Showing results by author "Lydia Denworth" in All Categories

World-class pediatric surgeon, social scientist, and best-selling author of Thirty Million Words Dr. Dana Suskind returns with a revelatory new look at the neuroscience of early childhood development - and how it can guide us toward a future in which every child has the opportunity to fulfill their potential. Her prescription for this more prosperous and equitable future, as clear as it is powerful, is more robust support for parents during the most critical years of their children’s development.

With warmth and compassion, Denworth weaves together past and present, field biology and cutting-edge neuroscience, to show how our bodies and minds are designed to make friends, the process by which social bonds develop, and how a drive for friendship underpins human (and nonhuman) society. With its refreshingly optimistic vision of the evolution of human nature, this book puts friendship at the center of our lives.

Lydia Denworth presents insights from studies of everything from at-risk kids in Head Start to noisy cocktail party conversation, from songbirds to signal processing, and from the invention of the telephone to sign language. Weaving together tales from the centuries-long quest to develop the cochlear implant and simultaneous leaps in neuroscientific knowledge against a tumultuous backdrop of identity politics, I Can Hear You Whisper shows how sound sculpts our children’s brains and the life changing consequences of that delicate process.

They didn't start out as environmental warriors. Clair Patterson was a geochemist focused on determining the age of the Earth. Herbert Needleman was a pediatrician treating inner-city children. But in the chemistry lab and the hospital ward, they met a common enemy: lead. It was literally everywhere. Though few people worried about it at the time, lead was also toxic. In Toxic Truth, journalist Lydia Denworth tells the little-known stories of these two men who were among the first to question the wisdom of filling the world with such a harmful metal.

Science journalist Lydia Denworth takes us in search of the biological, psychological and evolutionary foundations of this important bond. She finds that the human capacity for friendship is as old as humanity itself, when tribes of people on the African savanna grew large enough for individuals to seek meaningful connection with those outside their immediate families. Lydia meets scientists at the frontiers of brain and genetics research and discovers that friendship is reflected in our brain waves, our genomes and our cardiovascular and immune systems.