I have spent most of my career being skeptical of technology’s role in human development. So, I did not expect to find one of the most hopeful things I have read in years inside a story about chatbots.

Then I paid attention to what a computer scientist was saying. He was describing how his field teaches students to interview the people who will use the technology they are building. Over the decades, he said, the process had lost everything human about it. “We just extract data from them,” he admitted.

His name is Arvind Satyanarayan, and he might never have seen that problem if he hadn’t become good friends with Graham Jones, an anthropologist who studies communication. Jones had the opposite problem. He could teach students to analyze conversations with precision, but that analysis never got built into anything. His work stayed mostly on the page.

The two of them met years ago while co-advising a doctoral student. Working together, they became close enough to finish each other's sentences. And then they asked a question I wish more people were asking: What would it take to make tools with technology that actually help people? Really help them. The kind of help that changes how a person moves through the world and their lives.

Two Professors, One Classroom

Satyanarayan and Jones built a class at MIT called Humane User Experience Design, and the premise is simple and radical at the same time. They teach computer science students to use methods from linguistic anthropology, the study of how people actually talk to each other, how conversations work, what social rules shape the way we communicate, and they ask those students to design chatbots with all of that knowledge woven in.

I want you to think about what that means. Most chatbots are designed to keep you engaged and coming back for more. The measure of success is time spent, attention captured, or clicks generated.

These students were charged with something completely different. They were asked to design chatbots that help the people using them improve themselves, chatbots whose purpose is to be a social guide rather than an addictive escape. The goal was human growth over blind engagement.

I think about this the way I think about the history of medicine and medical cures. When medicines that could benefit people were first discovered, some of them helped and some of them hurt. But we did not ban medicine. We built an architecture to study it, and we learned to distinguish what was effective from what was dangerous. We developed safety protocols, dosing guidelines, and longitudinal research. We did experiment and try things out. We did take certain risks and over time learned how to constrain them. We did the hard, careful, human work of making something powerful into something trustworthy.

That's what this class is doing with chatbots. And what the students designed is worth seeing.

Technology for Humans

One team in the class created a chatbot called Pond, designed to help college graduates navigate the transition to independent adult life. I love this project because it addresses a moment I have seen over and over in my clinical work: a young person leaves the structured, high-proximity world of school and suddenly has to figure out how to be an adult without the guardrails. They do this best, if they become part of a community. One extraordinary example of this is a non-profit called Posse, founded by the brilliant Deborah Bial, which helps students form communities when they transition from high school to college.

Pond was designed to tell the truth. It gives honest guidance: how to set boundaries with a difficult landlord, how to start conversations in unfamiliar social settings, how to build skills through practice. It includes a role-playing mode where you rehearse hard conversations before you have them. When you have built the skill, you graduate from the topic. The metaphor is captured in the name itself: you are learning to swim on your own.

Another team created News Nest, a chatbot that uses ten colorful bird characters to help young people engage with credible news. Each bird covers a different beat, from science to sports to business, and every source and its political leaning is visible. The team deliberately chose birds over human avatars to create a buffer against the emotional manipulation that drives most news platforms. News Nest was designed to prevent mindless doomscrolling and to teach one of the most important human skills—the skill of discernment.

These students did this work because they were taught to think about technology the way an anthropologist thinks about human interaction: with genuine care for the person on the other end.

A Hidden Assumption

I need to say something that might make some people uncomfortable.

In nearly everything I read about technology and learning, there is a buried assumption: that the pure human version was always better. That before screens arrived, teachers knew how to form relationships with every student. That classrooms were places of personalized attention and emotional attunement. That we had it figured out, and technology just ruined it.

We did not have it figured out.

Teachers were never systematically trained to build deep positive developmental relationships with students. They were never fully prepared or equipped to personalize learning in a class of thirty-five or more. We did not have this knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century, and we did not prepare educators for these roles. The result was what you would expect. Some children could navigate the system, and many could not.

I have enormous respect for teachers. But the nostalgia for something we never had is getting in the way of the future. If we keep measuring technology against an idealized past that never existed, we will miss the chance to build and progress to something better.

I want to be clear that chatbots will never replace human relationships. But in the right circumstances, they might be able to do something that humans, in the systems we built, were never equipped to do consistently: meet a young person exactly where they are and help them take the next steps in their lives.

What Brain Science Shows

Jones and Satyanarayan brought two entirely different disciplines together and discovered that the combination produced something neither could have made alone. That is a beautiful story about two friends. It is also how the human brain actually works.

Our brains are interdisciplinary by design. When we solve a complex problem, we draw on memory, emotion, pattern recognition, social reasoning, and sensory experience all at once. The best thinking happens at the intersections.

There is a reason for that. The brain cannot store its own fuel. Unlike your muscles, which can hold reserves of energy, the brain depends entirely on blood delivering oxygen and glucose in real time. And one of the most reliable ways to increase that blood flow is through human connection.

So, the same biology that makes interdisciplinary thinking work is the biology that drives creativity, and both make human connection essential. Oxytocin, the hormone that drives trust and social bonding, also drives blood perfusion to the brain, delivering the nutrition that neural circuits need to grow. Connection is not just an interpersonal event; it is a biological event. Full stop.

When a chatbot is designed with an understanding of how humans actually communicate, what social genres shape our conversations, what rapport requires, what trust feels like, it is being designed in partnership with our biology. That alone changes everything about what a chatbot could do.

What This Could Mean

Right now, somewhere, a 22-year-old is sitting in an apartment trying to figure out how to tell a landlord to stop asking personal questions. A 19-year-old is scrolling through headlines designed to make her angry. A college junior is wondering whether anyone has ever felt this lost during their first semester away from home. These are the people Jones and Satyanarayan had in mind when they created this class. And these are the people their students had in mind when they sat down to design.

I have spent thirty years translating the science of human development for the people who build systems. Most of the time, I am trying to convince them that the science matters; that human connection is biological; that development is not fixed; that talent is not rare; that the environments we build shape who people become.

This is the first time I have seen a classroom where those ideas were already the starting point. A classroom where students began with the question “what does this person need?” and designed from there. That is what gives me hope. Two professors who think completely differently from each other decided to make something together, and their students are already building technology that takes human development seriously.

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If this story reminded me of anything, it is that the best ideas usually start with people who have different ideas about how the world works deciding to sit down together and create it. And you do not need to start a class at an elite university to do that. You just need to be willing to let someone else's way of thinking change yours.

Here are some ways to start.

Three Things You Can Try This Week

1. Challenge the nostalgia. The next time you hear someone say things were better before technology, ask yourself: better for whom? The systems we had before were failing most people. What would it look like to build something that actually works?

2. Look for the unlikely pairing. An anthropologist and a computer scientist made something neither could have imagined alone. Where in your own life or work could you bring together two ways of thinking that don’t usually sit in the same room? That intersection is where the most important ideas live.

3. Ask a young person what they wish technology could help them with. What they actually wish it could do. You might be surprised. And you might learn something about what “helpful” really means to the people we say we are trying to serve.

As always, if these ideas resonate with you, I’d love for you to share this with someone who needs to hear it. Please leave your comments below. And if you want to go deeper into the science of how we become who we become, please subscribe.

Thank you for being here.

—Pam

Photo by Mizuno K

There is a woman in a lab at MIT whose entire career began because she couldn’t choose.

Domitilla Del Vecchio grew up in Rome, the daughter of an engineer. Her father kept a home laboratory stuffed with the colorful insides of computers, circuit boards, bits of equipment he’d bring home from work. She spent hours there as a child, tinkering, touching, asking what things did.

Then in middle school, she had a math teacher who didn’t teach math the way anyone else did. This teacher started with the theory of numbers, almost philosophical, and something clicked. Later, a biology teacher in high school opened yet another door. By the time Del Vecchio was looking at universities, she had a problem: she loved math, she loved engineering, and she was captivated by biology, and yet she could not find a single place that would let her do all three.

So, she spent the next two decades building that place herself. She worked on robotic control systems in Rome, collaborated with biologists at Caltech, and eventually landed at MIT, where she now leads a lab at the intersection of mechanical engineering, biological engineering, and synthetic biology.

I want to tell you what she found there, because I believe it changes how we should think about who any of us can become.

What the Textbooks Get Wrong

Every cell in your body carries the same genome, the same starting code. What makes a skin cell different from a brain cell is not the code itself, but which genes are expressed and at what level. As cells develop, certain genes get turned on, others get turned off, and a process called DNA methylation and histone modification locks those settings in place. That lock is what biologists call epigenetic memory. It’s how a cell remembers what it is and what it has experienced.

For decades, the textbook understanding of that memory was binary: on or off. A gene was either fully expressed or fully silenced. If scientists saw a cell sitting somewhere in between, they assumed it was temporary, a cell that would eventually commit one way or the other.

Del Vecchio’s team tested that assumption. They engineered cells with a fluorescent marker tied to gene expression and then set different cells to different levels: fully on, fully off, and everywhere in between. Then they watched. For five months.

What they expected was that the in-between cells would drift toward one camp or the other. On or off. Because that’s what every textbook said would happen.

It didn’t happen.

Every single level held. The cells set to 30 percent of expression stayed at 30 percent. The cells at 70 percent stayed at 70 percent. Five months later, every intensity along the entire spectrum was maintained exactly where it had been set.

Gene expression wasn’t a light switch at all, but a dial, a dimmer switch. And the dimmer switch could be set anywhere, and it would stay there.

The study’s lead researcher, Sebastian Palacios, called the finding “mind-blowing.” I think that undersells it. I think it changes the way we need to think about human possibility itself.

Why This Finding Mattered to Me

I have spent thirty years translating the science of human development for people who work with children, who build systems, who make policy. And for most of that time, I have been making an argument that many people found hard to accept: that human potential is not fixed, not predetermined, and not knowable in advance. That what any one person is capable of depends enormously on the conditions and relationships around them.

I have said this in classrooms and in boardrooms. I have said it in clinical settings with children who had been told, in one way or another, that their story was already written. Over the years, I have watched children walk into my office carrying a number or a label someone gave them, convinced it told them everything they needed to know about what they could become. It never did.

This study gives that argument something it has never had before: proof at the level of the cell.

What Del Vecchio’s team has shown is that the machinery of life itself operates on a continuum. Your cells don’t snap into predetermined categories. They settle at levels that are shaped by relational context, by environment, by the molecular signals they receive. And those levels hold. They become what and who that cell is.

But the level was never inevitable. It was set by what happened to and around it.

What We’ve Been Dismissing

The consequences of this finding go well beyond the laboratory. Del Vecchio herself put it plainly: there may be many more cell types in our bodies than we currently know or recognize, and these cells have not become what they are going to become …..yet. Scientists may have been overlooking cells that don’t fit neatly into existing categories, dismissing them as noise, as transitional states, as cells that just hadn’t finished deciding yet. When in fact those in-between identities may be permanent or not. They may have functions we haven’t begun to understand.

I want you to sit with that for a moment. We have been looking at cells that don’t match our categories and assuming they must be temporary but already determined. We have been treating “in between” as a problem to be resolved rather than a state to be understood and developed.

Does that sound familiar?

I think about this every time someone tells me a child has been assessed. That a test score or a diagnosis or a zip code has revealed something essential and unchangeable about what that child is capable of. I think about the systems we’ve built to sort young people into tracks, to determine early who is college material and who is not, who is gifted and who needs intervention, who has potential and who has reached their limit.

Those systems rest on a binary assumption. You either have it or you don’t.

But identity is not a switch. Not at the cellular level, and not at the human level. It is a dial, and what sets the dial is not the code you were born with. It is the relationships that surround you, the environments that hold you, the experiences that signal to your biology what is possible here.

The First Chapter

This is the first chapter of the book I am writing, and it is the first chapter for a reason. Because I believe this is the first thing anyone needs to understand about human potential before we talk about education or mental health or workforce development or any of the systems that touch human lives.

The biology of becoming is not binary but graded. It is responsive. It is far more sensitive to context than any of us were taught to believe.

Del Vecchio couldn’t choose between math, engineering, and biology. So, she built a career that held all three. Nobody told her cells to do that. Something in her environment, a father’s lab full of opened-up computers, a math teacher’s philosophical question, a biology teacher who opened a door at the right time, set the dial. And the dial held and nurtured her future discoveries.

I find that deeply hopeful, not in a soft way, but in a scientific way.

Because if the machinery of life itself is capable of holding an infinite range of states, then no one’s potential was ever as narrow as the system that measured it at one moment in time. No child’s trajectory was ever as fixed as the label that was placed on them. And no human life was ever as determined as the story someone told about it before it had fully unfolded.

The Cells That Are Still Deciding

Right now, inside your body, there are cells that have not fully committed to who they are going to become. They are holding a position on a dial, responsive to the signals around them, capable of being set in ways we are only beginning to understand.

That is the biology of human possibility, doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The question for the rest of us, for parents, teachers, employers, policymakers, for anyone who has ever looked at another human being and made an assumption about what they were capable of, is whether we will build the environments that our biology requires and set those dials toward flourishing. Or whether we will keep insisting that a light switch was all there ever was.

I know where the science points. I have known for a very long time. And now, thanks to a woman who refused to choose between the things she loved, the cells themselves—her cells—are confirming it.

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Three Things You Can Try This Week

1. Notice a binary you’ve been holding. Is there someone in your life, anyone, whom you’ve mentally filed into a fixed category? Smart or struggling. Resilient or fragile. Ready or not ready. See if you can replace the switch with a dial. What would it take to move that dial, even slightly? What signal might you be able to send?

2. Be someone’s open door. Del Vecchio’s father didn’t tell her to become a synthetic biologist. He just left the lab open. A math teacher asked an unconventional question. A biology teacher let her explore. You don’t have to engineer someone’s future. You just have to be the kind of presence that tells their biology: more is possible here. That noticing itself is a neurobiological event.

3. Resist the urge to sort. The next time you encounter a test score, a performance review, a first impression, anything that wants to place a person in a fixed position, remember what the most sophisticated memory system in biology just taught us: even cells don’t work that way.

If the machinery of life can hold a spectrum, so can your understanding of another human being.

As always, if these ideas resonate with you, I’d love for you to share this with someone who needs to hear it. And please leave your comments below. I look forward to reading and replying. If you want to go deeper into the science of how we become who we become, please subscribe.

Thank you for being here.

—Pam

What if extraordinary capability emerges through a knowable pattern that is available to every one of us?

Connection → Belief → Biology → Agency → Practice → Growth

What if we moved from a culture of selection to a culture of cultivation—and built environments that reliably develop people, instead of sorting them? I believe we would see what many of us have sensed for a long time: talent is not rare. The potential for contribution isn’t scarce. It exists everywhere.

And the science of human possibility helps explain why.

Stories That Limit Our Potential

False beliefs about people run through our social systems, our schools, our workplaces. If you’re not privileged or protected, you see a distorted or incomplete reflection of who you are. Doors don’t open—or they close to keep you out.

When you are growing up, you see these reflections; you feel them overshadowing you. They constrain your dreams, your beliefs about yourself, and your willingness to be brave and take risks. They can make you feel small and vulnerable, even ashamed.

The Myth of Fixed Biology

By far the biggest myth of all is the myth that biology is destiny. How often have you heard someone say, “It’s in my DNA,” “I was born this way,” or “You can’t fight your biology”?

We are surrounded by language that suggests we are fixed—coded, predetermined.

Yet I will never forget the moment in my medical school class when the professor said this:

“There are 20,000 genes in the human genome, yet in our lifetimes, fewer than 10% will ever be expressed.”

I remember being stopped in my tracks, wondering, “What determines what is in that 10%?”

In fact, we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how society understands human potential. The antiquated bell curve model—the idea that we can know, sort, and cap a person’s potential in advance—has become the primary limiting factor in what individuals believe they can become.

The emerging paradigm rests on two scientific truths:

• that human potential is practically limitless

• that what any one person is capable of is not knowable in advance

What this means is that we can now move from a culture of selection to a culture of cultivation, grounded in the conditions that allow every person to realize their fullest possibilities.

Confronting Myths

I want to confront a few powerful myths that we cling to even though they are scientifically untrue. These myths are dangerous because they hold us back, constrain our dreams and undermine our belief in what is possible for ourselves and our children, and because they are embedded in our institutions as if they were true:

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The Science of Human Possibility Tells a Very Different Story

Genes are chemical followers that respond to environmental and relational signals. They are little packages of genetic material that can be turned on and off. What matters is not simply that we have particular genes, but what those genes are doing, and what is influencing what they are doing.

You can think of gene expression like a dimmer switch. And what influences the switch is context: the environments, experiences, and relationships in our lives.

Our genome is not just something we are born with. It develops as we do over our lifetimes. In fact, the genome you are born with is not the one you die with, and it won’t be the one you pass on to your children.

DNA contains instructions for building proteins, but environmental and relational factors play a huge role in which proteins are created. And it is these proteins that go on to influence what we do, and build, and become: intelligence, athleticism, musicality, a “gift” for writing.

Nowhere is this more true than intelligence. There are over 500 genes involved in the expression of our intelligence. But if you crank up chronic stress, fear, and relational deprivation, the expression of intelligence plummets, together with any measurement of your IQ. The genetic potential for intelligence will express itself in dramatically different ways depending on the context.

Genes are not destiny. They are possibilities that will be actualized, or not, depending on context.

How Context Shapes Human Potential

We can’t know what is encoded in our own DNA or what our brains are capable of. No one can. We can discover it through experiences that bring our capabilities to life. We come to know it through experience and relationships and opportunities that make our potential for good, great, or extraordinary performance visible. Healing, growth, and performance are one biological journey—the circuitry that repairs also strengthens, the one that strengthens performs and the one that performs can flourish.

Genes do not determine our destinies. Talent isn’t parceled out to a lucky few. Variation is the norm in human development.

What is true is this: potential is cultivated and revealed in relationships and through experiences that do exactly that—make our potential visible. This is because our brain is more like a live wire, rewiring itself based on what we feel, who we are with and what we believe is possible.

Three Things to Try Now

1. Question the myths you’ve absorbed about ability—in yourself and others. When you catch yourself thinking “I’m just not good at this” or “they’re not naturally talented,” pause. Ask: What experiences, relationships, or opportunities have shaped that belief? What might change with a different context?

2. Notice potential as something that grows. Whether you’re raising a young person, teaching, leading a team, or reflecting on your own path, remember: skills, confidence, and capability emerge through experience, support, and practice, not from fixed traits.

3. Choose environments and relationships that nurture belief. A door opened, a moment of encouragement, or a relationship rooted in trust can shift what feels possible for someone. Look for moments when you can offer opportunity—or a new way of seeing someone.

Carry this one idea with you: none of us fully knows what we are capable of until we experience the conditions to discover it. If you believe there is more in you—or in someone you care about—you are likely right.

Seek out the people and places where that “more” can be revealed. What you do matters.

—Pam

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For Further Reading

The Science of Experiential Civics

National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) State Education Standard

I explore these themes in another context in “The Science of Experiential Civics,” written with Fernande Raine and Susan Rivers. It considers how agency, experience, and relationships shape civic learning—and why context, not sorting, determines what young people can show us.

I want to tell you about one of the best teachers I ever had. He wasn’t particularly soft, and he wasn’t harsh, either. He just told the truth. When I brought him my work, he would give me an absolutely accurate assessment of where I was. Not what I wanted to hear or what would make me feel good. Just the real, honest truth. And because his feedback was so accurate, so detailed, it actually showed me what I could do to make it better.

I went to him every chance I got and over every other teacher I had during that time. He was the one I could count on. I knew that what he said was going to be valuable, and that the honest assessment would absolutely point me in the direction I needed to go. I trusted him.

Right now, we don’t have AI that can do this. Someone has to know you. They have to know something significant about who you are, what you’re working on, what you’re capable of, what you are aspiring to. Accuracy requires intimacy, and intimacy requires trust—the very thing that sycophancy is designed to simulate and avoid—the possibility that the other person might not like what you have to say.

I’ve been thinking about that teacher because of something I read by Julia Freeland Fisher, a researcher who writes a Substack called Connection Error.

Freeland Fisher has been making a case I think is very important: that AI companions, chatbots designed to affirm and never challenge, are training people out of being able to handle judgment and challenge. Especially young people. She argues that adults need to both withhold judgment to maintain connection with kids and avoid challenge—and that this won’t build kids’ tolerance for challenge and judgment as part of growing up and living in the world. AI that always affirms can’t do that in part because there is no tension, no struggle.

Freeland Fisher is right. And I want to push her argument further, because I don’t think this problem started with AI.

We Invented This

Long before chatbots existed, there was a much older technology for avoiding the truth: us.

I spent years as a therapist, and of all the dynamics that walked into my office, the most common one was probably parents who had chosen the path of least resistance with their children, or teachers with their students. Adults who avoided conflict, avoided judgment, avoided having their kids get angry at them. Teachers who would rather give the easy feedback than take the risk of saying the harder, truer thing. Most of these adults cared deeply. Telling someone the truth, especially someone you love, is one of the most difficult things a human being can do.

We act as if AI invented sycophancy, as if it came out of nowhere. AI didn’t invent it. It just replicated what humans do when we are not doing our best on behalf of the people we care most about. As a matter of fact, we often take the easier path when the stakes are the highest, with people who are really important to us. AI learned the path of least resistance from us and it scaled it.

The people in my life who helped me the most were the ones who figured out how to give feedback in language that made it possible for me to hear it. They told me what I needed to know, not what I wanted to hear, and they did it because they cared enough to take that risk. Having even a few people like that in your life can transform it. Even a few people you can actually count on to say the true thing can change the trajectory of your life.

As a therapist I knew that my responsibility was to build that specific muscle. The question I keep coming back to today is what happens when that muscle never gets built?

What Makes It So Hard

Hearing the truth makes one anxious if they feel that somebody is judging them. It makes them anxious if they feel that somebody is about to reject them. It makes them anxious if they want someone to be a friend and they don’t pick up the reciprocity that they actually want to be a friend, too. I could go down the list, but all of these things have something in common. They are judgements and rejections of different kinds, rejection of ourselves, of something we wish for, of an image we have of who we want to be.

Psychologists call this rejection sensitivity. It is such an uncomfortable feeling that we will do almost anything to get away from it. We stop speaking up, we avoid conflict, we steer clear of situations where we might be judged. We reject the other person first, before they can reject us. None of these strategies are good for us, and none of them build anything lasting, let alone this particular muscle.

I had a therapist who understood this. When I was struggling with a friendship that I was afraid wasn’t going to work out, he would say to me: “You’re not going to die from rejection. You really aren’t. You can live with the possibility that this doesn’t go the way you want.”

When he said that, which wasn’t all that sympathetic, but was absolutely the truth, he made this big thing smaller, made something that had been very big in my mind feel like I could manage it. He was being accurate about what I could handle, telling me the truth about my own capacity, which was greater than I believed. He built my muscles just like my best teachers.

Over time, I internalized something: I can handle this. It’s not going to overwhelm me. And eventually he taught me that I don’t want to be friends with people who don’t want to be friends with me. Why am I chasing them?

That progression, from avoidance to tolerance to self-knowledge, is what a young person misses when their primary source of feedback is something that only tells them what they want to hear.

The Missing Piece

There is something missing from the conversation about AI and young people, and even from the larger conversation about the anxious generation. I think it’s our biology.

When we are in the kind of connection with another person where someone truly sees us and we truly see them, a cascade of neurochemistry is activated. It begins with oxytocin, joined by dopamine and several other chemicals. Oxytocin has enormous influence on the vasculature of the brain. It drives blood perfusion, literally delivering the nutrition the brain needs to grow, to repair, and to thrive. This is the biology I wrote about in my last post, and it changes how we should be thinking about this moment.

You cannot build that muscle or the neurochemical system behind it by gliding through life, any more than you could build a bicep by avoiding the situations that could develop it. The cocktail of trust requires honesty that is received, friction that is worked through, conflict that is repaired, ambiguity that can be tolerated. If someone always agrees with you, you can’t build trust with them. If you can never count on someone to give you honest feedback about something that matters, the trust system doesn’t fully activate. And if that system doesn’t activate, the brain doesn’t grow the way it could.

Freeland Fisher has named something important about what happens to our social networks when AI makes it easy to solve problems alone. But I don’t think the conversation has fully named what the way forward looks like, because it is biological, and it requires us to do something that goes against our deepest instincts.

As I’ve said, taking phones away will not solve this. Reducing screen time will not solve this. What will solve this is building the muscle of tolerance for the discomfort that authentic relationships require: the capacity to receive feedback, to sit with the feeling of being judged, to repair a relationship after friction, and to discover that what emerges on the other side is something no chatbot can replicate.

Something Better than ‘Easy’

We are wired to seek relief from anxiety. Every part of us wants to get away from it, feel relief from a more frictionless path. And yet the frictionless path doesn’t lead to growth.

Because there is something better and juicier than a frictionless world, and it is connection and trust with another human being. The kind that can only exist when you have had friction with someone, navigated it together, and come to know what you now have with that person. There isn’t anything better than that. I have experienced it in my own life, and I have watched my patients experience it. Likely you have too. The feeling of trusting someone who has earned that trust through something honest and real is one of the most powerful human experiences available to us.

AI is making this harder, yes. But we were already heading here long before chatbots arrived. The question now is whether we are willing to do the harder, more human work of building the muscle that no technology can build for us. I believe we are, but only if we stop acting as though AI invented a problem that has always been ours and start taking seriously what our biology has been telling us all along: that human connection, honest enough to be trusted, is what fuels the growth that every one of us is designed for.

Three Things You Can Try This Week

1. Tell someone the truth, with care. Think of a person in your life you’ve been giving the easy answer to; a student, a child, a colleague. Find a way to say the honest thing, not harshly, but accurately, in language they can actually hear. That kind of honesty is one of the most important things you can do for another person’s brain… and their heart.

2. Let someone sit with discomfort and stay with them. The next time a young person in your life encounters criticism or disappointment, resist the urge to fix it immediately. Be with them. Let them feel what they’re feeling. And then help them see how they surmounted a tough moment. That is how the muscle gets built, one small experience at a time.

3. Notice who you trust for the truth. Think about the people in your life whose feedback you value most. They are probably not the people who always tell you what you want to hear. They are the ones who take the risk of being honest, and who know you well enough to do it in a way that actually helps. That relationship is rare. It is also biology at its most powerful, the biology of trust. Let them know what they mean to you.

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As always, if these ideas resonate with you, I’d love for you to share this with someone who needs to hear it. And please leave your comments below, I look forward to reading and replying. If you want to go deeper into the science of how we become who we become, please subscribe.

Thank you for being here.

—Pam

I put everything down and read it.

The study tested a clinical intervention called HOPE—Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences—built around four components. The results were rigorous, quantitative, and striking. The kind of damage we once believed was permanent can actually be repaired.

When I finished reading, I felt something I’ve learned to trust over many years: the feeling of dots connecting. Because this study doesn’t just tell us something important about trauma. It tells us something urgent about right now, about the crisis in youth mental health, the debate over phones and screens, and what nearly everyone is missing in the conversation.

What the Study Changes

When the original ACE study came out decades ago—the research linking adverse childhood experiences to long-term health consequences—I was in clinical practice. I watched what happened when people learned their scores. A woman would sit across from me and say, “I have six ACEs. Does that mean I’m going to have a heart attack at fifty?“

The ACE study was important. It elevated our understanding that adversity has real, lasting biological consequences. But many felt labeled, or worse given a death sentence, without offering a way forward. It told you what was wrong. It didn’t tell you what to do about it.

I was a child psychiatrist and avoided labels altogether with my patients because they hurt and didn’t help. As someone who has known childhood trauma, I know what it feels like to carry a number that feels like destiny.

This new study does something different by showing us that there is a pathway to reverse the damage that trauma can do. And it does so by understanding something fundamental about how the brain actually works.

The biology that makes trauma reversible—connection-driven neurobiological change—is the same biology that is affected when human connection is displaced in the daily lives of young people.

A Piece of Biology That Shifts Everything

The human brain weighs about two and a half pounds. It consumes roughly 25 percent of the energy your body uses in a given day, an astonishing amount for something that fits between your two hands. And it makes that energy the same way every cell does: with oxygen and glucose.

But brain cells have a problem no other cells in the body have. They cannot store oxygen or glucose. Not even a little. The only way the brain gets energy is through blood perfusion—blood flowing to the brain, delivering fuel in real time. You can decide to get more blood to your biceps by picking up a weight, but you cannot decide to get more blood to your brain.

There is, however, something that does it reliably, something every one of us has access to: human connection. When we are in the presence of someone who truly sees us, who is attuned to us, present with us, a cascade of neurochemistry is activated. It’s led by a hormone called oxytocin, joined by dopamine and several other chemicals. But here is the part most people don’t know: in this cascade, oxytocin is the dominant hormone, not dopamine. And oxytocin has enormous influence on the vasculature of the brain. It drives blood perfusion. It literally delivers the nutrition the brain needs to grow, to repair, and to thrive.

The technical term for it is neurovascular coupling. I didn’t discover it, but my work with children who have known trauma had me translating science to young people so they could understand what was going on in their brains and bodies and most of all to know that they could heal and grow from whatever had happened to them. That’s what I strive for.

This is why nurturance leads to brain growth. This is why love matters, not only as a feeling, but as a biological event.

What Screens Are Actually Doing

Jonathan Haidt has done an enormous service by drawing attention to what screens are doing to young people. His data on rising rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness are convincing, the trends are alarming, and he is not wrong.

But he has identified a problem without going to some of the deeper explanations for the crisis we are seeing. Because of that, the only solution most parents and policymakers can imagine is to reduce screen time—take the phones away. That is part of what the solution looks like, but by itself, it is not going to fix what is actually broken.

Here is what I mean.

When a young person spends hours a day on a screen, alone, two things happen simultaneously. First, their dopamine pathways are highly engaged. The pathways get strengthened and they want more dopamine. And once you grow those pathways, they demand even more. This is the addiction cycle Haidt describes, and he describes it well.

But the second thing is less visible and ultimately more devastating: the displacement of human connection—of time with other humans.

When screens outpace time with other humans, the oxytocin system won’t be stimulated and the neural cocktail that energizes the brain, reduces stress, drives curiosity and engagement is dramatically reduced. Perfusion to the brain decreases. The neural pathways that grow with connection don’t get built.

We know what happens when children are deprived of human connection. Studies of infants raised in Romanian orphanages—children who were fed and sheltered but rarely held, spoken to, or loved—showed that their brains were measurably smaller than those of children who had consistent human contact. The cause wasn’t malnutrition in the traditional sense. It was the absence of connection, which starved their brains of the neurochemical fuel they needed to grow.

I want to be careful here. I am not saying that a teenager on a phone is the same as a child in an orphanage. I am also not saying that the use of technology is a bad thing. I am saying that we are social creatures and that our brains have a social core that didn’t evolve to solve abstract math problems but instead to navigate the complex terrain of social relationships. Our bodies and our minds developed intricate systems for synchronizing with others, which shaped neural development, gene expression, regulation of stress and ultimately whether our full potential can emerge.

The Full Picture

The ACE study did with trauma what I believe Jonathan Haidt is doing with anxiety. It named the problem and quantified the damage—and that matters. But the framing has amplified anxiety instead of empowering people to do what actually heals.

Putting phones down will not, by itself, correct the energy problem in the brain. What will correct it is human-centered experiences that activate the biology of connection.

The antidote to the “anxious generation” is human connection, trust and presence. It is designing the environments in which we live and work and learn and grow so that they deliver the fuel and the energy to our minds and our bodies to do exactly that.

This is our biology and what we are designed for. And it is exactly what the HOPE intervention proved: that through consistent, caring, human connection, you can change neurochemistry. And when you change neurochemistry, the brain rewires.

One Biology, One Pathway.

Healing, growth, and transformation are not separate journeys. They are one biological arc. And human connection is what powers it.

The same circuitry that repairs also strengthens, the one that strengthens also performs and the one that performs can flourish.

This is why trauma is not destiny. Anxiety is not destiny.

Three Things You Can Try this Week

1. Replace one screen moment with a human one. This isn’t about policing technology. It’s about choosing, even once a day, to be fully present with someone—a child, a partner, a friend—without a device between you. That presence triggers a biological response no app can replicate.

2. Name what you see in someone. When you notice something good (effort, kindness, resilience, humor) say it out loud. That small act of recognition is an oxytocin event. You are not just being kind. You are delivering nutrition to someone’s brain.

3. Ask a better question than “how was your day?” Try: What made you laugh today? Was there a moment you felt proud of yourself? Did anyone surprise you? Specific questions invite connection, and connection is a neurochemical event, not just an interpersonal one.

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If these ideas resonate with you, I’d love for you to share this with someone who needs to hear it. And if you want to go deeper into the science of how we become who we become, please subscribe.

—Pam

Dear Friends,

If you’ve met me, you might know there is one question that has animated much of my work and life: How does each of us become who we become?

The Biology of Becoming is where I will explore that question, and what I’ve learned along the way about how growth actually happens. Many of you have been on this journey with me for a long time. This will be a space for your questions, too, and your reflections about your own life.

I will write about the powerful biology inside all of us, and how that biology is shaped and activated by human connection. Experiences and environments matter. Relationships matter. Small shifts in belief or design can change what becomes possible.

Some posts will draw from scientific research. Others will come from my experiences as a physician, educator, parent, and grandparent. And over time, I’ll feature the voices of colleagues who are building the conditions for human potential to flourish.

But I want to begin with my own story, because everything I know and believe about human possibility is rooted there. My life unfolded unexpectedly, painfully, and at times with shame.

But eventually it unfolded with purpose, and even beauty.

*A Note Before You Read:

The story below includes childhood trauma.

I am beginning here because this experience shaped my life and work, and it sits underneath the ideas I will explore in this space. If now is not the right moment for you to read a story involving abuse, please feel free to return to it when you are ready.

My Story

If you had known me when I was a teenager, you never would have imagined that one day I would become a doctor who helps people heal after terrible trauma. I was a sad, angry, isolated kid, and for good reason, because of what had happened to me.

I grew up in a house filled with secrets. Cousins, aunts, and uncles who lived on our street came in and out. There were sleepovers. Lots of sleepovers.

One night—I couldn’t have been more than five years old—my uncle came into my bedroom and abused me. I don’t remember how many times it happened after that. I only remember knowing it was wrong, and sensing that other people in my household knew it was happening, and not just to me.

When I was six, I had a nightmare that I was going to go blind or die if I stayed silent. I woke up in terror, ran to my parents, and told them what my uncle had been doing.

They told me not to speak of it to anyone, ever, because doing so would bring shame on the family. They were really angry at me, not at him, as if somehow, I was to blame.

So this terrible secret stayed deep inside me. The shame and distrust I felt burrowed into every part of my life for years.

Until I met someone who looked at me differently than I looked at myself.

He was a psychiatrist, a big bear of a man, and he called me “a pearl in an oyster,” not the ugly, dirty thing I believed I was. Through him, and others who cared about me, I began to believe something different about who I could become.

A few years later, I found myself in medical school. Getting there was a mountain climb. And when I arrived, I encountered an idea that stopped me in my tracks: it was an essay in Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974) that describes how every single cell in the human body has the capacity to change, to become something else.

If a cell can change, I thought, then so can I.

Then I learned something else from a lecture that mattered just as much: We have approximately 20,000 genes, but over the course of our lifetimes, fewer than 10 percent get expressed. And what determines what’s part of that 10 percent? Context: the environments, experiences, and relationships in our lives.

Once I grasped that biology responds to experience, something else became clear.

There is no separation of nature and nurture, biology and environment, or brain and behavior. There is only a collaboration between them.

Biology is not fixed. It is dynamic, alive to experience. This was a revelation for me.

Healing is possible.

Change is possible.

We are built for transformation.

And most importantly, none of us becomes what we are capable of in isolation.

The most important thing I learned in medical school wasn’t only about biology or treatments. It was about people. Human connection is the most powerful activator of potential. It fuels the brain. It releases the biochemistry of trust, agency, curiosity, and motivation. It makes the invisible visible.

This is what I mean when I talk about the science of human possibility: an emergent interdisciplinary science that tells an optimistic story about what is possible for all of us, especially our young people.

🔬 Here’s the biology, in plain language:

Our brains and bodies are literally shaped by relationship and experience. The brain is made up of cells that are among the most susceptible to change from experience of any in the human body. Human connection is not just an interpersonal event; it is a biological event. And human connection helps build and strengthen the neural connections that make change possible. Whether it is healing, discovering genius, or re-writing our own story, human possibility is not rare or fixed, it is wired into our biology, ready to be awakened by human connection.

Talent and potential will be revealed in environments and through relationships that do exactly that—reveal and develop who we can be. The biologic story explains something that we feel but have never had the language for—that healing, growth, and transformation are not separate journeys; they are one biological journey where the circuitry that repairs also strengthens, the one that strengthens also performs, and the one that performs can flourish.

The fullest expression of human possibility depends on whether we create opportunities and environments that honor what our biology requires.

This is why trauma is not destiny.

Not mine, and not anyone else’s.

This is why I was able to become who I have become, even though my start in life was rough. I am no exception. And I am not exceptional.

Three Things to Try This Week

1. Notice what is already working in a young person. Small, specific observations are not “nice.” They are biological signals. When you name someone’s strength, effort, or integrity, you widen what their nervous system can expect from themselves.

2. Be one steady, trustworthy person. One person who sees you clearly can alter the trajectory of your life. You can be that person for someone else.

3. Design for belonging. Create environments where people can show who they are without embarrassment, where they feel they belong quickly. Belonging is biology. It quiets doubt and builds courage.

Take these ideas into your week, and notice what shifts for you, or someone you care about.

Share The Biology of Becoming

An Invitation

This Substack will be a space for story and for science: how brains grow, how potential is revealed, how context shapes who we become, and how each of us can help ignite sparks in others.

• Because talent exists everywhere.

• Because trauma is not destiny.

• Because possibility lives inside each of us and is revealed in environments designed to do just that.

I am grateful you are here.

— Pam

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For Further Reading

Whole-Child Development, Learning, and Thriving
Cambridge University Press

If you are interested in how these ideas extend beyond my own story, and a deeper look at the science behind them, Whole-Child Development, Learning, and Thriving: A Dynamic Systems Approach (Cambridge University Press), written with Richard Lerner, Karen Pittman, Paul Chase, and Nora Gomperts, offers a clear explanation of how development unfolds through relationships and environments, and why those conditions shape what becomes possible.

Photo of Pamela Cantor, M.D. by David Jacobs

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