VUNLERABLE MINDS

Evolutionary biologist and childhood research scientist Marc Hauser’s VULNERABLE MINDS: How Traumatic Experiences Transform A Child’s Life – And What We Can Do About It explores childhood traumas, which affect at least 1 billion people every year, create disastrous individual and public health consequences, ruin lives, cost society trillions of dollars, and cultivate dangers that permeate humanity. Preventing those traumas, intervening in them, and coping with them is arguably the most important work that we, as a society, can collectively do. (It will be all the more urgent in the coming years and decades as the consequences of childhood Covid traumas manifest themselves.)

Codified in landmark work in the late 1990s, so-called Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) have become the principal pathway to discovering how and why early childhood traumas so often translate into significant troubles later in life. But as genetic and biological sciences have evolved in the last 25 years, so too has our understanding of ACEs, and the dimensions in which they operate. In this groundbreaking book, Hauser will make the next leap in our understanding of ACEs, providing readers with a new framework – the 4 T’s of Time, Type, Tenure, and Toxicity – to understand how childhood trauma intersects with, interacts with, and complicates our exquisitely oriented biological systems to disrupt the ever so fragile balance and potential for a life happily and healthily lived. 

The hope offered by the understandings and clues from this science – including from the lives of some extraordinarily and breathtakingly resilient lives – compel us to commit ourselves to this collective obligation we have to the children of the world.

Marc Hauser is uniquely positioned – personally and professionally -- to write VULNERABLE MINDS. He has inherited trauma through his father’s experience of the Holocaust and when Hauser himself was accused of research misconduct, resigned from his professorship at Harvard, and was publicly shamed in the media. He has since rehabilitated his reputation, published in journals such as Nature, and works with high at-risk youths suffering adverse experiences, directly helping hundreds of children to improve their lives.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Marc Hauser a scientist, educator, innovator, and humanist. With broad training in the biological and social sciences, as well as philosophy and linguistics, he has published over 300 scientific papers, four academic books, and three trade books (Wild Minds, Moral Minds, and Evilicious). During his 18 years as a professor at Harvard University, he worked on topics in animal cognition, moral psychology, cognitive development, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy.