delusional mission. 

He had been declared legally dead about thirteen years earlier but after this skirmish, it was concluded that he was still alive. More search parties were sent in to find him, however he successfully evaded them each time. But in February of 1974, after Onoda had been alone in the jungle for a year and a half, a Japanese college student named Norio Suzuki managed to track him down.

Onoda and Suzuki became good friends. Suzuki tried to convince him that the war had ended long ago, but Onoda explained that he would not surrender unless his commander ordered him to do so. Suzuki convinced Onoda to meet him again about two weeks later in a prearranged location. Suzuki returned to the island with Onoda’s one-time superior officer, Major Taniguchi. Onoda came in his uniform, wearing his sword and carrying his rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition, and several hand grenades. Major Taniguchi, who had long since retired from the military and become a bookseller, read aloud the orders:

Command from Headquarters, Fourteenth Area Army. Orders from the Special Squadron, Chief of Staff’s Headquarters, Bekabak, September 19, 1900 hours.

“1. In accordance with the Imperial Command, the Fourteenth Area Army has ceased all combat activity.

“2. In accordance with Military Headquarters Command No. A–2003, the Special Squadron in the Chief of Staff’s Headquarters is relieved of all military duties.

“3. Units and individuals under the command of the Special Squadron are to cease military activities and operations immediately and place themselves under the command of the nearest superior officer. When no officer can be found, they are to communicate with the American or Philippine forces and follow their directives.

“Special Squadron, Chief of Staff’s Headquarters, Fourteenth Area Army, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi.”

Onoda waited for some time feeling sure Major Taniguchi would come up to him and whisper, “That was so much talk. I will tell you your real orders later.” After all, Suzuki was present, and the major could not talk to him confidentially. He waited for some time but when the major remained silent, he realized the impossible: This was no trick - Japan had really lost the war! After a moment of quiet anger, Onoda pulled back the bolt on his rifle and unloaded the bullets, and then took off his pack and laid the rifle across it. When the reality of it sunk in, he wept openly.

By the time he formally surrendered to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in 1974, Onoda had spent twenty nine of his fifty two years hiding in the jungle, fighting a war that had long been over for the rest of the world. He and his guerrilla soldiers had killed some thirty people unnecessarily, and wounded about a hundred others. But they had done so under the belief that they were at war, and consequently President Marcos granted him a full pardon for the crimes he had committed while in hiding.

Kokura's luck

In Fluke: Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, Brian Klaas says that we give simplified, rational explanations for the world. We like to imagine that we can understand, predict, and control the world. We tend to ignore or minimize the importance of arbitrary, tiny changes that can have a huge impact on our lives. Some of these events we will never realize were consequential. Yet, when we try to explain the world, we ignore a truth: but for a few small changes, our lives and our societies could be very different. 

He gives an example. On October 30, 1926, Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Stimson checked into Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Japan. During their six-day stay, they soaked the beautiful sights in Kyoto - its historic temples, lovely gardens, the mudstone hill, the Japanese maples and ginkgo trees in full bloom... But that tourist visit turned out to be the most consequential sightseeing trip in human history.

Fast forward nineteen years. The Nazis surrendered on May 7, 1945. The focus now shifted to the Pacific where the Asian leg of the war showed no sign of ending. But in the hills of New Mexico, the scientists and soldiers saw a potential savior: the atomic bomb, a new weapon of unimaginable destruction. No successful test had yet been carried out to demonstrate the weapon’s full potential, but everyone involved knew they were getting close. 

On May 10, a group of 13 physicists and generals gathered at a top-secret location code-named Site Y three days after the Nazis had surrendered. This group would decide which cities should be chosen to introduce the bomb to the world. They thought that targeting Tokyo wasn’t a good idea, as heavy bombing had already devastated the new capital. After weighing up the alternatives, they decided that the first bomb would be dropped on Kyoto.

Why Kyoto? It was home to new wartime factories, including one that could churn out four hundred aircraft engines per month. Furthermore, leveling a former capital would deal a crushing blow to Japan’s morale. Kyoto was an intellectual hub with an educated population, home to the prestigious Kyoto University. Those who survived would, the committee supposed, recognize that this weapon represented a new era in human history and that the war had already been lost. 

The committee also agreed on three backup targets: Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. The target list was sent to President Truman. On July 16, 1945, a successful test explosion of the atom bomb was carried out in rural New Mexico. Military strategists consulted detailed maps of Kyoto and decided on ground zero for the explosion: the city’s railway yards. But, on August 6, 1945, the bomb code-named Little Boy fell from the sky not on Kyoto, but on Hiroshima killing 140,000 people, most of them civilians. 

Three days later, on August 9, another atom bomb code named Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, adding roughly 80,000 casualties to the horrifying death toll. But why was Kyoto spared? And why was Nagasaki — a city that hadn’t even been considered a top-tier bombing target — destroyed? Astonishingly, whether over 200,000 people lived or died depended on the nostalgia of a tourist couple and a cloud.

The intended blast in Kyoto site was only half a mile away from the Miyako Hotel, where Mr. and Mrs. H.L. Stimson had stayed two decades earlier. By 1945, Mr. H. (Henry) L. Stimson had become America’s secretary of war, the top civilian overseeing wartime operations. When the Target Committee picked Kyoto for destruction, Stimson put his foot down. He insisted that there was “one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto.” Yet, despite his insistence, Kyoto kept reappearing on the targeting list. 

The Generals kept saying that Kyoto was a nerve center of the Japanese war machine and needed to be bombed. Stimson went straight to the top. He met with President Truman twice in late July 1945, each time outlining his vehement opposition to destroying Kyoto. Truman finally relented and Kyoto was taken out of consideration. The final targeting list contained four cities: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and a late addition, Nagasaki. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima instead of the original target of Kyoto. 

The second bomb was to be dropped on the city of Kokura on August 9. But as the B-29 bomber approached the city, an unexpected cloud cover made it dicult to see the ground below. The pilot circled, hoping the clouds would clear. When they didn’t, the crew decided to attack a secondary target rather than risking a botched drop. As they approached Nagasaki, that city was also obscured by cloud cover. With fuel running low, they made one last pass, the clouds parted at the last possible minute and the bomb was released. 

Nagasaki’s civilians were doubly unlucky: the city was a last-minute addition to the backup targeting list, and it was leveled because of a tiny window of poor weather over another city. If the bomber had taken off a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later, countless residents of Kokura might have been incinerated instead. To this day, the Japanese refer to “Kokura’s luck” whenever someone unknowingly escapes from disaster.

Biological luck - IV

The problem is that, even with all this knowledge about how the brain is formed, it is still not possible to make a precise prediction about behaviour. Perhaps such a prediction is possible at the statistical level of groups, but not when it comes to individuals. It is easy to predict what will happen to a person when a particular bone is broken. But in the case of behaviour, this level of precision is not possible. You can’t say for certain that a person who was abused repeatedly as a child will become an abusive adult.

When someone has extensive damage in the frontal cortex, you can say with certainty that their social behaviour will be inappropriate. But if you take someone who has had a very difficult childhood with abusive parents, malnutrition, etc. you can predict that the outcome won’t be good, but not much beyond that. Why is it that you can predict the effects of a fractured leg exactly but effects of various social factors on behaviour is difficult to predict?  Both cases are dependent on biological factors that are quite well understood. The difference is that they are qualitatively different biology.

When a bone shatters, the steps leading to inflammation and pain that will affect the person’s effort to walk immediately, is easy to know. That straight line of biology won’t be altered by variation in his genome, his prenatal hormone exposure, the culture he was raised in, or when he ate lunch. But all of those variables can influence social behaviours in our life i.e. the biology of the behaviours is always dependent on a number of factors that don’t affect something like a broken bone.

Let us suppose there is someone suffering from depression. Could you have predicted today’s behaviour by knowing about her biology? Suppose you know what version of the serotonin transporter gene she has. That probably gives you a predictive power of about 10 percent. Suppose you also know that she suffered from a traumatic event in childhood. Maybe your predictive power becomes 25 percent. Suppose you know in addition that she is living alone in poverty? Maybe now you have 40 percent predictive power. 

Suppose you also know the average level of stress hormones in her bloodstream today, if she’s living in an individualist or a collectivist culture, if she is menstruating (which typically exacerbates symptoms in seriously depressed women, making it more likely that they’ll be socially withdrawn). Maybe the predictability is now above 50 percent. If you add more factors, many of which have not yet been discovered, eventually your biological knowledge will give you the same predictive power as in the fractured-bone scenario. Science still knows about only a handful of those internal forces. 

Suppose you’re born to a poor, single mother. You are overwhelmingly likely to be born into poverty and stay there.  The stress hormones in your mother’s blood-stream will seep into your blood-stream through the placenta when you are in the womb thus affecting the development of your brain. The stress that your mother faces means that there  a good chance of her leaving you neglected, abused, and living in a crime-ridden neighbourhood. All this stress will further impact the development of the brain, specifically the frontal cortex. 

This early-life adversity thus makes it more likely that you’ll be spending the rest of your life in environments that present you with fewer opportunities than most. The type of brain you are saddled with make you less able to benefit from those rare opportunities — you may not understand them, may not recognize them as opportunities, may not have the tools to make use of them or to keep you from impulsively blowing the opportunity. Fewer of those benefits make for a more stressful adult life, which will change your brain into one that is unluckily bad at resilience, emotional control, reflection, cognition . . .

This continuous stream of interconnected factors ensures that luck does not average out over time. More luck later in life in most cases does not undo the effects of bad luck in early in life. Instead our world virtually guarantees that bad and good luck are each amplified further. A report in the NYT says that a large-scale research study found that social mobility hadn’t changed much over time. To a large extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from that of your great-great-great-grandparents. 

When you look across centuries, at social status broadly measured — not just income and wealth, but also occupation, education and longevity — social mobility is much slower than many thought.  This is true whether you consider capitalism, democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution. The just world hypothesis is a lie. I can’t help agreeing with Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, "The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it ..."

All the nurses that I have had will have led difficult lives. Some will have a drunkard as a father or husband, some will be single mothers with their children in some hostel, some would have been ill-treated by a previous employer... It will be apparent that I have had far more lucky life. But, in spite of knowing all this, if somebody shouted at me now for what I think are trivial reasons, I often let my irritation get the better of me. A few minutes later, I will feel disappointed with myself and will tell myself that I should have exercised better self-control. 

I will think that if I had the person’s genes and life experience and an identical brain, I would have behaved in the same way as he or she did. In that situation, I could imagine a nurse going to an IIM and me being a nurse. It is a fallacy to think that our behaviour is independent of our personal histories. This present that I have now would not have been possible without the past that I had. Your personal history is not in the past but in the present "YOU". Our minds are the end products of all the biological moments that came before. But it is mighty hard to act according to this knowledge as I keep finding out. In a speech to Princeton graduates in 2012, Michael Lewis says:

In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.

Biological luck - III

Apparently, the Russian oligarch Mikail Khodorkovsky said before his fall from grace, "If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him. Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it." Every one had the same starting conditions? This guy must have been hallucinating when he said that. "Man is born free ...", said Rousseau. "All men are created equal" is found in the United States Declaration of Independence. All people are neither born free nor created equal. They are constrained by the interaction between the genes they inherited and the environment they were born into. Babies are already different by the time they are born. 

Environment doesn't begin at birth, it begins at conception. The biggest source of these influences of the pre-natal environment is what’s in the maternal circulation, — levels of a huge array of different hormones, immune factors, inflammatory molecules, pathogens, nutrients, environmental toxins, illicit substances, all which regulate brain function in adulthood. If the mother is poor, nuroimaging studies on fetuses have shown that the fetal brain is more likely to be bathed in stress hormones from her circulation which delays aspects of brain maturation. 

This means that there is increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety in your adulthood. Lots of androgens in your fetal circulation (coming from Mom; females secrete androgens, though to a lesser extent than do males) makes you more likely as an adult of either sex to show spontaneous and reactive aggression, poor emotion regulation, low empathy, alcoholism, criminality. A shortage of nutrients for the fetus, caused by maternal starvation, means there’s increased risk of schizophrenia in adulthood, along with a variety of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. Your mother's socioeconomic status is already beginning to influence what kind of brain you're going to have as an adult. Biological factors (e.g., hormones) don’t so much cause a behavior as modulate and sensitize, lowering thresholds for environmental stimuli to cause it.

That what kind of environment your womb was has all sorts of lifelong implications is shown by The Dutch Hunger Winter. This lasted from the start of November 1944 to the late spring of 1945. Europe was devastated by four years of brutal war. Western Netherlands was still under German control. A German blockade resulted in a big drop in the availability of food to the Dutch population. At one point the population was trying to survive on only about 30 per cent of the normal daily calorie intake. Over 20,000 people had died by the time food supplies were restored in May 1945.

The terrible shortages and suffering of this time also created a remarkable scientific study population. The Dutch survivors were a well-defined group of individuals all of whom suffered just one period of malnutrition, all of them at exactly the same time lasting about three months. Because of the excellent healthcare infrastructure and record-keeping in the Netherlands, epidemiologists have been able to follow the long-term effects of the famine. Their study had unexpected findings.

The effect of the famine on the birth weights of children who had been in the womb during that terrible period showed interesting variations. If a mother was well-fed around the time of conception and malnourished only for the last few months of the pregnancy, her baby was likely to be born small. If, on the other hand, the mother suffered malnutrition for the first three months of the pregnancy only (because the baby was conceived towards the beginning of this period), but then was well-fed, she was likely to have a baby with a normal body weight. The foetus seemed to have ‘caught up’ in body weight.

Foetuses do most of their growing in the last few months of pregnancy so this doesn’t seem surprising. But epidemiologists were able to study these groups of babies for decades and what they found was really surprising. The babies who were born small stayed small all their lives, with lower obesity rates than the general population. For forty or more years, these people had access to as much food as they wanted, and yet their bodies never got over the early period of malnutrition. 

Even more unexpectedly, the children whose mothers had been malnourished only early in pregnancy, had higher obesity rates than normal. They also had a greater incidence of other health problems as well, including certain tests of mental activity. Even though these individuals had seemed perfectly healthy at birth, something had happened to their development in the womb that affected them for decades after. And it wasn’t just the fact that something had happened that mattered, it was when it happened. Events that take place in the first three months of development, a stage when the foetus is really very small, can affect an individual for the rest of their life.

Even more extraordinarily, some of these effects seem to be present in the children of this group, i.e. in the grandchildren of the women who were malnourished during the first three months of their pregnancy. So something that happened in one pregnant population affected their children’s children. Audrey Hepburn spent her childhood in the Netherlands during the famine and despite her later wealth she had lifelong medical problems like anemia, respiratory illnesses, and œdema as a result. Subsequent academic research on the children who were affected in the second trimester of their mother's pregnancy found an increased incidence of schizophrenia in these children.

Biological luck - II

Why do different childhoods produce different adults? The reason is that the brain that you have as an adult was influenced during its construction by various childhood experiences. For example, lots of childhood stress damages construction of the frontal cortex, producing an adult less adept at helpful things like impulse control. Lots of exposure to testosterone early in life makes for the construction of a highly reactive amygdala, producing an adult more likely to respond aggressively to provocation. 

The names are not important. What is important to appreciate is that there are areas in the brain that are very important to us deciding what counts as the right thing to do and all brains are constructed differently depending on their life experiences. Every aspect of your childhood, factors over which you had no control, sculpted the adult brain you have. Childhood adversity increases the odds of an adult having depression, anxiety, and/or substance abuse and also impairs learning and memory. There is also a greater chance of their indulging in antisocial behaviour, including violence; and being in relationships that replicate the adversities of childhood. 

Some studies demonstrate that by age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the thinner the frontal cortex and the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control. Thus, if you are born in a poor family, your odds of success are automatically lowered. Some of the reasons why poverty reduces your chances of success are human specific — if you’re poor, you’re more likely to grow up near environmental toxins with the neighbourhood having more liquor stores than playgrounds; you’re less likely to attend a good school or have parents who can spend qualify time with you. 

The Adverse Childhood Experiences, or “ACEs,” quiz asks a series of questions about common traumatic experiences that occur in early life. It is an indication of how lucky your childhood was. It will ask about things like abuse, neglect and household dysfunction. For each of these experienced, you get a point on the checklist, where the unluckiest have scores approaching a ten and the luckiest being around zero. It is found that for every step higher in one’s ACE score, there is roughly a 35 percent increase in the likelihood of adult antisocial behaviour, including violence; problems with impulse control; substance abuse; increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety disorders, poorer health and earlier death. 

The opposite happens if you a have a high RLCE (Ridiculously Lucky Childhood Experiences) score. As a child, did you feel loved and safe in your family?  Was your neighborhood crime-free, your family mentally healthy, your socioeconomic status reliable and good? Well then, you’d be a high-functioning adult. Children who have suffered from abuse or neglect in their early years grow up with a substantially higher risk of adult mental health problems than the general population. Often, the child grows up into an adult at high risk of depression, self-harm, drug abuse and suicide.

All these factors indicate adult potential and vulnerability, not inevitable destiny. There may be all sorts of problems in childhood. It has been found that childhood abuse increases the odds of being an abusive adult; witnessing violence raises the risk for PTSD; But despite such problems many individuals turn into reasonably functional adults with the childhood adversities seeming to have left no permanent scars. What explains such resilience?

What is important is the number of times a child suffers the whips and scorns of time and the number of factors that protects the child from trauma. If a child has been sexually abused OR has witnessed violence, the chances of it leading a normal adult life is better than if it had experienced both. If a child has experienced poverty, then the future prospects of the child are better if the family is stable and loving than broken and acrimonious. The more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy adulthood.

What happens when everything goes wrong — no mother or family, minimal peer interactions, malnutrition, etc? Take the example of the Romanian institution kids. In the 1980s the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu banned contraceptives and abortions and required women to bear at least five children. The result was that institutions soon filled with thousands of infants and kids abandoned by impoverished families. Many intended to reclaim the kids later when their financial situation improved. The kids thus lived in overwhelmed institutions, resulting in severe neglect and deprivation.

The story became widely known after Ceauşescu’s 1989 overthrow. The resulting  international attention led to some improvements in the institutions and many kids were adopted by Westerners. Since then, all categories of children - children adopted in the West, those eventually returned to their families, and those who remained institutionalized - have been studied.

As adults, all these kids had low IQ, poor cognitive skills, problems with forming attachments, often bordering on autistic, anxiety and depression galore. The longer the institutionalization, the worse the prognosis. When their brains were studied, they were found to have decreased size, gray matter, white matter, frontal cortical metabolism, connectivity between regions, sizes of individual brain regions. Only the amygdala - a small, almond-shaped structure in the brain, one of its key functions being to control fear and anxiety - is enlarged. 

An enlarged amygdala indicates an anxious and depressed child. Children with autism, ADHD or OCD tend to have an enlarged amygdala. So improved conditions later in life doesn’t reverse certain brain regions that developed during a traumatic childhood. Adverse consequences can be reversed to a greater extent than used to be thought. But the longer you wait to intervene, the harder it will be.

Biological luck - I

People are obsessed with finding out the secrets to success. Many take great pride in describing themselves as self-made. They will assert that it was their individual traits — talent, skill, mental toughness, work ethic, persistence, optimism, etc. that helped them reach where they are now. Parents keep telling their children that if they try hard enough, they can achieve their goals. Self-help books will keep telling you that you, alone, are the solution that you seek. They ignore the fact that their success was entirely due to the initial conditions that they found themselves in which benefited them greatly.  

It is difficult to see that society's wealthiest and most successful individuals are simply the lucky ones. I had thought luck was important but not to the extent that I now think it is. How important the luck you had in where and to whom you were born only recently became clear to me after reading and listening to Robert Sapolsky who teaches neuroscience at Stanford University. The genes you inherited, foetal environment, childhood experience, the culture you were born in, all contributed to shaping the construction of your brain. 

Choices, efforts, intentions, will power, all of which influence our behaviour, are themselves biological phenomena. You are lucky to have them. Basically, our present state is the result of our cumulative biological and environmental luck. A misguided notion that many have today is spelled out by the nihilist, Bazarov, in Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons: 

I assure you, studying separate individuals is not worth the trouble. All people are like one another, in soul as in body; each of us has brain, spleen, heart, and lungs made alike; and the so–called moral qualities are the same in all; the slight variations are of no importance. A single human specimen is sufficient to judge of all by. People are like trees in a forest; no botanist would think of studying each individual birch–tree.

Most people will agree that our natural attributes like height, which make you good at playing certain games, or fast twitch fibres, that enable you to run fast, are biological. Then they will say that what really matters is what do you do with those attributes - whether you work hard to take advantage of those gifts or whether you waste these blessings. But this ability to work hard doesn’t come out of thin air. It's that brain of yours (and more specifically, a part of the brain called the frontal cortex) that decides if you are going to show impulse control or whether you give in to the slightest temptation. 

The frontal cortex is the most recently evolved brain region. The human frontal cortex is bigger and more complex than in other apes. It has a wide portfolio of functions including working memory, gratification postponement, long-term planning, regulation of emotions, impulse control, among others. Sapolsky groups these functions under one heading: "the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do." It is the last brain region to fully mature, with people being in their mid-twenties by the time it is fully functional. 

The frontal cortex, and even more specifically, a part of it known as the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), is critical for making tough decisions in the face of temptation. This explains why teenagers do things that adults find daft - their PFC is not yet firing on all cylinders. And everyone doesn’t have the same PFC (and other parts of the brain). The enormous varieties of adolescent experiences will help produce enormously varied PFCs in adulthood. And this PFC is responsible for what you characterise as grit, character, backbone, tenacity, strong moral compass, etc.

Your adolescent experiences of trauma, stimulation, love, failure, rejection, happiness, despair, etc. all have played a very important role in constructing the PFC that you are using as an adult to decide whether to practice now or to skip it and watch a movie instead. It is difficult to appreciate that the same neurotransmitters, receptors, or transcription factors are involved when considering feats of willpower as is the case when regarding fast twitch fibers. Most people seem to have to have no idea how lucky one must be to be both talented and hard working. Your admirable self-discipline has much to do with how your cortex was constructed when you were a foetus and your childhood and adolescence.

You can’t will yourself to have more willpower. The factors that can affect willpower include blood glucose levels; the socioeconomic status of your family of birth; sleep quality and quantity; prenatal environment; stress; whether you’re in pain; if you have had a stroke in your frontal cortex; if you suffered childhood abuse; how much of a cognitive load you’ve borne in the last few minutes; if you’re infected with a particular parasite; if you have the gene for Huntington’s disease; lead levels in your tap water when you were a kid; if you live in an individualist or a collectivist culture, among many others, most of which are beyond your control.

Blood glucose levels affect willpower because of the glucose demands of the frontal cortex. A real- world example of this is a study of more than 1,100 judicial rulings. What best predicted whether a judge granted someone parole versus more jail time? It was found that the longer it had been since judges had eaten, the less likely they were to grant a prisoner parole. There was overall decline over the course of a tiring day with essentially a zero percent rate just before judges ate. This shows that there are situations when biology can affect our behaviour. 

What was causing this behaviour? As the hours since the last meal kept increasing, the PFC was finding it more difficult to focus on the details of each case, the judge became more likely to choose the easier default option which is to send the person back to jail. This is the easier option than giving careful thought to whether the criminal in front of you has some potential for change. This idea is supported by a study in which subjects had to make judgments of increasing complexity. As the task progressed, the PFC became more slow during deliberating and the subjects became more likely to opt for the easier decision. Of course judges will give various philosophical reasons for rationalizing their decisions rather than say that they were caused by hunger.