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Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Charlie Rose 20150527

nurturing and neglect of children and has revealed new insight about gender roles and parenting. new studies suggest the maternal instinct is not unique to women. men's brains also change as a take care of children and also suffer from postpartum depression. david levine experienced this first hand after the birth of his son. he joins me today to talk about his experience. also here to talk about that are a remarkable group of scientists, catherine dulac susanne shultz, charles nelson margaret spinelli , and my cohost, dr. eric kandel . he is a howard hughes medical investigator. i'm pleased to have all of them here at this table this evening. guest: in discussing the biology of parenting, we are going to discuss a number of topics. one is the remarkable similarity of parenting throughout the animal kingdom. we're also going to discuss parental and collect and how disasters that can be. we're also going to look at the changes that occur imposed partum depression. in the last program, we considered the biology of aggression and we learned from david anderson's work that the hypothalamus is concerned with aggression. there are nerves in the hypothalamus recruited for aggression and they are located right next to ron's concerned with mating. moreover, there is a population in between that can respond to either of those two instinctual drives depending on the intensity of the stimulation. if you stimulate weekly, you recruit mating behavior. if you induce strongly, you induce fighting. this prospect of having cells mediating different aspects is the number one characteristic of the hypothalamus and part of parenting. catherine dulac has discovered there are two populations of cells -- those concerned with parenting and those concerned with parental neglect. this has opened up a whole inquiry into the nature of the biology of parenting and we are learning a great deal about what leads to good parenting and what leads to parental neglect and what the consequences are. the interest in this began much earlier, in the early 1940's. a psychoanalyst turned out a remarkable study. he studied children isolated from their mothers at birth living in two very different environment. one environment was connected with a prison where the women delivered and there was a nursery. the other was a founding home in which children were dropped off because they were abandoned by their parents or by their mother. the two institutions functioned very differently. in the nursing home, the mothers themselves took care of the infants. because these were special times during the day they were allowed to interact with their infants, they bestowed a lot of attention and affection on the kids. in the founding home, there were nurses assigned to the children and one nurse took care of seven children. as a result, he child received a limited amount of attention and lived in relative social and sensory deprivation. when these kids were examined one year later, the differences were quite apparent. the kids in the nursing home were like kids raised in manhattan -- they were happy they interacted well with the people around them. the kids at the founding home were anxious and not very curious about what was going on around them. at ages two and three, the difference is even more dramatic. the kids in nursing home -- in the nursing home talked and were gregarious with one another. the kids in the founding home most of them could not walk, most of them could not talk and those that could talk could only express themselves with a few words. subsequent studies have shown there is a critical time of development that if you deprive children of up opiate parental interaction in contact, it affects them for the rest of their lives. a comparable time of isolation in later life has very little effect. so we're going to have a wonderful discussion about these topics and we have five spectacular people here. we have catherine dulac who made this wonderful discovery. we have susanne shultz who has been interested in the evolution of parental behavior and hormonal changes in parenting. chuck nelson has been studying a remarkable orphanage in romania in which children have lived in surprisingly isolated conditions . he is not only described the cognitive alterations but shown alterations in brain function and structure as a result. mag spinelli is a psychiatrist like myself, except competent. she's interested in postpartum depression and will tell us about hormonal changes associated with it and some of the things likely to increase the likelihood of of depression. 10% to 20% of women come down with postpartum depression. it also occurs in men and david is a person who suffered from this. the reason one doesn't know more about this is because most men are reluctant to discuss it. we are fortunate to have david here who is a physician and pediatrician and has the courage to discuss it which is not only wonderful for us but beneficial for other people who might suffer from postpartum depression to realize that to talk about it is normal. this is nothing to be ashamed of and it may be helpful for both the person who suffers from it and the people around him. we are in for a terrific program that could make us better parents, grandparents and godparents. charlie: let me ask this question of how we behave as parents is wired into the brain a central aspect of our conversation. guest: human parents nurture their young and these behaviors are essential to development of the child. in addition, parenting is one of the strongest and most enduring social bonds in human societies. remarkably, parental behavior is widely concerned in the mammal kingdom. females lactate and take primary responsibility of frontal care as can be seen in this very nice slide, the female chimpanzee is watching over the first step of her child. feel -- females are very maternal not only in mammals but in some species of birds frogs reptiles and insects. what about fathers? the contribution of males is very vulnerable. in some species, as seen here in these silverback mountain gorillas, and some species males are paternal, they nurture their young. in other, males attacked the children and sometimes kill them. so, i am a narrow biologist my group used a laboratory mouse to try to understand the basic pilot g of parental behavior. we would like to identify the brain areas involved in driving parental behavior and we would like to understand how these rain areas are regulated. in order to have animals that are parenting and some that are neglecting their infants. in females, mothers as well as non-mothers are spontaneously maternal, which means when they are put in the presence, they will put them in the nest and huddle with them. in contrast, males are infanticide. a will regularly attack the pups and kill them. however, males that have access to the females he come paternal free weeks after mating with the female which corresponds exactly to the gestation time. in other words, males who become fathers also become paternal. we took advantage of these extremely interesting paradigms in behavior between males and females and fathers and infanticide all males to discover what are the brain areas involved with this behavior. the first question we ask our what are the neurons that drive rental behavior? in the first set of experiments, we identified a specific set of cells in the hypothalamus that are activated during parental behavior. we then ask are these neurons required for parental behavior? we genetically ablated these neurons in rental males and parental females and surprisingly and remarkably none of these animals neglect their infants or attack them. this experiment the success shows these are required for parental behavior. in the next experiment, we asked if the activity in these neurons was sufficient to drive rental behavior. we took aggressive males and artificially stimulated these nurturing neurons. amazingly, the aggressive male stop attacking the pups and instead, they groom the infants. what this experiments as is the activity of these neurons is sufficient to drive parental care. in another experiment, we identify a set of cells in a different area of the hypothalamus that is activated when a aggressive males attacked their infants. we call these the parental a glad -- parental neglect neurons. in another experiment, we activate these neurons in females and found these neurons, these e-mails, instead of caring for their infants now neglect or attack them. so overall, this series of experiments suggest the brain has two components -- a set of cells in the hypothalamus that drives parental behavior and another set of cells that drives parental neglect. we are very excited by these results because it opens new opportunities to understand the control of parental behavior and possibly why some animals are parental and some are neglecting or attacking these infants. parental behavior is widely observed among animals, so these also raise the possibility that the function and regulation is widely conserved across the animal kingdom. charlie: how do you stimulate the neuron and to make the aggressive males mourner touring? guest: we use -- make the aggressive males more nurturing? guest: we stimulate neurons that have been modified and have a channel that is light activated. we drive the activity of genetically defined population of neurons. charlie: fascinating. ♪ charlie: let me talk about how it has all evolved. guest: what is very nice about what catherine has told us is that parenting is conserved across animals. what is interesting is that it often varies. there are similarities between species and there are differences between closely related species. our work is trying to understand the evolutionary basis for some of these parenting behaviors and why is it you have some parenting that's very different? as you can see in this io, this is a video of a gorilla mother and her infant -- in this video. this is one of those things we want to understand -- what is similar about humans and our caregiving and parental behavior in other animals? in the biology of mammals, females, it means there are hormones that are important in determining lactation, driving the production of milk and the let down reflex. these hormones are very important in regulating the behavior of mothers and their infants. two of these hormones are oxytocin and prolactin. at the end of regnant see, the hypothalamus the same part of the brain were catherine discovered the parenting hormones, produces proxy toes and primarily important physiologically in the production of milk and lactation. however, it is important in driving maternal behavior. oxytocin has these secondary impact on the brain such that when oxytocin levels are raised, females bond with their babies. this hormone is incredibly important in driving this relationship. another hormone produced is prolactin which is important in the production of milk. it also has consequences for maternal offspring bonding. that's interesting because we have this biology that allows females to produce milk, but they are also incredibly important in driving the relationship between mothers and their offspring. it's also shown to drive social bonds in general with other animals, so it seems like one of the base relationships tween two individuals for mammals is the mother offspring bond and its important in determining pair bonding between the relationships of males and females and more widely social relationships. there has been some fascinating work done to understand the evolutionary behavior especially of pair bonding between males and females. there is a nice system in full square some are polygynous and some are monogamous. the prairie vole is an example of monogamous pair bonding that are nurturing toward their young. what has been found in this system is that not only are there higher levels of oxytocin but in the mails, there's a similar hormone produced by the happened thalamus -- the hypothalamus which is important in determining pair bonding behavior. in a monogamous species, there are more present. oxytocin in female is important and driving maternal behavior and in males, it plays a similar role in driving pair bonds. there was a fascinating series of experiments determining both how oxytocin impacts female maternal behavior and mail pair bonding and paternal behavior. charlie: is it monogamy that produces the high levels of oxytocin or is it higher level of oxytocin that produce monogamy? guest: oxytocin is primarily involved with the maternal behavior. what is quite interesting is some of the tame -- some of the same teams that work on how that relates to pair bonding have shown you can take species that are not monogamous and had that and make them switch to being monogamous. you can actually change the hormones and it changes their behavior. in a larger context understanding what makes humans special, or what is it about human biology that is both similar and different to other primates. one thing that's remarkable as we have a very large brain and exceptionally long juvenile and infancy times. because we are born so helpless and unable to take care of ourselves, parenting becomes exceptionally important. human babies are totally defenseless and even throughout their juvenile time, they need more investment either parents than similar species closely related to us. that tells us that in humans particularly, understanding the role of parenting behavior is very important. charlie: what are the effects of children deprived of nurturing? guest: as you can see here, this infant and mother are having a wonderful conversation. this mother is in love with this baby and is what you want to see in all mothers. in instances of profound deprivation, all of that is missing. here, we have a pair of twins interacting. but here we have institutional care. the thing to notice is the sheer number of babies and the lack of caregivers. as you look through here there's one that you can see in the back. this is a very low investment in these children, unlike the piece we saw in the beginning. this lack of social interaction plays a fundamental role in building the brain. what we started to observe is in this study, what happens to the developing brain in kids growing up in institutional care. we had a manipulation where we saw a large number of children abandoned to institutions in romania. after studying them, some were placed in high quality foster care and some are placed in an is i want to show you a video every child around the age of two. the girl who is rolling over is 22 months of age. her iq is below 50. she's been in the institution and notice the other little girl is rocking. there are three or four other kids rocking and that is characteristic of kids who grow up in institutions. the question becomes what happens to the brain? and the next slide, i'm going to shade the beginning of the journey to understanding the rain. we recorded the brain's electrical activity by placing sensors on top of the head. the billions of neurons we have generated electricity we can pick up. from there, we can infer the power the brain is producing. how much electrical activity is there. we can color code that which indicates more or less power. on the right side, you see an image of ad never institutionalized rain. you are looking at this from the top down. it's portrayed here to reflect much more brain activity in red sitting over the frontal lobe. on the left panel, that is the institutionalized group. the brains of the kids in the institution are underpowered. instead of a 100 lightbulb -- 100 watt lightbulb, it's a 40 watt lightbulb. at that time, we became concerned. when the children were eight to 10, we performed magnetic resonance imaging on them. on the right is an m.r.i. scan and we are showing here gray matter which represent the cell bodies and appendages of the ron's that's on the cortical surface and do the computations and calculations of the brain. white matter shows up white and gray matter shows up gray. on the far right, you see the amount of gray matter in the never institutionalized -- these are children who grew up in families in bucharest, romania. if you look at the children on the far left, it is dramatically reduced. they show less gray matter as do the kids in foster care. what this is showing us is the brain has much less gray matter why the function of being in an institution. we show the same reduction and white matter. what is scary about this is that it's -- we know there is a smaller brain as a function of being an institution. guest: this is so important because before chuck did these studies, people knew deprivation and a lack of parental interaction was bad for the cognitive development of children. we did not know the degree to which it affected the brain directly. this is the first evidence that shows dramatic changes in the brain. charlie: what to be different if there were some kind of activities with these kids -- much more collegiality from outside? guest: in a moment, we will talk about what happens when you put kids in families. your question is can you improve an institution? guest: and does it have to be the parents? can it be parental substitutes? charlie: it doesn't have to be the parents, but it has to be caregivers that care for the child. charlie: is it as simple as your brain will develop if you can feel there is some contact and someone knows who you are and there is some active caring? guest: absolutely. social interaction is what is stimulating brain development and it is the lack of social interaction. kids in an institution who got cognitive and linguistic stimulation but no caregiving got -- would be just as poorly off. now the question is how much recovery is there? in this study, we placed half the kids into high-quality foster care. at the beginning of this io, we will see that little girl when she is 22 months of age -- this video when she is 22 months of age. right after this, we put her in foster care and this is her in foster care eight months later. her iq is in the mid-60's. this is her interacting with her foster care other. they have this loving relationship and this is eight months of foster care. in this clip she is four years of age and has been half her life in foster care. look at that interaction. this is the same little girl in the beginning who is crawling backwards and rolling over and had no language and now her iq is in the 80's. this tremendous recovery can occur by placing children into a family. but it seems to be regular did by critical time which means placement before the age of two years of age leads to much better outcomes. placement after that leads to much less desirable outcomes. on this slide, we can show that eeg. on the right is the brain of the never institutionalized child. in the next slide, we see the critical time. this is institution after age two. it looks identical to the institutionalized brain. the child is in a family, but not until they were older than two. now the children placed before they were two years old looks just like the kids who were never placed in an institution. what we see is an inflection point in development. removal from an institution and placement to a good family before two leads to better outcomes. charlie: so timing is everything and a at the ceiling on how much you can do. guest: it's a window of opportunity that is reduced. guest: you can see this in simple systems -- there was a simple experiment where they had monkeys were they did not have light for the first year or so. they were blind for the rest of their lives. they did an experiment involving binocular interaction. they give -- we see with both eyes and it gives depth perception. if you close one eye and keep it closed during that critical time and open it up, that i has lost complete control. the other eye has taken over. this applies to every system. this is a magical time in the development of sensory and social interactions. guest: what is interesting is how key the social interaction is. if you are thinking about vision, it's easy to see how that relates to the brain. guest: in the brain studies which i find so fascinating, we can get an idea of what is going on. we know when a child learns something or anyone learned anything the connection between nerve cells strengthen. you actually see a growth of synapse deked connections. -- synaptic connections. i would presume you are losing connection because you are not learning a darn thing. you are probably speaking at the pair bonding that involves new connections forming. guest: it is interesting also that infants that are not cared well our not necessarily good parents. it will be interesting to look at the development involved in parenting. what happens -- charlie: they are more likely to become bad parents? guest: when that pup grows up it does not take good care of its pups. guest: we are seeing our children at 16. it could be pretty dreadful errands but the kids we put in foster care early enough have a better chance of being good parents. charlie: someone is looking at this program and saying how do i maximize the rain and intellectual development of my child. is the simple answer engage? guest: enjoy and love the child. charlie: what about the argument of quality time versus time? guest: the position i take his parents worry too much. if they spend time interacting with their babies and talk to their babies and do all of the things we are biologically programmed to do, they don't have to worry. will they give them an iq of 150? that's irrelevant. that's not what makes us special as a species. ecologically in our offspring. guest: i think we're going to hear more, but being a too anxious is not a good idea as a parent. guest: i want to make one other point and that is that institutions also very. institutions can do a good job raising children who are there if they have appropriate staff to do it. what was wrong in this study is one nurse for seven children is inadequate. they have to listen to this program. ♪ charlie: when parents aren't present, their ability to nurture may be compromised. talk about postpartum depression. guest: most women start out the first days after birth with mood changes, but they usually resolve on their own. about 10% to 20% will have postpartum depression. we now know people who are at risk are those with either a personal history of depression a history of depression associated with childbirth family history of depression -- twin gestate asian also seems to be a participant and it also is worth noting that impoverished women and women with many life circumstances have twice the risk of the women i just spoke about. we tend to be very vulnerable after childbirth. in fact, women are more vulnerable to psychiatric illness immediately after childbirth and they are at any other time in their life. this was a study done in edinburgh in which 15,000 women were followed over 12 years. he found an increase in psychiatric admissions within the first three months postpartum. a formal diagnosis of postpartum depression requires a four-week onset. even if it occurs within the first year we continue to call it postpartum. some postpartum depressions will begin during pregnancy. about 50% begin during pregnancy. one other time to be careful of is moms who stop breast-feeding. at some point in that year or so for two years, i have had women come into my office who manifested major depressive symptoms immediately after stopping lactation. the clinical manifestations of women who come in, they are profoundly sad and have terrible anxiety. they feel overwhelmed that every task and they are usually unable to sleep, even unable to sleep when the baby sleeps, so that is unusual. what is unfortunate is they feel they cannot connect with the baby. they feel numb and they feel terribly guilty about this and usually label themselves bad mother. bonding with the baby -- they don't feel at all attached to the baby. they are not interested in interacting with the baby and it makes them feel awful. suicide can be a real concern at this time in mothers who are seriously depressed. there is another symptom that will occur in a few women who have postpartum depression. they have substantial ruminations all day long that a might hurt their baby. they become intolerable and they are really tortured. these are not women who want to kill their baby, these are women who have anxious ruminations that are very distressing. having said that, i want to quickly discuss postpartum psychosis because postpartum psychosis is very different from postpartum depression. it's actually a very rare disorder. it occurs it may be one in 1000 deliveries, though it is more prevalent in women who have bipolar disorder. these women need to be hospitalized and we consider it a psychiatric emergency because mom has to be separated from her baby for her own safety and her infant safety. they have lost contact with reality and may have hallucinations hallucinations or another psychotic thought may compel them to kill their baby. that's one of the saddest circumstances. speaking of the adverse effects that occur in children with a postpartum depression, they seem to have insecure attachment. they cannot tend to the infant's emotional needs. they also have some cognitive impairment because of the parental failure to encourage interest in the environment or curiosity and will often have behavioral problems because of the parents own irritability or hostility during the parenting time. over the course of pregnancy as you can see in this slide, there are hormones, which increase over the 40 weeks of identity. at the time of delivery, there's a precipitous fall within 24 hours, which is kind of a shock to the system. these hormones, estrogen and progesterone, feedback on to the hypothalamus, which is the emotional part of the brain. there are some women who are exquisitely sensitive to hormones and hormone changes during a lifetime. the most important component of parental caregiving is responsiveness to the infant. this is how i mom reacts to her baby -- she speaks to the baby, the baby has emotional needs, there is a kind of mutual emotional dance that goes on between them. but when a mom is depressed, what she says is she cannot attach to her baby, she cannot respond to the babies needs or the babies smile. charlie: what is the percentage of men who have post partum depression? guest: very underrecognized and very underresearched. how bubbly 5% and 10%. -- probably between 5% and 10%. guest: the stigma of mental illness is something i see every day is a pediatrician. not being able to talk about something, whether it mental illness or any treatment, if you can't get help i think it did delay me seeking treatment. in my opinion in america, a man is associated with several things, but weakness and helplessness are not considered to be masculine behaviors. that was what i experienced. when i was going through my postpartum issues with my wife i would say to her i worry that by telling you this, you will think less of me, that it will affect your perception of me because i'm supposed to be the strong husband and here i am -- charlie: tell us what you are feeling. guest: what ended up happening hit me off guard. i was very excited to have the child and was very happy when we found out we were having a boy, and i suffered no symptoms anytime during my wife's pregnancy. the first week of life everything was fine. i was at work but i had taken weeks two and three off to spend time at home. my wife was on maternity leave as well. that's when my feelings started to change. in retrospect, my sadness came out as more frustration and anger. i felt rejected i felt as if my son was rejecting me. he was a very ethical child to calm down. he cried a lot, even if he was well fed and changed. he did not soothe very easily. i viewed that very differently than my wife did. my wife connected to him and was nurturing and there were times i just did not want to be around him. there was one instance where i was so angry and frustrated that i just had to leave the apartment and walk outside because i could not be around him. i did not seek any help at that point because i was going back to work and i figured things would just get better. but of course, they didn't. when i would come home from work and my wife would hand my son to me, he was start crying him -- start crying and i would hand him right back. i would start to denigrate him and say very mean things about my son and this would upset my wife as much as for what i was saying as much as how i was feeling. during this time, i started to have some images in my head. that were not pervasive but they were there. unfortunately, they did involve me harming him. then harming my wife and then harming myself. it was at this point i realized i need some help. i spoke to my physician and he gave me zoloft and i took maybe four doses. i don't think i was prepared to take medicine. i had been in therapy for mild anxiety and i was comfortable with that. i found one person who does postpartum depression but i did not make the phone call. i think there was part of me that thought this would just get better, but of course it did not. at around week five or six, i probably said something particularly heinous that morning and i left for work and i called my wife to apologize and make sure we were still on for that weekend where one of the grandparent was going to come and watch my son and we were going to run some errands and maybe get some lunch and i thought i heard her know and i just lost it. i started crying and finally all of these things i was thinking and saying had finally come back and it was going to sever my bond with my wife which i needed so much at that point. of course, that was not what she said and she said you need some help. i said we need to get a night nurse to help us with some sleep. i got to work and called one of my good friend who has two daughters and told him some of what i was experiencing. he told me it was not unusual and i should make some phone calls. that day i called the therapist and by the next week, i was seeing somebody who i ended up seeing for the next three months. the night nurse started and i was starting my cognitive behavioral therapy. one thing they went over was these feelings are thoughts they are not actions and they should not real bad that i felt this way, i just have to see them for what they were. they were negative thoughts not based on reality. my son was not rejecting me. he was not ill, he was seeing the doctor, there's nothing to act up what i was thinking and i had to do a lot of homework to help myself through that. by the time he was three months i was going to take some time off. up until that point, it was looking dicey. thankfully, through the european him just maturing and getting at her like a bees do, we ended up having a great month. i finally felt like a parent. i changed all the diapers. i felt like i gained so much at the time. he's 18 months old and i have a great wife. charlie: and he loves you. guest: he does and i believe that. thinking back, it was another person experiencing that. i do hope if -- as i realized i looked online for information and there's not much on paternal postpartum depression and i did not know what rates there were and i never had anybody talk about it. hopefully if somebody does see this and understand what they are going through is not unique that they can get help and hopefully don't have two go through that. charlie: let me just say to anyone watching, there's an admiration for coming to share your story. i'm sure you sharing your story will benefit someone else. i wonder if in fact, and it's so much easier to say -- if you reached out from the very beginning when you felt this, at that time you did not realize it was a problem. for someone to give you more context and say your son is not rejecting you, he's being a baby that would have made a difference. guest: when the time comes and we have another child, i will probably start seeing someone ahead of time to be on the safe side. i'm assuming having gone through it once that i will the -- it will be more electable. but just to be on the safe side as i never want to have those feelings again, i will be talking to someone and make sure if they do pop up i do have someone i can talk to. guest: one of the ground rules of psychotherapy is you can think anything. that is, you are allowed to entertain any idea you have in your head. that's not action. that alone makes it comfortable -- knowing it's not a terrible thing. thinking is your privilege. charlie: everything that has been said here is fascinating to me and i'm not a parent. but i, godparent and i see lots of kids. i come away with this with a greater understanding of the absolute significance in the first two years of a baby's life for there to be some kind of -- and this may be fundamentally understood by mothers around the world, but it's not. how essential this is to what we now know about the biology of the brain and what happens to neurons. let's talk a bit more about other places where children, of no fault of their own, and up perhaps by tragedy or something else, in a foster home. what are the implications of that? are the rules the same? we have to figure out a way to find and connect to a child with love and to nurture. guest: i think it's a little more complicated in foster care in the u.s. because what leads a child to go into foster care can be complicated. it can be any number of awful things in the worst thing we do is in foster care is have repeated foster care placements. the critical issue is the sooner they are taken out of a bad environment and put into a good one, the better off it will be. the second thing is a trickier issue, adult last the city. now you have a child who had an awful few years and they are showing all kinds of a you're an emotional problems. it's going to require more effort to get that child back on even keel. it's not impossible but having gone through this, the parent needs to understand it's going to take more. that's another frontier, to harness the power of the adult brain and rescue these critical times and in so doing take a five-year-old, 10-year-old or 15-year-old and get them back to where they should be. charlie: do you have research on that? guest: we have growing research on that. how to -- if you go back to the example of children born with a vision problem, there is work to suggest in the adult animal, few rear them in the dark for a while, you can treat adults for business, but we can't do that in a human. what we are looking for are things we can do in the human that will allow us to make up for a lack of that. guest: what is important is non-parents can be as nurturing as biological parents. this has been shown in animals as well. in rats, nonparent male and females will reject a pop. but if you expose these animals to pups several days in a row, they will build a nest and groom the pops. these suggest the brain areas that drive parental behavior can be activated in parents and nonparents. guest: the biology is becoming so interesting. we can tell when a woman has postpartum depression and how she responds to the child compared to a normal parent. we are at a very early stage and i think they are so fascinating in terms of the aggression. charlie: is there some point where nurturing reaches a vanishing level? guest: i think there is a point of diminishing returns. as a species, we've come to expect certain things and then it kind of like those which should take pressure off the parents to be perfect. guest: thinking of how humans evolved in what we traditionally did, the nuclear family is something quite recent and it comes back to what parents say about nonparental care -- there's a lot of different ways we can raise children with different kinds of support and investment. it doesn't all have to be from the parent. we get stuck into it -- moms have to bring kids up, but villages bring kids at. it's important to think about this nurturing can come from outside the family. guest: it is important to remember the extended family and interacting with grandparents and cousins. guest: if you look at traditional societies, it's not always the family. there's the risk of people thinking i don't have an extended family network and my child is going to suffer. high quality care can come from a lot of places. charlie: i know fathers who have said to me i really could not connect or identify with my child below two years old. once he got to be three or four or five, it was much better. it seems to me that we are making the case here -- you should understand the rentable that nurturing is good and if you can't do it, figure out a way that it can be done. guest: what we are describing is that somebody needs to make an investment in the child. it doesn't necessarily have to be the biological parents. guest: the mom has to hear it's ok if you don't want to be with them 100% of the time. if you want to go have lunch with somebody and leave the child with a friend, neighbor or family member, it's not a bad thing but we have made it so the mother must be able to do everything and anything and that's not what i'll g really has. -- what biology really has. charlie: what are we doing next? guest: we are doing the allergy of gender identity. charlie: thank you very much. ♪ angie: sunday the spotlight. accusation. fifa says it is the damaged party. shareholders slam jamie dimon proxy advice as blaming -- lazy and irresponsible. . . energies chairman denies it is under investigation by hong kong regulators. the day, i'm angie lau. love them to "first up," comi

Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Charlie Rose 20150528

new studies suggest the maternal instinct is not unique to women. men's brains also change as a take care of children and also suffer from postpartum depression. david levine experienced this first hand after the birth of his son. he joins me today to talk about his experience. also here to talk about that are a remarkable group of scientists, catherine dulac, susanne shultz, charles nelson margaret spinelli, and my co-host, dr. eric kandel. he is a howard hughes medical investigator. i'm pleased to have all of them here at this table this evening. guest: in discussing the biology of parenting, we are going to discuss a number of topics. one is the remarkable similarity of parenting throughout the animal kingdom. we're also going to discuss parental and collect and how -- discuss parental neglect and how disasters that can be. we're also going to look at the changes that occur imposed partum depression. in the last program, we considered the biology of aggression and we learned from david anderson's work that the hypothalamus is concerned with aggression. there are nerves in the hypothalamus recruited for aggression and they are located right next to ron's concerned -- neurons concerned with mating. moreover, there is a population in between that can respond to either of those two instinctual drives depending on the intensity of the stimulation. if you stimulate weekly, you recruit mating behavior. if you stimulate strongly, you induce fighting. this prospect of having cells mediating different aspects is the number one characteristic of the hypothalamus and part of parenting. catherine dulac has discovered there are two populations of cells -- those concerned with parenting and those concerned with parental neglect. this has opened up a whole inquiry into the nature of the biology of parenting and we are learning a great deal about what leads to good parenting and what leads to parental neglect and what the consequences are. the interest in this began much earlier, in the early 1940's. a psychoanalyst turned out a remarkable study. he studied children isolated from their mothers at birth, living in two very different environment. one environment was connected with a prison where the women delivered and there was a nursery. the other was a founding home in which children were dropped off because they were abandoned by their parents or by their mother. the two institutions functioned very differently. in the nursing home, the mothers themselves took care of the infants. because these were special times during the day they were allowed to interact with their infants they bestowed a lot of attention and affection on the kids. in the founding home, there were nurses assigned to the children and one nurse took care of seven children. as a result, he child received a limited amount of attention and lived in relative social and sensory deprivation. when these kids were examined one year later, the differences were quite apparent. the kids in the nursing home were like kids raised in manhattan -- they were happy they interacted well with the people around them. the kids at the founding home were anxious and not very curious about what was going on around them. at ages two and three, the difference is even more dramatic. the kids in nursing home -- in the nursing home talked and were gregarious with one another. the kids in the founding home, most of them could not walk, most of them could not talk and those that could talk could only express themselves with a few words. subsequent studies have shown there is a critical time of development that if you deprive children of appropriate interaction or contact it affects them for the rest of their lives. a comparable time of isolation in later life has very little effect. so we're going to have a wonderful discussion about these topics and we have five spectacular people here. we have catherine dulac who made this wonderful discovery. we have susanne shultz who has been interested in the evolution of parental behavior and hormonal changes in parenting. chuck nelson has been studying a remarkable orphanage in romania in which children have lived in surprisingly isolated conditions. he is not only described the cognitive alterations but shown alterations in brain function and structure as a result. mag spinelli is a psychiatrist like myself, except competent. she's interested in postpartum depression and will tell us about hormonal changes associated with it and some of the things likely to increase the likelihood of of depression. 10% to 20% of women come down with postpartum depression. it also occurs in men and david is a person who suffered from this. the reason one doesn't know more about this is because most men are reluctant to discuss it. we are fortunate to have david here who is a physician and pediatrician and has the courage to discuss it, which is not only wonderful for us but beneficial for other people who might suffer from postpartum depression to realize that to talk about it is normal. this is nothing to be ashamed of and it may be helpful for both the person who suffers from it and the people around him. we are in for a terrific program that could make us better parents, grandparents and godparents. charlie: let me ask this question of how we behave as parents is wired into the brain, a central aspect of our conversation. guest: human parents nurture their young and these behaviors are essential to development of the child. in addition, parenting is one of the strongest and most enduring social bonds in human societies. remarkably, parental behavior is widely concerned in the mammal kingdom. females lactate and take primary responsibility of frontal care as can be seen in this very nice slide, the female chimpanzee is watching over the first step of her child. females are very maternal not only in mammals but in some species of birds, frogs, reptiles and insects. what about fathers? the contribution of males is very vulnerable. in some species, as seen here in these silverback mountain gorillas, and some species males are paternal, they nurture their young. in other, males attacked the children and sometimes kill them. i am a narrow biologists -- neor obiologist. try to understand the basic pilot g of parental behavior. we would like to identify the brain areas involved in driving parental behavior and we would like to understand how these rain areas are regulated. in order to have animals that are parenting and some that are neglecting their infants. in females, mothers as well as non-mothers are spontaneously maternal, which means when they are put in the presence, they will put them in the nest and huddle with them. in contrast, males are infanticide. a will regularly attack the pups and kill them. however, males that have access to the females become paternal free weeks after mating with the female which corresponds exactly to the gestation time. in other words, males who become fathers also become paternal. we took advantage of these extremely interesting paradigms in behavior between males and females and fathers and infanticide all males to discover what are the brain areas involved with this behavior. the first question we ask our what are the neurons that drive behavior? in the first set of experiments, we identified a specific set of cells in the hypothalamus that are activated during parental behavior. we then ask are these neurons required for parental behavior? we genetically ablated these neurons in rental males and -- parental males and parental females and surprisingly and remarkably, none of these animals neglect their infants or attack them. this experiment the success shows these are required for parental behavior. in the next experiment, we asked if the activity in these neurons was sufficient to drive rental -- parental behavior. we took aggressive males and artificially stimulated these nurturing neurons. amazingly, the aggressive male stop attacking the pups and instead, they groom the infants. what this experiments as is the activity of these neurons is sufficient to drive parental care. in another experiment, we identify a set of cells in a different area of the hypothalamus that is activated when aggressive males attacked their infants. we call these this the parental neglect neurons. in another experiment, we activate these neurons in females and found these neurons, instead of caring for their infants now neglect or attack them. so overall, this series of experiments suggest the brain has two components -- a set of cells in the hypothalamus that drives parental behavior and another set of cells that drives parental neglect. we are very excited by these results because it opens new opportunities to understand the control of parental behavior and possibly why some animals are parental and some are neglecting or attacking these infants. parental behavior is widely observed among animals, so these also raise the possibility that the function and regulation is widely conserved across the animal kingdom. charlie: how do you stimulate the neuron and to make the aggressive males mourner -- more nurturing? guest: we stimulate neurons that have been modified and have a channel that is light activated. we drive the activity of genetically defined population of neurons. charlie: fascinating. ♪ charlie: let me talk about how it has all evolved. guest: what is very nice about what catherine has told us is that parenting is conserved across animals. what is interesting is that it often varies. there are similarities between species and there are differences between closely related species. our work is trying to understand the evolutionary basis for some of these parenting behaviors and why is it you have some parenting that's very different? as you can see this is a video of a gorilla mother and her infant. this is one of those things we want to understand -- what is similar about humans and our caregiving and parental behavior in other animals? in the biology of mammals, females, it means there are hormones that are important in determining lactation, driving the production of milk and the let down reflex. these hormones are very important in regulating the behavior of mothers and their infants. two of these hormones are oxytocin and prolactin. at the end of regnant see, the -- pregnancy, the hypothalamus, the same part of the brain were catherine discovered the parenting hormones, produces proxy toes and primarily important physiologically in the production of milk and lactation. however, it is important in driving maternal behavior. oxytocin has these secondary impact on the brain such that when oxytocin levels are raised, females bond with their babies. this hormone is incredibly important in driving this relationship. another hormone produced is prolactin which is important in the production of milk. it also has consequences for maternal offspring bonding. that's interesting because we have this biology that allows females to produce milk, but they are also incredibly important in driving the relationship between mothers and their offspring. it's also shown to drive social bonds in general with other animals, so it seems like one of the base relationships tween two individuals for mammals is the mother offspring bond and its important in determining pair bonding between the relationships of males and females and more widely social relationships. there has been some fascinating work done to understand the evolutionary behavior, especially of pair bonding between males and females. there is a nice system in full square some are polygynous and some are monogamous. the prairie vole is an example of monogamous pair bonding that are nurturing toward their young. what has been found in this system is that not only are there higher levels of oxytocin, but in the mails, there's a similar hormone produced by the hypothalamus which is important in determining pair bonding behavior. in a monogamous species, there are more present. oxytocin in female is important and driving maternal behavior and in males, it plays a similar role in driving pair bonds. there was a fascinating series of experiments determining both how oxytocin impacts female maternal behavior and mail pair bonding and paternal behavior. charlie: is it monogamy that produces the high levels of oxytocin or is it higher level of oxytocin that produce monogamy? guest: oxytocin is primarily involved with the maternal behavior. what is quite interesting is some of the tame -- some of the same teams that work on how that relates to pair bonding have shown you can take species that are not monogamous and had that and make them switch to being monogamous. you can actually change the hormones and it changes their behavior. in a larger context, understanding what makes humans special, or what is it about human biology that is both similar and different to other primates. one thing that's remarkable as we have a very large brain and exceptionally long juvenile and infancy times. because we are born so helpless and unable to take care of ourselves, parenting becomes exceptionally important. human babies are totally defenseless and even throughout their juvenile time, they need more investment either parents than similar species closely related to us. that tells us that in humans particularly, understanding the role of parenting behavior is very important. charlie: what are the effects of children deprived of nurturing? guest: as you can see here, this infant and mother are having a wonderful conversation. this mother is in love with this baby and is what you want to see in all mothers. in instances of profound deprivation, all of that is missing. here, we have a pair of twins interacting. but here we have institutional care. the thing to notice is the sheer number of babies and the lack of caregivers. as you look through here there's one that you can see in the back. this is a very low investment in these children, unlike the piece we saw in the beginning. this lack of social interaction plays a fundamental role in building the brain. what we started to observe is in this study, what happens to the developing brain in kids growing up in institutional care. we had a manipulation where we saw a large number of children abandoned to institutions in romania. after studying them, some were placed in high quality foster care and some are placed in an -- some remain in the institution. i want to show you a video of a child around the age of two. the girl who is rolling over is 22 months of age. her iq is below 50. she's been in the institution and notice the other little girl is rocking. there are three or four other kids rocking and that is characteristic of kids who grow up in institutions. the question becomes what happens to the brain? and the next slide, i'm going to show you the beginning of the journey to understanding the brain. we recorded the brain's electrical activity by placing sensors on top of the head. the billions of neurons we have generated electricity we can pick up. from there, we can infer the power the brain is producing. how much electrical activity is there. we can color code that which indicates more or less power. on the right side, you see an image of ad never institutionalized brain. you are looking at this from the top down. it's portrayed here to reflect much more brain activity in red sitting over the frontal lobe. on the left panel, that is the institutionalized group. the brains of the kids in the institution are underpowered. instead of a 100 watt lightbulb, it's a 40 watt lightbulb. at that time, we became concerned. when the children were eight to 10, we performed magnetic resonance imaging on them. on the right is an m.r.i. scan and we are showing here gray matter which represent the cell bodies and appendages of the neurons that sit on the cortical surface and do the computations and calculations of the brain. white matter shows up white and gray matter shows up gray. on the far right, you see the amount of gray matter in the never institutionalized -- these are children who grew up in families in bucharest, romania. if you look at the children on the far left, it is dramatically reduced. they show less gray matter as do the kids in foster care. what this is showing us is the brain has much less gray matter why the function of being in an institution. we show the same reduction and white matter. what is scary about this is that it's -- we know there is a smaller brain as a function of being an institution. guest: this is so important because before chuck did these studies, people knew deprivation and a lack of parental interaction was bad for the cognitive development of children. we did not know the degree to which it affected the brain directly. this is the first evidence that shows dramatic changes in the brain. charlie: what to be different if there were some kind of activities with these kids -- much more collegiality from outside? guest: in a moment, we will talk about what happens when you put kids in families. your question is can you improve an institution? guest: and does it have to be the parents? can it be parental substitutes? charlie: it doesn't have to be the parents, but it has to be caregivers that care for the child. charlie: is it as simple as your brain will develop if you can feel there is some contact and someone knows who you are and there is some active caring? guest: absolutely. social interaction is what is stimulating brain development and it is the lack of social interaction. kids in an institution who got cognitive and linguistic stimulation but no caregiving got -- would be just as poorly off. now the question is how much recovery is there? in this study, we placed half the kids into high-quality foster care. at the beginning of this video when she is 22 months of age. right after this, we put her in foster care and this is her in foster care eight months later. her iq is in the mid-60's. this is her interacting with her foster care other. -- mother. they have this loving relationship and this is eight months of foster care. in this clip, she is four years of age and has been half her life in foster care. look at that interaction. this is the same little girl in the beginning who is crawling backwards and rolling over and had no language and now her iq is in the 80's. this tremendous recovery can occur by placing children into a family. but it seems to be regular did by critical time which means placement before the age of two years of age leads to much better outcomes. placement after that leads to much less desirable outcomes. on this slide, we can show that eeg. on the right is the brain of the never institutionalized child. in the next slide, we see the critical time. this is institution after age two. it looks identical to the institutionalized brain. the child is in a family, but not until they were older than two. now the children placed before they were two years old looks just like the kids who were never placed in an institution. what we see is an inflection point in development. removal from an institution and placement to a good family before two leads to better outcomes. charlie: so timing is everything and a at the ceiling on how much you can do. guest: it's a window of opportunity that is reduced. guest: you can see this in simple systems -- there was a simple experiment where they had monkeys were they did not have light for the first year or so. they were blind for the rest of their lives. they did an experiment involving binocular interaction. we see with both eyes and it gives depth perception. if you close one eye and keep it closed during that critical time and open it up, that i has lost -- eye has lost complete control. the other eye has taken over. this applies to every system. this is a magical time in the development of sensory and social interactions. guest: what is interesting is how key the social interaction is. if you are thinking about vision, it's easy to see how that relates to the brain. guest: in the brain studies which i find so fascinating, we can get an idea of what is going on. we know when a child learns something or anyone learned anything, the connection between nerve cells strengthen. you actually see a growth of synaptic connections. i would presume you are losing connection because you are not learning a darn thing. you are probably speaking at the pair bonding that involves new connections forming. guest: it is interesting also that infants that are not cared well are not necessarily good parents. it will be interesting to look at the development involved in parenting. what happens -- charlie: they are more likely to become bad parents? guest: when that pup grows up, it does not take good care of its pups. guest: we are seeing our children at 16. it could be pretty dreadful but the kids we put in foster care early enough have a better chance of being good parents. charlie: someone is looking at this program and saying how do i maximize the brain and intellectual development of my child. is the simple answer engage? guest: enjoy and love the child. charlie: what about the argument of quality time versus time? guest: the position i take his parents worry too much. if they spend time interacting with their babies and talk to their babies and do all of the things we are biologically programmed to do, they don't have to worry. will they give them an iq of 150? that's irrelevant. that's not what makes us special as a species. ecologically in our offspring. guest: i think we're going to hear more, but being a too anxious is not a good idea as a parent. guest: i want to make one other point and that is that institutions also vary. institutions can do a good job raising children who are there if they have appropriate staff to do it. what was wrong in this study is one nurse for seven children is inadequate. they have to listen to this program. ♪ charlie: when parents aren't present, their ability to nurture may be compromised. talk about postpartum depression. guest: most women start out the first days after birth with mood changes, but they usually resolve on their own. about 10% to 20% will have postpartum depression. we now know people who are at risk are those with either a personal history of depression a history of depression associated with childbirth family history of depression -- twin gestate asian also seems to -- twin gestation also seems to be a participant and it also is worth noting that impoverished women and women with many life circumstances have twice the risk of the women i just spoke about. we tend to be very vulnerable after childbirth. in fact, women are more vulnerable to psychiatric illness immediately after childbirth and they are at any other time in their life. this was a study done in edinburgh in which 15,000 women were followed over 12 years. he found an increase in psychiatric admissions within the first three months postpartum. a formal diagnosis of postpartum depression requires a four-week onset. even if it occurs within the first year, we continue to call it postpartum. some postpartum depressions will begin during pregnancy. about 50% begin during pregnancy. one other time to be careful of is moms who stop breast-feeding. at some point in that year or so for two years, i have had women come into my office who manifested major depressive symptoms immediately after stopping lactation. the clinical manifestations of women who come in, they are profoundly sad and have terrible anxiety. they feel overwhelmed that every task and they are usually unable to sleep, even unable to sleep when the baby sleeps, so that is unusual. what is unfortunate is they feel they cannot connect with the baby. they feel numb and they feel terribly guilty about this and usually label themselves bad mother. bonding with the baby -- they don't feel at all attached to the baby. they are not interested in interacting with the baby and it makes them feel awful. suicide can be a real concern at this time in mothers who are seriously depressed. there is another symptom that will occur in a few women who have postpartum depression. they have substantial ruminations all day long that a might hurt their baby. they become intolerable and they are really tortured. these are not women who want to kill their baby, these are women who have anxious ruminations that are very distressing. having said that, i want to quickly discuss postpartum psychosis because postpartum psychosis is very different from postpartum depression. it's actually a very rare disorder. it occurs it may be one in 1000 deliveries, though it is more prevalent in women who have bipolar disorder. these women need to be hospitalized and we consider it a psychiatric emergency because mom has to be separated from her baby for her own safety and her infant safety. they have lost contact with reality and may have hallucinations or another psychotic thought may compel them to kill their baby. that's one of the saddest circumstances. speaking of the adverse effects that occur in children with a postpartum depression, they seem to have insecure attachment. they cannot tend to the infant's emotional needs. they also have some cognitive impairment because of the parental failure to encourage interest in the environment or curiosity and will often have behavioral problems because of the parents own irritability or hostility during the parenting time. over the course of pregnancy as you can see in this slide, there are hormones, which increase over the 40 weeks of identity. -- pregnancy. at the time of delivery, there's a precipitous fall within 24 hours, which is kind of a shock to the system. these hormones, estrogen and progesterone, feedback on to the hypothalamus, which is the emotional part of the brain. there are some women who are exquisitely sensitive to hormones and hormone changes during a lifetime. the most important component of parental caregiving is responsiveness to the infant. this is how i mom reacts to her baby -- she speaks to the baby the baby has emotional needs there is a kind of mutual emotional dance that goes on between them. but when a mom is depressed, what she says is she cannot attach to her baby, she cannot respond to the babies needs or the babies smile. charlie: what is the percentage of men who have post partum depression? guest: very underrecognized and very underresearched. probably between 5% and 10%. guest: the stigma of mental illness is something i see every day as a pediatrician. not being able to talk about something, whether it mental illness or any treatment, if you can't get help, i think it did delay me seeking treatment. in my opinion in america, a man is associated with several things, but weakness and helplessness are not considered to be masculine behaviors. that was what i experienced. when i was going through my postpartum issues with my wife i would say to her i worry that by telling you this, you will think less of me, that it will affect your perception of me because i'm supposed to be the strong husband and here i am -- charlie: tell us what you are feeling. guest: what ended up happening hit me off guard. i was very excited to have the child and was very happy when we found out we were having a boy and i suffered no symptoms anytime during my wife's pregnancy. the first week of life everything was fine. i was at work but i had taken weeks two and three off to spend time at home. my wife was on maternity leave as well. that's when my feelings started to change. in retrospect, my sadness came out as more frustration and anger. i felt rejected, i felt as if my son was rejecting me. he was a very ethical child to -- difficult child to calm down. he cried a lot, even if he was well fed and changed. he did not soothe very easily. i viewed that very differently than my wife did. my wife connected to him and was nurturing and there were times i just did not want to be around him. there was one instance where i was so angry and frustrated that i just had to leave the apartment and walk outside because i could not be around him. i did not seek any help at that point because i was going back to work and i figured things would just get better. but of course, they didn't. when i would come home from work and my wife would hand my son to me, he was starts crying and i would hand him right back. i would start to denigrate him and say very mean things about my son and this would upset my wife as much as for what i was saying as much as how i was feeling. during this time, i started to have some images in my head. that were not pervasive but they were there. unfortunately, they did involve me harming him. then harming my wife and then harming myself. it was at this point i realized i need some help. i spoke to my physician and he gave me zoloft and i took maybe four doses. i don't think i was prepared to take medicine. i had been in therapy for mild anxiety and i was comfortable with that. i found one person who does postpartum depression but i did not make the phone call. i think there was part of me that thought this would just get better, but of course it did not. at around week five or six, i probably said something particularly heinous that morning and i left for work and i called my wife to apologize and make sure we were still on for that weekend where one of the grandparent was going to come and watch my son and we were going to run some errands and maybe get some lunch and i thought i heard her know and i -- no and i just lost it. i started crying and finally all of these things i was thinking and saying had finally come back and it was going to sever my bond with my wife which i needed so much at that point. of course, that was not what she said and she said you need some help. i said we need to get a night nurse to help us with some sleep. i got to work and called one of my good friend who has two daughters and told him some of what i was experiencing. he told me it was not unusual and i should make some phone calls. that day, i called the therapist and by the next week, i was seeing somebody who i ended up seeing for the next three months. the night nurse started and i was starting my cognitive behavioral therapy. one thing they went over was these feelings are thoughts, they are not actions and they should not real bad that i felt this way, i just have to see them for what they were. they were negative thoughts not based on reality. my son was not rejecting me. he was not ill, he was seeing the doctor, there's nothing to act up what i was thinking and i had to do a lot of homework to help myself through that. by the time he was three months, i was going to take some time off. up until that point, it was looking dicey. thankfully, through the therapy and him just maturing and we ended up having a great month. i finally felt like a parent. i changed all the diapers. i felt like i gained so much at the time. he's 18 months old and i have a great wife. charlie: and he loves you. guest: he does and i believe that. thinking back, it was another person experiencing that. as i realized, i looked online for information and there's not much on paternal postpartum depression and i did not know what rates there were and i never had anybody talk about it. hopefully if somebody does see this and understand what they are going through is not unique, that they can get help and hopefully don't have two go through that. charlie: let me just say to anyone watching, there's an admiration for coming to share your story. i'm sure you sharing your story will benefit someone else. i wonder if in fact, and it's so much easier to say -- if you reached out from the very beginning when you felt this, at that time you did not realize it was a problem. for someone to give you more context and say your son is not rejecting you, he's being a baby, that would have made a difference. guest: when the time comes and we have another child, i will probably start seeing someone ahead of time to be on the safe side. i'm assuming having gone through it once that i will the -- it will be more electable. but just to be on the safe side, as i never want to have those feelings again, i will be talking to someone and make sure if they do pop up i do have someone i can talk to. guest: one of the ground rules of psychotherapy is you can think anything. that is, you are allowed to entertain any idea you have in your head. that's not action. that alone makes it comfortable -- knowing it's not a terrible thing. thinking is your privilege. charlie: everything that has been said here is fascinating to me and i'm not a parent. but i, godparent and i see lots of kids. i come away with this with a greater understanding of the absolute significance in the first two years of a baby's life for there to be some kind of -- and this may be fundamentally understood by mothers around the world, but it's not. how essential this is to what we now know about the biology of the brain and what happens to neurons. let's talk a bit more about other places where children, of no fault of their own, and up perhaps by tragedy or something else, in a foster home. what are the implications of that? are the rules the same? we have to figure out a way to find and connect to a child with love and to nurture. guest: i think it's a little more complicated in foster care in the u.s. because what leads a child to go into foster care can be complicated. it can be any number of awful things in the worst thing we do is in foster care is have repeated foster care placements. the critical issue is the sooner they are taken out of a bad environment and put into a good one, the better off it will be. the second thing is a trickier issue, adult last the city. -- adult plasticity. now you have a child who had an awful few years and they are showing all kinds of emotional problems. it's going to require more effort to get that child back on even keel. it's not impossible, but having gone through this, the parent needs to understand it's going to take more. that's another frontier, to harness the power of the adult brain and rescue these critical times and, in so doing, take a five-year-old, 10-year-old or 15-year-old and get them back to where they should be. charlie: do you have research on that? guest: we have growing research on that. if you go back to the example of children born with a vision problem, there is work to suggest in the adult animal, few -- if you reat -- rear them in the dark for a while, you can treat adults for business, but we can't do that in a human. what we are looking for are things we can do in the human that will allow us to make up for a lack of that. guest: what is important is non-parents can be as nurturing as biological parents. this has been shown in animals as well. in rats, nonparent male and females will reject a pop. -- pup. but if you expose these animals to pups several days in a row, they will build a nest and groom the pops. -- pups. these suggest the brain areas that drive parental behavior can be activated in parents and nonparents. guest: the biology is becoming so interesting. we can tell when a woman has postpartum depression and how she responds to the child compared to a normal parent. we are at a very early stage and i think they are so fascinating in terms of the aggression. charlie: is there some point where nurturing reaches a vanishing level? guest: i think there is a point of diminishing returns. as a species, we've come to expect certain things and then it kind of like those which should take pressure off the parents to be perfect. guest: thinking of how humans evolved in what we traditionally did, the nuclear family is something quite recent and it comes back to what parents say about nonparental care -- there's a lot of different ways we can raise children with different kinds of support and investment. it doesn't all have to be from the parent. we get stuck into it -- moms have to bring kids up, but villages bring kids up. it's important to think about this nurturing can come from outside the family. guest: it is important to remember the extended family and interacting with grandparents and cousins. guest: if you look at traditional societies, it's not always the family. there's the risk of people thinking i don't have an extended family network and my child is going to suffer. high quality care can come from a lot of places. charlie: i know fathers who have said to me i really could not connect or identify with my child below two years old. once he got to be three or four or five, it was much better. it seems to me that we are making the case here -- you should understand the rentable that nurturing is good and if you can't do it, figure out a way that it can be done. guest: what we are describing is that somebody needs to make an investment in the child. it doesn't necessarily have to be the biological parents. guest: the mom has to hear it's ok if you don't want to be with them 100% of the time. if you want to go have lunch with somebody and leave the child with a friend, neighbor or family member, it's not a bad thing but we have made it so the mother must be able to do everything and anything and that's what biology really has. charlie: what are we doing next? guest: we are doing gender identity. charlie: thank you very much. ♪ rishaad: today's the 28th of may, i am rishaad salaamamat, and this is "trending business.:" in singapore here's a look at what we are watching. shaky foundation. some of the conditions were not met. shares jumped initially but have since turned around. the widening scandal at fifa causing many to say they are concerned. visa says their disappointment is profound. and the top luxury name for the 10th year. prada' s value fell 35%. follow me at twitter. the hashtag is there. here is what is going on market wise. here is yourvonne. yvonne: they are headed for the longest rally since 1988. the nikkei climbed. that is because of the week yen. continuing to weekend. most of it is asian currencies. for the past five days, we have seen fluctuations.

Transcripts For KQED Charlie Rose 20150527

myself through that. >> one of the questions that drives our research is understanding what makes humans special or what is it about human biology that is both similar and different to other primates. and one of the things that's very remarkable about humans is we have an exceptionally long juvenile and infant periods. and human babies are pretty much totallyless, and even throughout their juvenile period they really need much more investment by their parents than similar species that are closely related to us. and i think that tells us in humans, particularly, understanding the role of parenting behavior and the biology of parenting behavior is very important. >> rose: episode two of the charlie rose brain series three it underwritten by the sloan foundation coming up. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: tonight, we continue our exploration of the magnificent human brain with a look at the neurobiology of parenting. neurobiologists are increasingly beginning to understand the brain's influence on parental behavior. we now understand the act of caring for children can activate special neural circuitry that forms a parenting network in the brain. research version identified cells that influence both the nurturing and reglect of children. this work has revealed new insight about gender roles and parenting. new studies suggest that the maternal instinct is not unique to women. men's brains also change as they take care of their children. they also suffer from post-partum depression. david levine experienced this condition firsthand after the birth of his son. he joins me today to talk about his experience. also here to talk about the brain and the biology of parent regular a remarkable group of scientists. catherine dulac of harvard university. susanne shultz of the university of manchester. charles nelson of harvard medical school. margaret spinelli of columbia university. and once again my cohost dr. eric kandel. he is a nobel laureate a professor at columbia university and a howard hughes medical investigator. i'm pleased to have all of them here at this table this evening. >> in discussing the biology of parenting, we're going to discuss a number of topics. one is the remarkable similarity of parenting throughout the animal kingdom. we're also going to discuss the consequences of parental neglect and how disastrous that can be. and we're also going to consider the hormonal changes that occur with post-partum depression. let me put this in a somewhat broader context. in the last prospect, we considered the biology of aggression. and we learned that from david anderson's work, that the hypothalamus is concerned with aggression. there are neurons in the hypothalamus that are recruited for aggression. and interestingly, they're located, as we see in the image right next to neurons concerned with mating. moreover, there's a population in between about 20% of neurons, that can respond to either of those two instinctual drives depending on intensity of stimulation. if you stimulate weekly, you recruit mating behavior. if you stimulate strongly, you recruit fighting. this principle of having cells mediating different aspects of the same instinctive behavior is, number one characteristic of the hypothalamus, and also applies to parenting. catherine dulac has discovered independently that there are two populations of cells that that are concerned with parenting and those that are concerned with parental neglect. and this is really opened up as whole inquiry into the nature of the biology of parenting, and we're learning a great deal of what leads to good parenting and what leads to parental neglect and what the consequences are. now, the interest in this actually began much earlier in the early 1940s a psychoanalyst by the name renee spitz carried oit a remarkable study. he studied children isolated from their mothering at birth living in two very different environments. one environment was connected with a prison, where the women delivered, nursing home, really sort of a nursery. and the other was a founding home in which children were dropped off because they were abandoned by their parents, by their mother. the two institutions functioned very differently. in the nursing home, the mothers themselves took care of the infants, their own infants. and because these were special times during the day they were allowed to interact with the infants, they really bestowed a lot of attention air, lot of affection on the kids. in the found ling home, there were nurses assigned to the children, and one nurse cook took care of seven children. as a result, each child received a limited amount of attention and lived in a situation of relative sensory deprivation social deprivation. when these kids were examined a year later the differences were already quite apparent. the kids in the nursing home that had contacts with their mother were like kids raised in manhattan-- they were happy interacted very well with people around them. the kids in the founding home were anxious and not very curious about what was going on around them. at ages two and three the differences were even more dramatic. the kids who were in the nursing home talked and walked and were very gregarious in acting with one another. the kids in the founding home, most of them could not walk, most of them could not walk, and those that could talk expressed themselves with few words. subsequent studies have confirmed this and shown there is a critical period of development, if you deprive children of appropriate interaction, parental social contact, it really affects them for the rest of their lives. a comparable period of isolation later in life has very little effects. so we're going to have a wonderful discussion about these topics and we have really five spectacular people here. we can catherine dulac who made this wonderful discovery about the cells in the hypothalamus that are involved in parenting. we have susanne shultz who has been interested in the evolution of parental behavior and interested in hormonal changes in parenting. chuck nelson has been studying a remarkable orphanage in romanian in which children have lived in surprisingly isolated conditions and not only described the cognitive alterations but alterationing in the brain function and structure as a result of that. margaret spinelli is a psychiatrist, like myself, except competent. and she is interested in post-partum depression. and she is going to tell bus hormonal changes that are associated with it, some of the things that are likely to increase the likelihood of depression, and also therapeutic approaches to available to it. 10% to 20% of women come down with post-partum depression. post-partum depression, as you mentioned, also occurs in men and david is a person who suffered from this. it's 5% to 10% of men. the reason one doesn't know more about this is because most men are reluctant to discuss it. we're so fortunate to have david here. >> rose: absolutely. >> who is a physician, a pediatrician, but has the courage to discuss it, which is not only wonderful for us but really beneficial from other people who might suffer from post-partum depression to realize to talk about it is normal. this is nothing to be ashamed of. and it may be helpful for both the person who suffers from it and the people around him. we're in for a terrific program which may make us better parents, better grandparents and better god parents. >> rose: let me begin with catherine dulac, andac sc this question as to how we behave as parents is wider as we drill down. >> as david describes, human parents, this behavior is absolutely essential for the proper development of the child. in addition, parenting is one of the strongest and most enduring social bond in human societies. now, remarkable, parental behavior is widely observed in the animal kingdom. in mammals females lactate, and, therefore, they take primary responsibility of the parental care as can be seen in this very nice slide. this female chimpanzee is watching over the first step of her child. so females are very frequently maternal and not only in mammals but also in some species of birds frogz reptile, insects. now, what about fathers? well, the contribution of males in parenting is very variable. in some species as seen for example here in this silverback mountain guerilla playing with his infants. in some cases they are paernl paternal and nurture their young. in some species males attack the children and sometimes kill them. i'm a neurobiologist, and the group used a mouse to try tond the basic biology of parental behavior. we would like to identify the brain areas that are involved in driving parental behavior and we would like to understand how this brain areas regulated in order to have animals that are parenting and some animals that are neglecting their infants. now, in females, mothers as well as non-mothers are spontaneously maternal, which means that when they are put in presence with perps they will spontaneously build a nest. they will retrieve the perp to the nest, groom them, and huddle with them for long periods. in contrast, males are infanticidal. they will readily attack the perpsperps and kill them. however, males that have access to the females become paternal three weeks after mating with a female which correspond exactly to the gestation time in mice. in other words males who become father also become paternal. so we took advantage of this extremely interesting paradigm and differences in behavior between males and females and fathers and infanticidal males to try to understand what are brain areas involved in those behaviors. the the first question we asked is what are nur thoons drive parental behavior? and in the first set of experiments, we identify a specific set of cells in the hypothalamus that are activated during parental behavior. we then ask all are these neurons required for the parental drive? in a subsequent experiment, we ablaitd these nur nons parental males and parental femaleses. and surprise explg remarkable none of the animals neglectd their infants or attacked them so the experiment suggests these nur rons required for parental behavior. in the next experiment, we ask whether the activity of these neurons was sufficient to drive parental behavior? so this time we took aggressive males and we artificially stimulated these nurturing neurons. amazingly, this aggressive males stopped attacking the perps and instead they groomed their infants. so what this experiment says is the activity of these nur opposite is sufficient to drive parental care. in another experiment, we identify a set of cells in a different area of the hypothalamus that is activated when aggressive males attack their infants. we call these the parental neflect neurons. in another experiment, we activate these neurons in females and found that these neurons now, these females instead of caring of their infants now neglect or attack them. so what overall these series of experiments suggests is that the brain has two components-- a set of cells in the hypothalamus that drive parental behavior, and another set of cells that drive parental neglect. we are very exciteed by these results because it opens new opportunity to understand the control of parental behavior and possibly why some animals are animals are parental and some animals are neglecting or attacking the infants. parental behavior is widely observed among animals, so these also raise the possibility that the function and the regulation of these cells is widely conserved across the animal kingdom. >> rose: how do you stimulate the neurons to make the aggressive males more nurturing? >> we use modern methods in neuroscience, called optogenetics to enable to shine lights on neurons that have been genetically modified and have an ion channel that is light activated. in other words we drive the activity of genetically defined population of neurons. >> rose: that's fascinating. suzanne, let me talk about how it's all evostled, parental behavior. >> what's very nice about what catherine has told us is parenting behavior is conserved across animals. it's not just that it's conserved. that's really interested is it also varies. there are similarities between species not very closely related and there are differences between closely related species. and what our work is trying to do is understand the evolutionary basis for some of these parenting behaviors and why is it that you have some parenting that is very similar and some parenting that is very different? as we can see in this video this is a video of a guerilla mother and her infant. there are a lot of similarities in the behavior between how this mother interacts with her babies and how humans interact with their babies. and this is one of the things we really want to understand. what is it that is similar about humans and our caregiving and our parental behavior and other animals? and the biology of mammals females, means that there are hormones that are very, very important in determining lactation, so driving the production of milk and driving the let-down reflex, and these hormones also seem to be very important in regulating the behavior of mothers and their infants. two of these horr ploans oxytocin and prolactin. at the end of pregnancy, the hypothalamus, which is the same part of the brain that catherine discovered these important parenting neurons, producing a hormone called oxyitosein which is primarily important psychologically in the production of milk and lactation. however, it also is very important in driving maternal behavior. so oxytocin has these secondary impacts on the brain such that when oxytocin levels are raised females bond with their babies. this hormone is incredibly important in driving this mother-offspring relationship. another hormone that's produced in late pregnancy is prolactin and prolactin is also important in the production of mek but again, it also has these consequences for maternal offspring bonding. and i think that's actually really interesting because we have this biology that allows females to produce milk, but they also are incredibly important in driving the relationship between mothers and their offspring. and these hormones also have been shown to have a lot-- be very important in driving social bonds in general with other animals. so it seems like one of the basic relationships between two individuals for mammals is the mother-offspring bond but also these hormones are important in the relationship between males and females and also more widely in social relationships. there has been some fascinating work done by teams understanding the evolution of parenting behavior and understanding evolution, especially of parabonding between males and females. in voalz there's a very nice system where some voal species are polygamous, and some are monogamous. some males and females form long-term pair bonds and both are nurturing toward their young. what has been found in this system is that not only are their higher levels of oxytocin, but in the males, there's a similar hormone that's produced by the hypothalamus vasoppressin which seems to be important in paternal behavior and pair bonding behavior. so we have oxytocin in females that seems to be very important in driving pair bonds and maternal behavior, and in males we have vasoppressin which plays a similar role in driving pair bonds-- >> this vaso pressin work was done by-- >> they did a fascinating series of experiments determining how oxytocin impacts on female maternal behavior and vasoppressin behavior for male pair bonding and parental behavior. >> rose: is it monogamy that produces the higher levels of oxytocin, or is it higher levels of oxyitose thane produces monogamy? >> oxytocin is primarily involved with the maternal behavior. it's vasoppressin that is associated with monogamy. some of the same teams who worked on how vasopressin relates to pair bonding bonding and paternal behavior in voals shows you can take voal species that are not monogamous and add vasopress and i know make them monogamous. in a larger context one of the questions that drives our research is understanding what makes humans special? what is it about human biology that is both similar and different to other primates? and one of the things that's very remarkable about humans is we have a very large brain and we have exceptionally long juvenile and infant periods. because we're porn so help will and unable to take care of ourselves, parenting becomes exceptionally important and human babies are pretty much totally defenseless, and even throughout their juvenile period, they really need much more investment by their parents than similar species that are closely related to us. and i think that tells us that in humans particularly, understanding the role of parenting behavior and the biology of parenting behavior is very important. >> rose: chuck let me turn to what is the effect on children who are deprived of nurturing? >> we know that children are exposed to a continuum of care. as you can see here, this infant and mother are having a wonderful conversation. you can see the mother is clearly in love with this baby and this is what we want to see in all infants and mothers. under conditions of profound deprivation, all of that is missing. here we have a pair of twins interacting, but now we have institutional care and a couple of things to note is the sheer number of babies sitting-- in the institutions, the lack of caregivers. as you look through here, there's one you can see in the back. you can see there's a very low investment in these children, unlike the video clips we saw in the beginning. and this lack of social interaction we think plays a fundamental role in building the brain. so what we started to observe was in this study, what happens to the developing brain in kids growing up in institutional care? we formed a manipulation in which we saw a large number of children abandoned to institutions in romania and after studying them extensively some of them were placed in very high-quality foster care and some remained in the institution. i want to show you a video of what a child at around the age of two looks like. this is on an outing with a bunch of little kids from an institution, and if you notice, the girl who is rolling over, she's 22 months of age. her i.q. is below 50 at this point in time. she's been in the institution close to the time of birth. notice the other little girl is rocking and off camera there are three or four other kids rocking and that is very characteristic of kids who grow up in institutions. the question then becomes what happens to the brain? in the next slide i'm going to show you the beginning of this journey to understand the brain. the first thing we did is record the brain's electrical activity e.e.g., by placing sensors on top of the head. the billions of neurons in the brain generate electrical activity that we can pick up and from that electrical activity we can basically infer the power that the brain is producing, how much electrical activity is there. we can color code that. that indicates more or less powerop on the right side you see an image of a never-institutionalized brain. the distribution of electrical activity is portrayed here to reflect much more brain activity in red sitting over the frontal lobe. if you look on the left panel that the institutionalized group. you can see the kids in the institution are underpowered. instead of a 100 watt light bulb it's a 50 watt light bulb. when the children were eight to 10 we performed magnetic resonance imaging on them to look at the detailed anatomy of the brain. on the right is an m.r.i. scan and we're showing gray matter. gray matter represents the cell bodies and appendages of neurons that sit on the cortical surface and do the computations and calculations that the brain does. white matter which i'll show you in a moment, really does the communication of the brain. white matter shows up whitish and the gray matter shows up gracish. on the far right you see the amount of dprai matter in the never-institutional ides kids. these are the children who grew up in families in bucharest romania. you look at the children institutionalized on the far left it's dramatically reduced. they show lesgray matter as do kids we put in foster care and i'll come back to that. this is showing us the brain has much lesgray matter by a function of being in institution. we show the same reduction in white matter, the communication pathway. what's scary about this is it is almost suggesting we know there is a smaller brain as a function of being in an institution -- >> the reason this is so important is because before chuck did these studies people knew that deprivation, or lack of parental interaction was bad for the cognitive development of the which were. one didn't know to what degree it affect the brain directly. one thought this was likely to be the case but this was the first it evidence that showed dramatic changes occurring in the brain. >> rose: would it be different if somehow there were some kind of activity with these kids in institutions. in other words, there was much more collegiality in some way produced from outside. >> in a moment we'll talk about what happens when you put kids in families. your question really is can you improve an institution? >> charlie asked another question-- does it have to be a parent? can there be parental substitutes? >> we know it has to be the investment the caregivers make. it doesn't have to be the parents but it has to be caregivers who care about that child. and what goes on in institution is you don't have that investment. >> rose: you have a sense your brain will development if you feel there's some contact, that somebody knows who are you, recognizes you and there's some act of caring-- >> affection. >> i it's this social interaction stimulating brain development, and it's the lack of interaction. kids in an institution who got cognitive and linguistic stimulation dut butt no caregiving would be just as poorly off as the kids we see. now the question is how much recovery is there? in the study we placed half the kid into foster care, really high-quality foster care. in the beginning of this video once again we'll see that little girl when she's 22 months of age, i.q. below 50, in an institution. very atypical motor behavior. right after this, we put her in foster care, and this is her in foster care eight months later. her i.q. is now in the mid-60s. this is her interacting with her foster care mother. clearly, they have a loving relationship. and this is eight months of foster care. in this clip, she's now about four years of age. she's now spent half her life in foster care, and look at that interaction she's having. this is the same little girl we saw in the beginning who is crawling backwards, rolling over, had no language, and now her i.q. in the 80s. there is tremendous recovery that occur by place a child in a family. placement around the two years of age leads to much better outcomes. but placement after two years of age leads to much les-desirable outcomes. in the next slide we can show the e.e.g.. on the right is the brain of the never-institutionalized child more red means more activity. in the next slide we see the critical period. now, the brain this is left institution after age two. notice it looks identical to the institutionalized brain. the child was in a family but not until they were older than two. in the next slide, you can see the children placed before two have brain activity that looks like just the kids who have never been in an institution. we see this in other do mains as well. what we see is an inflection point in development. removal from an institution and placement into a good family before two leads to much better outcomes than children placed after two. >> rose: timing is everything and if you don't have it it puts a certain sealing on how much you can produce. >> it's as though the the window of opportunity is reduced. >> you can see this in simple-- they put monkeys in a room where they didn't have light for the first year or two. they were blind the rest of their lives. another experiment looked at what is called binocular interaction. we see with both eyes and it gives us depth perception. and there are cells in the cerebral cortex that respond to input from the twoize ayes. if you close one eye and keep it closed thas lost complete control of the cells in the cerebral cortex. other eye has taken over and spread. this applies to every sensory system. >> i think what's so interesting about it as well is how key the social interaction is. if you're thinking thinking about vision, it's simple to see how that relates directly to the brain but-- >> even richer and even more sensitive. yes. and it actually in the brain studies which i find so fascinating is we can sort of get an idea of what's going on. i think it also applies to your stuff, cath ren. and that is we know when a child libraries something, when anybody learns anything, the connections between serve cells strengthen. and in the long run you actually see a growth of new synaptic connections. one of the reasons the brain gets big ser because it's learning something, it is acquiring new information, it grows new it extension i would presume you're losing connections between you're not learning a darned thing. >> absolutely. >> and you're probably talking about the pair bonding new connection forming. >> it's interesting also that infants are are not cared well, in turn, are not necessarily good parents. and so it's going to be interesting from a neuroscience standpoint to look at the development of the neurons that are involved quality of parenting. what happened if there's bad parenting to the development of the brain? >> rose: if there's bad parenting they become more likely to be a bad parent. >> if you remove a pup from the rat, because it doesn't have the benefit of parenting, when that fup pickup grows up, it doesn't take good care of its pups. >> we see children at 16. we would expect the kids in the institutional group when they become parent, which could be the next few years, to be pretty dreadful parent. but the kids we put in foster care early enough have a much greater chance of becoming good parents. >> rose: so someone is looking at this program at this moment and saying how do i maximize the brain and intellectual development of my child? is the simple answer engage and show a lot of nurt expurg loving? >> enjoy the child and love the child. >> rose: and what about this whole argument about quality time versus time? >> so, the position i take on this is i think that parents worry too much. and that they spend time interacting with their babies, and they talk to their babies and they do all the things we're biologically programmed to do they don't have to worry. now, will it give them an i.q. of 150 and get them into an ivy league school? that's really irrelevant. what we want to do is invest socially and psychologically in our offspring. >> in fact stress is a problem in driving appropriate parenting behavior. i think we're going to hear more from meg. but being too anxious is not a good idea. >> i just want to make one other point, and that is institutions also zero. institutions can do a very good job in raising children that are left there. if they have appropriate staff in order to do it. what was wrong in spitzer's study, one nurse for seven children is inadequate. >> rose: to have a consciousness of the ideas we're talking about. >> exactly. they have to listen to this program. >> rose: margaret, when the parents are present their ability to nurture may be compromised. talk about post-partum depression. >> sure. most women will start off the first days after birth with some mood changes. but they usually resolve on their own. but about 10% to 20% of women will have a post-partum depression. we now know people who are at risk, women who are at risk with those with either air personal history of depression, a history of depression associated with child birth, family history of depression, twin gestation seems to also be a precipitant. and it's also worth noting that impoverished women and women with many life circumstances have actually twice the risk of the women i just spoke about. we tend to be very vulnerable after child birth. in fact, women are more vulnerable to psychiatric illness immediately after childbirth than they are at any other time of their life. this was a study done by kendall in edinborough, in which he followed 15,000 women over 12 years. what you will see is he found that there was an increase in psychiatric admissions within the first three months post-partum. and so, a normal diagnosis of post-partum depression requires four-week onset, but actually, even if it occurs within the first year we do continue to call it post-partum. now, some post-partum depressions will begin during pregnancy, about 50% of post-partum depression begins during pregnancy. and one other time to be careful of is moms who stop breast feeding. at some point in that year or so or two years i've had women come in to my office who manifested major depressive symptoms immediately after stopping their lactation. so the clinical manifestations actually of women who come in, they're profoundly sad and have terrible anxiety. they feel overwhelmed at every task. and they're usually unable to sleep. but even unable to sleep when the baby sleeps so that's unusual. what is unfortunate is they feel that they cannot connect with the baby. they feel numb. and they feel terribly guilty about this. and usually label themselves bad mothers. >> rose: "connect to" means what? >> bonding with the baby. they don't feel at all atasmed to the baby. >> rose: desire? >> desire they're not interested in interacting with the baby and it makes them feel awful. now, suicide can be a real concern at this time in mothers who are seriously depressed. and there's another symptom that will happen-- will occur in a few women who have post-partum depression. and these have these obsessional ruminations, all day long, that they might hurt their baby. and they become intolerable. and they're really tortured. so these are not women who want to kill their baby. these are women who are having anxious ruminations that are very distressing. now, having said that i just want to quickly discuss post-partum psychosis because post-partum psychosis is very different from post-partum depression. it's actually a very rare disorder. it occurs in maybe one in 1,000 deliveries, although it's more prevalent in women who have bipolar disorder. these women need to be hospitalized immediately. we consider it a psychiatric emergency because the mom does have to be separated from her baby, both for her own safety and for her infant's safety. because they've lost contact with reality. and they may have hallucinations or-- hallucinations or another psychotic thought which may excel them to kill their-- compel them to kill ther babies. that's one of the saddest circumstances. speaking of the adverse effects that occur in children upon post-partum depressed women these babies tend to have insecure attachment because these moms cannot attend to the infant's cues. they can't tend to their emotional needs. they also have some cognitive impairment because of the parental failure to encourage interest in the environment or curiosity. and often they will have behavioral problems as well because of the parent's own irritability or hostility during the parenting time. so we wonder what actually causes this. over the course of pregnancy, as you can see in this slide, there are hormones specifically estrogen and progesterone which increase slowly over 40 weeks of pregnancy. at the time of delivery, there is a precipitous fall within 24 hours, which is kind of a shock to the system. >> wow. >> and these it hormones, estrogen and progesterone, feed back on to the hypothalamus which is the emotional part of the brain. there are some women who are exquisitely sensitive to hormones and hormones changes during their lifetime. a most important component of parental caregiving, of course, is responsiveness to an infant. this is how a mom reacts with her baby. she speaks to her baby. the paeb has emotional needs. there's a kind of mutual emergency dance that goes on between them. but when a mom is depressed what she says is she can't attach to her baby. she can't respond to the baby's needs or the baby's coouz or the baby's smiles. >> rose: i want to get david involved in this. so what's the percentage of men that have post-partum depression? >> very underrecognized and very unresearched. probably at this point 5% to 10% of them. >> rose: tell me about your experiences, david. >> thank you charlie. i really appreciate the opportunity. i first just wanted to say that the stigma of mental illness is something that i see every day as a pediatrician, and i can say that not being able to talk about something whether it is mental illness or any illness if you can't get treatment, you can't get help. and i think that that stigma was real for me, and i think it did delay me seeking treatment. at least in my opinion, in america, a man is associated with several things, but weakness and helplessness are not generally considered to be masculine behaviors. but that was what i experienced. and when i was going through my post-partum issues with my wife, i would always say to her i worry that by telling you this, you'll think lesof me, that it will affect your perception of me because i'm supposed to be the strong husband and here i am cowed by" -- >> tell us what you were feeling. >> so i-- what ended up happening hit me completely off guard. i was very excited to have the child. i was very happy when i found out we were having a boy. and i suffered no symptoms during the end-- at any time during my wife's pregnancy. the first week of life, everything was fine. i was at work during that time, but i had taken weeks two and three off to spend time at home. my wife was on maternity leave as well. and that's when my feelings started to change. i think in retrospect, my sadness came out as more frustration and anger. i felt rejected. i felt faz my son was rejecting me. he was a very difficult child to calm down. he cried a lot. even if he was well fed and changed, he just didn't soothe very easily. and i think i just viewed that very differently than my wife did. my wife connected to him and was nurturing and there were times i just did not want to be around him. in fact, there was one instance where i was so angry and so frustrated that i just had to leave the apartment and walk outside because i couldn't be around him. i didn't seek any help at that point because i was going back to work, and i figured things would just get better. but, of course they didn't. and i would come home from work and my wife would hand my son to me he would just start crying and i'd hand him right back. and i'd say "i do not want to hold him." and i would start to denigrate him. i would say very mean things about my son and this would upset my wife as much for what i was saying as to how i was feeling. it was during this time, as meg point out i started to have some images in my head that were not pervasive but they were there. and, unfortunately, they did involve me harming my son and then harming my wife and then harming myself. it was at this point they realized -- >> you needed help. >> i needed some help. i spoke to my physician, and he had given me zoloft, i took maybe four doses and i didn't take any more. i think i wasn't prepared to take medicine for something like this. i had been in therapy for some mild anxiety before so i was comfortable with that, and the practice i work at has behavioral health and i found one person who does specifically post-partum dwe pregz. but i didn't make the phone call. i think maybe there was just a part of me that thought this would just get better but of course, it didn't get better. at around week five, six i probably said something particularly heinous that morning, and i left for work, and i called my wife to apologize and to make sure we were still on for that weekend where one of the grandparents was going to come and watch my son and go and run some errand and maybe get lurch. and i thought i heard her say no. and i just lost it. i started crying ask balling my eyes out. i thought finally all these things i was thinking and all these things i was saying had finally come back and and it was going to sever my bond with my wife which i needed so much at that point. of course, that is not what she said. she got upset and she said you really need to-- you need some help. i said at that moment we need a night nurse to help us with some sleep and get some rest. i got to work and i called one of my good friends who had two daughters and told him some of what i was experiencing and he told me that it was not unusual and i should make some phone calls. and that day i called the therapist, and by the next week i was seeing somebody who i ended up seeing for about three months. so the night nurse had started. i was starting my cognitive behavioral therapy. and one of the things they went over was as eric said, these feelings are not-- they're thoughts. they're not actions. and i shouldn't feel bad that i felt this way. i just had to see them for what they were, which were these negative thoughts that were not based on reality. my son was not rejecting me. he wasn't ill in some way. he was seeing the doctor. he was growing. there was nothing to back up what i was thinking and i had to do a lot of homework to kind of help myself through that. by the time he was about three months, i was going to take a month off. my wife was going to go back to work and i was going to take month and up until that point it was looking really dicey because we were really nervous how i would react. but thankfully through the therapy and him just maturing and getting better, like babies do, we ended up having a great month. i finally felt like a parent. i changed all the diapers, i fed him. i felt like i gained so much from that time. i have an amazing son. he is 18 months old. he is just an awesome kid and i have a great wife -- >> and he loves you. >> he does. he does. i believe that. and thinking back to what i felt back then, it was another period in my life-- it was another person that was experiencing that. and i do hope that if-- as i realized, i did not know eye looked online for information, and there just isn't very much on parental post-partum depression and i didn't know what rates there were and i never had anybody to talk to me about it. i knew about the female part but i never knew about the male part that hopefully if somebody does see this and understands what they're going through is not unique, that they can get help and hopefully don't have to suffer. >> rose: let me see what everybody knows in this room and everybody watching you, one, there is an admiration for coming to share your story and because you share your story i am sure it will benefit someone else. that's first. the second thing, i wonder if in fact-- and it's so much easier to say-- if you'd reached out from the very beginning when you felt this, at that time you didn't realize it was a problem. you realized it was a feeling to someone to give you more context and say "your son is not rejecting you. he's being a baby." that would have made a difference. >> i think so. and when the time comes that we have another child i will likely be very proactive with and i probably will start seeing someone ahead of time just to be on the safe side. i'm assuming having gone true it once i will be better able-- it will be more predictable to me, i'll understand it better. but just to be on the safe side because i never want to have those feelings again i will be talking to someone and make sure if they do pop up i already have somebody i can talk to. >> i think one of the things we talked about before and one of the ground rules of psychotherapy is you can think anything. that is, you're allowed to entertain any idea you want in your head. that's not action. so that alone makes one more comfortable, knowing that this is not a terrible thing. thinking is your privilege. >> rose: so let's have a conversation here. this is fascinating. everything that has been said here is fascinating to me, every aspect of this, and i'm not a parent so to appreciate this-- i'm a godparent, and i see lots of kids. i come away from this with a greater understanding of the absolute significance in the first two years of a baby's life for there to be some kind of remarkable kind-- this may be fundamental and understood by mothers around the world-- >> no. >> rose: but it's not. >> no. >> rose: how essential this is to what we now know about the biology of the brain and what happens to neurons when there is. and so let's talk a bit more about other place where's children-- of no fault of their own-- end up perhaps by tragedy perhaps by something else, end up in a foster home. what are implications of that? are rules the same? we've just got to figure out a way to find, to connect to a child with love and nurture and companionship. >> right. i think it's a little bit more complicated in foster care, for example, in the u.s., simply because what leads a child to go into foster care can be complicated. it can be maltreatment. it can be neglect. it can be any number of awful things. and i think the worst things we do in foster care is have repeated foster care placements where kids go from one home to another. the sooner they're taken out of a bad environment and put boa good one the better off they'll be. the second thing you're raising is much more difficult, the issue of adult plasticity. you have a child who had an awful few years of life and now they're five or 10 years of age and showing all kinds of behavior and emotion problems, what can we do? i think the storyline is it is going to require more effort and more resource in some ways to get that child back on an even keel. it's not impossible, but having gone through this critical period the parent needs to understand it's going to take more than if the child had been placed earlier. i think that's another frontier of neuroscience, rescue these critical periods and in so doing take a five-year-old or 10-year-old or 15-year-old and get them back to where they should be. >> rose: do we have a lot of research on that? >> we have growing research on that. a colleague of ours has been doing brilliant work on how to rescue a critical period in an adult animal. sometimes it's pharmacological but sometimes behavior. when you go back to children born with a vision problem their eyes wander and they can't focus. there's treatment, if you rear them in the dark for a while you can treat adult stare, abismus. that's remarkable but we can't do that in humans. >> what is really important is foster parents non-parents can be as nurturing as the biological parents. and this has been shown in human. it has been shown in animals as well. for example, in rats, nonparent males and females will reject the perps, will avoid them. but if you expose the animals to pups several days in a role, they will nurture the pups, build a nest, and groom the pups-- they will be parents. so these suggest that the brain areas that drive parental behavior can be activated both in parents and in nonparents. so that's extremely important. >> that's really important. >> i think the biology is becoming so interesting. we can tell when a woman has post-partum depression how she respond to the child compared to a normal parent. at a very early age and i think the opposing brain region nghtz hypothalamus are so fascinating in terms of the aggression that anderson described and your findings on parenting. >> rose: is there some point where nurturing reaches a diminishing level of participation? >> i think there is a point of diminishing returns. it's not lirn. it's not the more caregiving you give the better the outcome. i think the point as a species we have come to expect certain things and then it plateaus which should take some of the pressure off parents to be a perfect parent. >> i think it's important to think about how humans evolved and what we traditionally did. the nuclear family is quite recent. it comes back to catherine saying nonparents provide parental care. there are a lot of different ways we can raise children with different kinds of support and different kinds of investment, and it doesn't all have to be just from the parent. so i think it-- i think we kind of get stuck into moms have to bring kids up. but villages bring kids up, and it's-- i think it's really important to think about this nurturing can come from outside the family. >> many people describe how important the extended family is. interacting with grandparents or cousins and things like that. you can see important that might be. >> if you look at traditional societies, it isn't always the family. there's a risk of people thinking i don't have an extended family network. my child is going to suffer. >> neighbors, friends-- >> neighbors, friends child care nursery, high-quality care can come from different places. >> rose: i know fathers who have said to me i really couldn't connect or identify with my child below two years old. once he got to be three four, five-- whatever-- it was much better. but in the first two years i just-- it would seem to me we're making the case here that-- you shouldn't feel bad about yourself-- but what shudo is understand the principle here that nurturing is good, and if you can't do it-- >> that's right. >> that's right. >> rose: figure out a way it can be done. >> excellent point. >> that's a really good point. >> i think what we're describe describing is somebody needs to make an investment in the child. >> rose: it doesn't have to be the biological parent. >> i think it's more recent, parents have a baby and they hand the baby to them and said go home and they were by themes. even my parents, my grandparents were nearby. so there were more people there. so someone could get rest. someone could attend to themselves and now we just kind of-- we kick them out of the hospital much faster, and suddenly it's like "here gu." and i know that when i see parents before they've had their babies i used to have a very different discussion before i had a child and now after and i always ask "do you have a network? do you have people around?" it's so important-- i think as you said, there's a lot of anxiety. and i think sometimes a mom just needs to hear, "it's not bad if you don't want to be with them 100% of the time. it's okay to go have lunch with somebody or just go for a run and leave the child with a friend, a neighbor or a family member and attend to yourself. it's not a bad thing." but i think we've made it so that the mother mush able to do everything and anything and it's not what biology says they can do. >> i think the point that emerges from your presence here it's okay to have post-partum depression. this is -- >> as long as you recognize it. >> as long as you recognize it. >> and do something about it. >> rose: and get some help. as we close this out i'm struck one more time about how scientists have made observational studies looking in romania, wherever the particular saturday were done, the prison experience with mothers who gave quality time even though limited, versus foster, other kinds of institutions. these were observational experiments. now we can look at the neurons. it shows you we're just beginning to get the biology and how often the biology connects with the observation. >> right. >> absolutely. >> which is an amazing thing. >> rose: what are we doing next time? >> we're doing the biology of gender identity. how brain encodes the difference between sexes and how does it handle transgender identity? so really it's a continuation of this further dealing with, you know, development of the individual. this time with sexual identity and changes in sexual identity. >> rose: i thank thank all of you. it's a pleasure to have you at this table and to help us understand this essential and remarkable thing called parenting. so thank you very much. happyand we'll see you next time. thank you for joining us. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org this is "nightly business " with tyler mathisen and sue herera. shaky start. the shortened week beginsh a triple-digit decline on the dow and some are wondering some the summer months will bring more of the same. >> cable consolidation. charter swoops in and buys time warner for 55 brls creating a pourer house in the fast changi industry. hacked. the irs is hit by a cyber attack and data accessed by people who want to steal your identity. all of that and more for on "nightly busin" for tuesday, may 26th. >> good evening. investors return to a selloff. stocks stumble on up beat economic data

Transcripts For KQED Charlie Rose 20150527

myself through that. >> one of the questions that drives our research is understanding what makes humans special or what is it about human biology that is both similar and different to other primates. and one of the things that's very remarkable about humans is we have an exceptionally long juvenile and infant periods. and human babies are pretty much totallyless, and even throughout their juvenile period they really need much more investment by their parents than similar species that are closely related to us. and i think that tells us in humans, particularly, understanding the role of parenting behavior and the biology of parenting behavior is very important. >> rose: episode two of the charlie rose brain series three it underwritten by the sloan foundation coming up. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: tonight, we continue our exploration of the magnificent human brain with a look at the neurobiology of parenting. neurobiologists are increasingly beginning to understand the brain's influence on parental behavior. we now understand the act of caring for children can activate special neural circuitry that forms a parenting network in the brain. research version identified cells that influence both the nurturing and reglect of children. this work has revealed new insight about gender roles and parenting. new studies suggest that the maternal instinct is not unique to women. men's brains also change as they take care of their children. they also suffer from post-partum depression. david levine experienced this condition firsthand after the birth of his son. he joins me today to talk about his experience. also here to talk about the brain and the biology of parent regular a remarkable group of scientists. catherine dulac of harvard university. susanne shultz of the university of manchester. charles nelson of harvard medical school. margaret spinelli of columbia university. and once again my cohost dr. eric kandel. he is a nobel laureate a professor at columbia university and a howard hughes medical investigator. i'm pleased to have all of them here at this table this evening. >> in discussing the biology of parenting, we're going to discuss a number of topics. one is the remarkable similarity of parenting throughout the animal kingdom. we're also going to discuss the consequences of parental neglect and how disastrous that can be. and we're also going to consider the hormonal changes that occur with post-partum depression. let me put this in a somewhat broader context. in the last prospect, we considered the biology of aggression. and we learned that from david anderson's work, that the hypothalamus is concerned with aggression. there are neurons in the hypothalamus that are recruited for aggression. and interestingly, they're located, as we see in the image right next to neurons concerned with mating. moreover, there's a population in between about 20% of neurons, that can respond to either of those two instinctual drives depending on intensity of stimulation. if you stimulate weekly, you recruit mating behavior. if you stimulate strongly, you recruit fighting. this principle of having cells mediating different aspects of the same instinctive behavior is, number one characteristic of the hypothalamus, and also applies to parenting. catherine dulac has discovered independently that there are two populations of cells that that are concerned with parenting and those that are concerned with parental neglect. and this is really opened up as whole inquiry into the nature of the biology of parenting, and we're learning a great deal of what leads to good parenting and what leads to parental neglect and what the consequences are. now, the interest in this actually began much earlier in the early 1940s a psychoanalyst by the name renee spitz carried oit a remarkable study. he studied children isolated from their mothering at birth living in two very different environments. one environment was connected with a prison, where the women delivered, nursing home, really sort of a nursery. and the other was a founding home in which children were dropped off because they were abandoned by their parents, by their mother. the two institutions functioned very differently. in the nursing home, the mothers themselves took care of the infants, their own infants. and because these were special times during the day they were allowed to interact with the infants, they really bestowed a lot of attention air, lot of affection on the kids. in the found ling home, there were nurses assigned to the children, and one nurse cook took care of seven children. as a result, each child received a limited amount of attention and lived in a situation of relative sensory deprivation social deprivation. when these kids were examined a year later the differences were already quite apparent. the kids in the nursing home that had contacts with their mother were like kids raised in manhattan-- they were happy interacted very well with people around them. the kids in the founding home were anxious and not very curious about what was going on around them. at ages two and three the differences were even more dramatic. the kids who were in the nursing home talked and walked and were very gregarious in acting with one another. the kids in the founding home, most of them could not walk, most of them could not walk, and those that could talk expressed themselves with few words. subsequent studies have confirmed this and shown there is a critical period of development, if you deprive children of appropriate interaction, parental social contact, it really affects them for the rest of their lives. a comparable period of isolation later in life has very little effects. so we're going to have a wonderful discussion about these topics and we have really five spectacular people here. we can catherine dulac who made this wonderful discovery about the cells in the hypothalamus that are involved in parenting. we have susanne shultz who has been interested in the evolution of parental behavior and interested in hormonal changes in parenting. chuck nelson has been studying a remarkable orphanage in romanian in which children have lived in surprisingly isolated conditions and not only described the cognitive alterations but alterationing in the brain function and structure as a result of that. margaret spinelli is a psychiatrist, like myself, except competent. and she is interested in post-partum depression. and she is going to tell bus hormonal changes that are associated with it, some of the things that are likely to increase the likelihood of depression, and also therapeutic approaches to available to it. 10% to 20% of women come down with post-partum depression. post-partum depression, as you mentioned, also occurs in men and david is a person who suffered from this. it's 5% to 10% of men. the reason one doesn't know more about this is because most men are reluctant to discuss it. we're so fortunate to have david here. >> rose: absolutely. >> who is a physician, a pediatrician, but has the courage to discuss it, which is not only wonderful for us but really beneficial from other people who might suffer from post-partum depression to realize to talk about it is normal. this is nothing to be ashamed of. and it may be helpful for both the person who suffers from it and the people around him. we're in for a terrific program which may make us better parents, better grandparents and better god parents. >> rose: let me begin with catherine dulac, andac sc this question as to how we behave as parents is wider as we drill down. >> as david describes, human parents, this behavior is absolutely essential for the proper development of the child. in addition, parenting is one of the strongest and most enduring social bond in human societies. now, remarkable, parental behavior is widely observed in the animal kingdom. in mammals females lactate, and, therefore, they take primary responsibility of the parental care as can be seen in this very nice slide. this female chimpanzee is watching over the first step of her child. so females are very frequently maternal and not only in mammals but also in some species of birds frogz reptile, insects. now, what about fathers? well, the contribution of males in parenting is very variable. in some species as seen for example here in this silverback mountain guerilla playing with his infants. in some cases they are paernl paternal and nurture their young. in some species males attack the children and sometimes kill them. i'm a neurobiologist, and the group used a mouse to try tond the basic biology of parental behavior. we would like to identify the brain areas that are involved in driving parental behavior and we would like to understand how this brain areas regulated in order to have animals that are parenting and some animals that are neglecting their infants. now, in females, mothers as well as non-mothers are spontaneously maternal, which means that when they are put in presence with perps they will spontaneously build a nest. they will retrieve the perp to the nest, groom them, and huddle with them for long periods. in contrast, males are infanticidal. they will readily attack the perpsperps and kill them. however, males that have access to the females become paternal three weeks after mating with a female which correspond exactly to the gestation time in mice. in other words males who become father also become paternal. so we took advantage of this extremely interesting paradigm and differences in behavior between males and females and fathers and infanticidal males to try to understand what are brain areas involved in those behaviors. the the first question we asked is what are nur thoons drive parental behavior? and in the first set of experiments, we identify a specific set of cells in the hypothalamus that are activated during parental behavior. we then ask all are these neurons required for the parental drive? in a subsequent experiment, we ablaitd these nur nons parental males and parental femaleses. and surprise explg remarkable none of the animals neglectd their infants or attacked them so the experiment suggests these nur rons required for parental behavior. in the next experiment, we ask whether the activity of these neurons was sufficient to drive parental behavior? so this time we took aggressive males and we artificially stimulated these nurturing neurons. amazingly, this aggressive males stopped attacking the perps and instead they groomed their infants. so what this experiment says is the activity of these nur opposite is sufficient to drive parental care. in another experiment, we identify a set of cells in a different area of the hypothalamus that is activated when aggressive males attack their infants. we call these the parental neflect neurons. in another experiment, we activate these neurons in females and found that these neurons now, these females instead of caring of their infants now neglect or attack them. so what overall these series of experiments suggests is that the brain has two components-- a set of cells in the hypothalamus that drive parental behavior, and another set of cells that drive parental neglect. we are very exciteed by these results because it opens new opportunity to understand the control of parental behavior and possibly why some animals are animals are parental and some animals are neglecting or attacking the infants. parental behavior is widely observed among animals, so these also raise the possibility that the function and the regulation of these cells is widely conserved across the animal kingdom. >> rose: how do you stimulate the neurons to make the aggressive males more nurturing? >> we use modern methods in neuroscience, called optogenetics to enable to shine lights on neurons that have been genetically modified and have an ion channel that is light activated. in other words we drive the activity of genetically defined population of neurons. >> rose: that's fascinating. suzanne, let me talk about how it's all evostled, parental behavior. >> what's very nice about what catherine has told us is parenting behavior is conserved across animals. it's not just that it's conserved. that's really interested is it also varies. there are similarities between species not very closely related and there are differences between closely related species. and what our work is trying to do is understand the evolutionary basis for some of these parenting behaviors and why is it that you have some parenting that is very similar and some parenting that is very different? as we can see in this video this is a video of a guerilla mother and her infant. there are a lot of similarities in the behavior between how this mother interacts with her babies and how humans interact with their babies. and this is one of the things we really want to understand. what is it that is similar about humans and our caregiving and our parental behavior and other animals? and the biology of mammals females, means that there are hormones that are very, very important in determining lactation, so driving the production of milk and driving the let-down reflex, and these hormones also seem to be very important in regulating the behavior of mothers and their infants. two of these horr ploans oxytocin and prolactin. at the end of pregnancy, the hypothalamus, which is the same part of the brain that catherine discovered these important parenting neurons, producing a hormone called oxyitosein which is primarily important psychologically in the production of milk and lactation. however, it also is very important in driving maternal behavior. so oxytocin has these secondary impacts on the brain such that when oxytocin levels are raised females bond with their babies. this hormone is incredibly important in driving this mother-offspring relationship. another hormone that's produced in late pregnancy is prolactin and prolactin is also important in the production of mek but again, it also has these consequences for maternal offspring bonding. and i think that's actually really interesting because we have this biology that allows females to produce milk, but they also are incredibly important in driving the relationship between mothers and their offspring. and these hormones also have been shown to have a lot-- be very important in driving social bonds in general with other animals. so it seems like one of the basic relationships between two individuals for mammals is the mother-offspring bond but also these hormones are important in the relationship between males and females and also more widely in social relationships. there has been some fascinating work done by teams understanding the evolution of parenting behavior and understanding evolution, especially of parabonding between males and females. in voalz there's a very nice system where some voal species are polygamous, and some are monogamous. some males and females form long-term pair bonds and both are nurturing toward their young. what has been found in this system is that not only are their higher levels of oxytocin, but in the males, there's a similar hormone that's produced by the hypothalamus vasoppressin which seems to be important in paternal behavior and pair bonding behavior. so we have oxytocin in females that seems to be very important in driving pair bonds and maternal behavior, and in males we have vasoppressin which plays a similar role in driving pair bonds-- >> this vaso pressin work was done by-- >> they did a fascinating series of experiments determining how oxytocin impacts on female maternal behavior and vasoppressin behavior for male pair bonding and parental behavior. >> rose: is it monogamy that produces the higher levels of oxytocin, or is it higher levels of oxyitose thane produces monogamy? >> oxytocin is primarily involved with the maternal behavior. it's vasoppressin that is associated with monogamy. some of the same teams who worked on how vasopressin relates to pair bonding bonding and paternal behavior in voals shows you can take voal species that are not monogamous and add vasopress and i know make them monogamous. in a larger context one of the questions that drives our research is understanding what makes humans special? what is it about human biology that is both similar and different to other primates? and one of the things that's very remarkable about humans is we have a very large brain and we have exceptionally long juvenile and infant periods. because we're porn so help will and unable to take care of ourselves, parenting becomes exceptionally important and human babies are pretty much totally defenseless, and even throughout their juvenile period, they really need much more investment by their parents than similar species that are closely related to us. and i think that tells us that in humans particularly, understanding the role of parenting behavior and the biology of parenting behavior is very important. >> rose: chuck let me turn to what is the effect on children who are deprived of nurturing? >> we know that children are exposed to a continuum of care. as you can see here, this infant and mother are having a wonderful conversation. you can see the mother is clearly in love with this baby and this is what we want to see in all infants and mothers. under conditions of profound deprivation, all of that is missing. here we have a pair of twins interacting, but now we have institutional care and a couple of things to note is the sheer number of babies sitting-- in the institutions, the lack of caregivers. as you look through here, there's one you can see in the back. you can see there's a very low investment in these children, unlike the video clips we saw in the beginning. and this lack of social interaction we think plays a fundamental role in building the brain. so what we started to observe was in this study, what happens to the developing brain in kids growing up in institutional care? we formed a manipulation in which we saw a large number of children abandoned to institutions in romania and after studying them extensively some of them were placed in very high-quality foster care and some remained in the institution. i want to show you a video of what a child at around the age of two looks like. this is on an outing with a bunch of little kids from an institution, and if you notice, the girl who is rolling over, she's 22 months of age. her i.q. is below 50 at this point in time. she's been in the institution close to the time of birth. notice the other little girl is rocking and off camera there are three or four other kids rocking and that is very characteristic of kids who grow up in institutions. the question then becomes what happens to the brain? in the next slide i'm going to show you the beginning of this journey to understand the brain. the first thing we did is record the brain's electrical activity e.e.g., by placing sensors on top of the head. the billions of neurons in the brain generate electrical activity that we can pick up and from that electrical activity we can basically infer the power that the brain is producing, how much electrical activity is there. we can color code that. that indicates more or less powerop on the right side you see an image of a never-institutionalized brain. the distribution of electrical activity is portrayed here to reflect much more brain activity in red sitting over the frontal lobe. if you look on the left panel that the institutionalized group. you can see the kids in the institution are underpowered. instead of a 100 watt light bulb it's a 50 watt light bulb. when the children were eight to 10 we performed magnetic resonance imaging on them to look at the detailed anatomy of the brain. on the right is an m.r.i. scan and we're showing gray matter. gray matter represents the cell bodies and appendages of neurons that sit on the cortical surface and do the computations and calculations that the brain does. white matter which i'll show you in a moment, really does the communication of the brain. white matter shows up whitish and the gray matter shows up gracish. on the far right you see the amount of dprai matter in the never-institutional ides kids. these are the children who grew up in families in bucharest romania. you look at the children institutionalized on the far left it's dramatically reduced. they show lesgray matter as do kids we put in foster care and i'll come back to that. this is showing us the brain has much lesgray matter by a function of being in institution. we show the same reduction in white matter, the communication pathway. what's scary about this is it is almost suggesting we know there is a smaller brain as a function of being in an institution -- >> the reason this is so important is because before chuck did these studies people knew that deprivation, or lack of parental interaction was bad for the cognitive development of the which were. one didn't know to what degree it affect the brain directly. one thought this was likely to be the case but this was the first it evidence that showed dramatic changes occurring in the brain. >> rose: would it be different if somehow there were some kind of activity with these kids in institutions. in other words, there was much more collegiality in some way produced from outside. >> in a moment we'll talk about what happens when you put kids in families. your question really is can you improve an institution? >> charlie asked another question-- does it have to be a parent? can there be parental substitutes? >> we know it has to be the investment the caregivers make. it doesn't have to be the parents but it has to be caregivers who care about that child. and what goes on in institution is you don't have that investment. >> rose: you have a sense your brain will development if you feel there's some contact, that somebody knows who are you, recognizes you and there's some act of caring-- >> affection. >> i it's this social interaction stimulating brain development, and it's the lack of interaction. kids in an institution who got cognitive and linguistic stimulation dut butt no caregiving would be just as poorly off as the kids we see. now the question is how much recovery is there? in the study we placed half the kid into foster care, really high-quality foster care. in the beginning of this video once again we'll see that little girl when she's 22 months of age, i.q. below 50, in an institution. very atypical motor behavior. right after this, we put her in foster care, and this is her in foster care eight months later. her i.q. is now in the mid-60s. this is her interacting with her foster care mother. clearly, they have a loving relationship. and this is eight months of foster care. in this clip, she's now about four years of age. she's now spent half her life in foster care, and look at that interaction she's having. this is the same little girl we saw in the beginning who is crawling backwards, rolling over, had no language, and now her i.q. in the 80s. there is tremendous recovery that occur by place a child in a family. placement around the two years of age leads to much better outcomes. but placement after two years of age leads to much les-desirable outcomes. in the next slide we can show the e.e.g.. on the right is the brain of the never-institutionalized child more red means more activity. in the next slide we see the critical period. now, the brain this is left institution after age two. notice it looks identical to the institutionalized brain. the child was in a family but not until they were older than two. in the next slide, you can see the children placed before two have brain activity that looks like just the kids who have never been in an institution. we see this in other do mains as well. what we see is an inflection point in development. removal from an institution and placement into a good family before two leads to much better outcomes than children placed after two. >> rose: timing is everything and if you don't have it it puts a certain sealing on how much you can produce. >> it's as though the the window of opportunity is reduced. >> you can see this in simple-- they put monkeys in a room where they didn't have light for the first year or two. they were blind the rest of their lives. another experiment looked at what is called binocular interaction. we see with both eyes and it gives us depth perception. and there are cells in the cerebral cortex that respond to input from the twoize ayes. if you close one eye and keep it closed thas lost complete control of the cells in the cerebral cortex. other eye has taken over and spread. this applies to every sensory system. >> i think what's so interesting about it as well is how key the social interaction is. if you're thinking thinking about vision, it's simple to see how that relates directly to the brain but-- >> even richer and even more sensitive. yes. and it actually in the brain studies which i find so fascinating is we can sort of get an idea of what's going on. i think it also applies to your stuff, cath ren. and that is we know when a child libraries something, when anybody learns anything, the connections between serve cells strengthen. and in the long run you actually see a growth of new synaptic connections. one of the reasons the brain gets big ser because it's learning something, it is acquiring new information, it grows new it extension i would presume you're losing connections between you're not learning a darned thing. >> absolutely. >> and you're probably talking about the pair bonding new connection forming. >> it's interesting also that infants are are not cared well, in turn, are not necessarily good parents. and so it's going to be interesting from a neuroscience standpoint to look at the development of the neurons that are involved quality of parenting. what happened if there's bad parenting to the development of the brain? >> rose: if there's bad parenting they become more likely to be a bad parent. >> if you remove a pup from the rat, because it doesn't have the benefit of parenting, when that fup pickup grows up, it doesn't take good care of its pups. >> we see children at 16. we would expect the kids in the institutional group when they become parent, which could be the next few years, to be pretty dreadful parent. but the kids we put in foster care early enough have a much greater chance of becoming good parents. >> rose: so someone is looking at this program at this moment and saying how do i maximize the brain and intellectual development of my child? is the simple answer engage and show a lot of nurt expurg loving? >> enjoy the child and love the child. >> rose: and what about this whole argument about quality time versus time? >> so, the position i take on this is i think that parents worry too much. and that they spend time interacting with their babies, and they talk to their babies and they do all the things we're biologically programmed to do they don't have to worry. now, will it give them an i.q. of 150 and get them into an ivy league school? that's really irrelevant. what we want to do is invest socially and psychologically in our offspring. >> in fact stress is a problem in driving appropriate parenting behavior. i think we're going to hear more from meg. but being too anxious is not a good idea. >> i just want to make one other point, and that is institutions also zero. institutions can do a very good job in raising children that are left there. if they have appropriate staff in order to do it. what was wrong in spitzer's study, one nurse for seven children is inadequate. >> rose: to have a consciousness of the ideas we're talking about. >> exactly. they have to listen to this program. >> rose: margaret, when the parents are present their ability to nurture may be compromised. talk about post-partum depression. >> sure. most women will start off the first days after birth with some mood changes. but they usually resolve on their own. but about 10% to 20% of women will have a post-partum depression. we now know people who are at risk, women who are at risk with those with either air personal history of depression, a history of depression associated with child birth, family history of depression, twin gestation seems to also be a precipitant. and it's also worth noting that impoverished women and women with many life circumstances have actually twice the risk of the women i just spoke about. we tend to be very vulnerable after child birth. in fact, women are more vulnerable to psychiatric illness immediately after childbirth than they are at any other time of their life. this was a study done by kendall in edinborough, in which he followed 15,000 women over 12 years. what you will see is he found that there was an increase in psychiatric admissions within the first three months post-partum. and so, a normal diagnosis of post-partum depression requires four-week onset, but actually, even if it occurs within the first year we do continue to call it post-partum. now, some post-partum depressions will begin during pregnancy, about 50% of post-partum depression begins during pregnancy. and one other time to be careful of is moms who stop breast feeding. at some point in that year or so or two years i've had women come in to my office who manifested major depressive symptoms immediately after stopping their lactation. so the clinical manifestations actually of women who come in, they're profoundly sad and have terrible anxiety. they feel overwhelmed at every task. and they're usually unable to sleep. but even unable to sleep when the baby sleeps so that's unusual. what is unfortunate is they feel that they cannot connect with the baby. they feel numb. and they feel terribly guilty about this. and usually label themselves bad mothers. >> rose: "connect to" means what? >> bonding with the baby. they don't feel at all atasmed to the baby. >> rose: desire? >> desire they're not interested in interacting with the baby and it makes them feel awful. now, suicide can be a real concern at this time in mothers who are seriously depressed. and there's another symptom that will happen-- will occur in a few women who have post-partum depression. and these have these obsessional ruminations, all day long, that they might hurt their baby. and they become intolerable. and they're really tortured. so these are not women who want to kill their baby. these are women who are having anxious ruminations that are very distressing. now, having said that i just want to quickly discuss post-partum psychosis because post-partum psychosis is very different from post-partum depression. it's actually a very rare disorder. it occurs in maybe one in 1,000 deliveries, although it's more prevalent in women who have bipolar disorder. these women need to be hospitalized immediately. we consider it a psychiatric emergency because the mom does have to be separated from her baby, both for her own safety and for her infant's safety. because they've lost contact with reality. and they may have hallucinations or-- hallucinations or another psychotic thought which may excel them to kill their-- compel them to kill ther babies. that's one of the saddest circumstances. speaking of the adverse effects that occur in children upon post-partum depressed women these babies tend to have insecure attachment because these moms cannot attend to the infant's cues. they can't tend to their emotional needs. they also have some cognitive impairment because of the parental failure to encourage interest in the environment or curiosity. and often they will have behavioral problems as well because of the parent's own irritability or hostility during the parenting time. so we wonder what actually causes this. over the course of pregnancy, as you can see in this slide, there are hormones specifically estrogen and progesterone which increase slowly over 40 weeks of pregnancy. at the time of delivery, there is a precipitous fall within 24 hours, which is kind of a shock to the system. >> wow. >> and these it hormones, estrogen and progesterone, feed back on to the hypothalamus which is the emotional part of the brain. there are some women who are exquisitely sensitive to hormones and hormones changes during their lifetime. a most important component of parental caregiving, of course, is responsiveness to an infant. this is how a mom reacts with her baby. she speaks to her baby. the paeb has emotional needs. there's a kind of mutual emergency dance that goes on between them. but when a mom is depressed what she says is she can't attach to her baby. she can't respond to the baby's needs or the baby's coouz or the baby's smiles. >> rose: i want to get david involved in this. so what's the percentage of men that have post-partum depression? >> very underrecognized and very unresearched. probably at this point 5% to 10% of them. >> rose: tell me about your experiences, david. >> thank you charlie. i really appreciate the opportunity. i first just wanted to say that the stigma of mental illness is something that i see every day as a pediatrician, and i can say that not being able to talk about something whether it is mental illness or any illness if you can't get treatment, you can't get help. and i think that that stigma was real for me, and i think it did delay me seeking treatment. at least in my opinion, in america, a man is associated with several things, but weakness and helplessness are not generally considered to be masculine behaviors. but that was what i experienced. and when i was going through my post-partum issues with my wife, i would always say to her i worry that by telling you this, you'll think lesof me, that it will affect your perception of me because i'm supposed to be the strong husband and here i am cowed by" -- >> tell us what you were feeling. >> so i-- what ended up happening hit me completely off guard. i was very excited to have the child. i was very happy when i found out we were having a boy. and i suffered no symptoms during the end-- at any time during my wife's pregnancy. the first week of life, everything was fine. i was at work during that time, but i had taken weeks two and three off to spend time at home. my wife was on maternity leave as well. and that's when my feelings started to change. i think in retrospect, my sadness came out as more frustration and anger. i felt rejected. i felt faz my son was rejecting me. he was a very difficult child to calm down. he cried a lot. even if he was well fed and changed, he just didn't soothe very easily. and i think i just viewed that very differently than my wife did. my wife connected to him and was nurturing and there were times i just did not want to be around him. in fact, there was one instance where i was so angry and so frustrated that i just had to leave the apartment and walk outside because i couldn't be around him. i didn't seek any help at that point because i was going back to work, and i figured things would just get better. but, of course they didn't. and i would come home from work and my wife would hand my son to me he would just start crying and i'd hand him right back. and i'd say "i do not want to hold him." and i would start to denigrate him. i would say very mean things about my son and this would upset my wife as much for what i was saying as to how i was feeling. it was during this time, as meg point out i started to have some images in my head that were not pervasive but they were there. and, unfortunately, they did involve me harming my son and then harming my wife and then harming myself. it was at this point they realized -- >> you needed help. >> i needed some help. i spoke to my physician, and he had given me zoloft, i took maybe four doses and i didn't take any more. i think i wasn't prepared to take medicine for something like this. i had been in therapy for some mild anxiety before so i was comfortable with that, and the practice i work at has behavioral health and i found one person who does specifically post-partum dwe pregz. but i didn't make the phone call. i think maybe there was just a part of me that thought this would just get better but of course, it didn't get better. at around week five, six i probably said something particularly heinous that morning, and i left for work, and i called my wife to apologize and to make sure we were still on for that weekend where one of the grandparents was going to come and watch my son and go and run some errand and maybe get lurch. and i thought i heard her say no. and i just lost it. i started crying ask balling my eyes out. i thought finally all these things i was thinking and all these things i was saying had finally come back and and it was going to sever my bond with my wife which i needed so much at that point. of course, that is not what she said. she got upset and she said you really need to-- you need some help. i said at that moment we need a night nurse to help us with some sleep and get some rest. i got to work and i called one of my good friends who had two daughters and told him some of what i was experiencing and he told me that it was not unusual and i should make some phone calls. and that day i called the therapist, and by the next week i was seeing somebody who i ended up seeing for about three months. so the night nurse had started. i was starting my cognitive behavioral therapy. and one of the things they went over was as eric said, these feelings are not-- they're thoughts. they're not actions. and i shouldn't feel bad that i felt this way. i just had to see them for what they were, which were these negative thoughts that were not based on reality. my son was not rejecting me. he wasn't ill in some way. he was seeing the doctor. he was growing. there was nothing to back up what i was thinking and i had to do a lot of homework to kind of help myself through that. by the time he was about three months, i was going to take a month off. my wife was going to go back to work and i was going to take month and up until that point it was looking really dicey because we were really nervous how i would react. but thankfully through the therapy and him just maturing and getting better, like babies do, we ended up having a great month. i finally felt like a parent. i changed all the diapers, i fed him. i felt like i gained so much from that time. i have an amazing son. he is 18 months old. he is just an awesome kid and i have a great wife -- >> and he loves you. >> he does. he does. i believe that. and thinking back to what i felt back then, it was another period in my life-- it was another person that was experiencing that. and i do hope that if-- as i realized, i did not know eye looked online for information, and there just isn't very much on parental post-partum depression and i didn't know what rates there were and i never had anybody to talk to me about it. i knew about the female part but i never knew about the male part that hopefully if somebody does see this and understands what they're going through is not unique, that they can get help and hopefully don't have to suffer. >> rose: let me see what everybody knows in this room and everybody watching you, one, there is an admiration for coming to share your story and because you share your story i am sure it will benefit someone else. that's first. the second thing, i wonder if in fact-- and it's so much easier to say-- if you'd reached out from the very beginning when you felt this, at that time you didn't realize it was a problem. you realized it was a feeling to someone to give you more context and say "your son is not rejecting you. he's being a baby." that would have made a difference. >> i think so. and when the time comes that we have another child i will likely be very proactive with and i probably will start seeing someone ahead of time just to be on the safe side. i'm assuming having gone true it once i will be better able-- it will be more predictable to me, i'll understand it better. but just to be on the safe side because i never want to have those feelings again i will be talking to someone and make sure if they do pop up i already have somebody i can talk to. >> i think one of the things we talked about before and one of the ground rules of psychotherapy is you can think anything. that is, you're allowed to entertain any idea you want in your head. that's not action. so that alone makes one more comfortable, knowing that this is not a terrible thing. thinking is your privilege. >> rose: so let's have a conversation here. this is fascinating. everything that has been said here is fascinating to me, every aspect of this, and i'm not a parent so to appreciate this-- i'm a godparent, and i see lots of kids. i come away from this with a greater understanding of the absolute significance in the first two years of a baby's life for there to be some kind of remarkable kind-- this may be fundamental and understood by mothers around the world-- >> no. >> rose: but it's not. >> no. >> rose: how essential this is to what we now know about the biology of the brain and what happens to neurons when there is. and so let's talk a bit more about other place where's children-- of no fault of their own-- end up perhaps by tragedy perhaps by something else, end up in a foster home. what are implications of that? are rules the same? we've just got to figure out a way to find, to connect to a child with love and nurture and companionship. >> right. i think it's a little bit more complicated in foster care, for example, in the u.s., simply because what leads a child to go into foster care can be complicated. it can be maltreatment. it can be neglect. it can be any number of awful things. and i think the worst things we do in foster care is have repeated foster care placements where kids go from one home to another. the sooner they're taken out of a bad environment and put boa good one the better off they'll be. the second thing you're raising is much more difficult, the issue of adult plasticity. you have a child who had an awful few years of life and now they're five or 10 years of age and showing all kinds of behavior and emotion problems, what can we do? i think the storyline is it is going to require more effort and more resource in some ways to get that child back on an even keel. it's not impossible, but having gone through this critical period the parent needs to understand it's going to take more than if the child had been placed earlier. i think that's another frontier of neuroscience, rescue these critical periods and in so doing take a five-year-old or 10-year-old or 15-year-old and get them back to where they should be. >> rose: do we have a lot of research on that? >> we have growing research on that. a colleague of ours has been doing brilliant work on how to rescue a critical period in an adult animal. sometimes it's pharmacological but sometimes behavior. when you go back to children born with a vision problem their eyes wander and they can't focus. there's treatment, if you rear them in the dark for a while you can treat adult stare, abismus. that's remarkable but we can't do that in humans. >> what is really important is foster parents non-parents can be as nurturing as the biological parents. and this has been shown in human. it has been shown in animals as well. for example, in rats, nonparent males and females will reject the perps, will avoid them. but if you expose the animals to pups several days in a role, they will nurture the pups, build a nest, and groom the pups-- they will be parents. so these suggest that the brain areas that drive parental behavior can be activated both in parents and in nonparents. so that's extremely important. >> that's really important. >> i think the biology is becoming so interesting. we can tell when a woman has post-partum depression how she respond to the child compared to a normal parent. at a very early age and i think the opposing brain region nghtz hypothalamus are so fascinating in terms of the aggression that anderson described and your findings on parenting. >> rose: is there some point where nurturing reaches a diminishing level of participation? >> i think there is a point of diminishing returns. it's not lirn. it's not the more caregiving you give the better the outcome. i think the point as a species we have come to expect certain things and then it plateaus which should take some of the pressure off parents to be a perfect parent. >> i think it's important to think about how humans evolved and what we traditionally did. the nuclear family is quite recent. it comes back to catherine saying nonparents provide parental care. there are a lot of different ways we can raise children with different kinds of support and different kinds of investment, and it doesn't all have to be just from the parent. so i think it-- i think we kind of get stuck into moms have to bring kids up. but villages bring kids up, and it's-- i think it's really important to think about this nurturing can come from outside the family. >> many people describe how important the extended family is. interacting with grandparents or cousins and things like that. you can see important that might be. >> if you look at traditional societies, it isn't always the family. there's a risk of people thinking i don't have an extended family network. my child is going to suffer. >> neighbors, friends-- >> neighbors, friends child care nursery, high-quality care can come from different places. >> rose: i know fathers who have said to me i really couldn't connect or identify with my child below two years old. once he got to be three four, five-- whatever-- it was much better. but in the first two years i just-- it would seem to me we're making the case here that-- you shouldn't feel bad about yourself-- but what shudo is understand the principle here that nurturing is good, and if you can't do it-- >> that's right. >> that's right. >> rose: figure out a way it can be done. >> excellent point. >> that's a really good point. >> i think what we're describe describing is somebody needs to make an investment in the child. >> rose: it doesn't have to be the biological parent. >> i think it's more recent, parents have a baby and they hand the baby to them and said go home and they were by themes. even my parents, my grandparents were nearby. so there were more people there. so someone could get rest. someone could attend to themselves and now we just kind of-- we kick them out of the hospital much faster, and suddenly it's like "here gu." and i know that when i see parents before they've had their babies i used to have a very different discussion before i had a child and now after and i always ask "do you have a network? do you have people around?" it's so important-- i think as you said, there's a lot of anxiety. and i think sometimes a mom just needs to hear, "it's not bad if you don't want to be with them 100% of the time. it's okay to go have lunch with somebody or just go for a run and leave the child with a friend, a neighbor or a family member and attend to yourself. it's not a bad thing." but i think we've made it so that the mother mush able to do everything and anything and it's not what biology says they can do. >> i think the point that emerges from your presence here it's okay to have post-partum depression. this is -- >> as long as you recognize it. >> as long as you recognize it. >> and do something about it. >> rose: and get some help. as we close this out i'm struck one more time about how scientists have made observational studies looking in romania, wherever the particular saturday were done, the prison experience with mothers who gave quality time even though limited, versus foster, other kinds of institutions. these were observational experiments. now we can look at the neurons. it shows you we're just beginning to get the biology and how often the biology connects with the observation. >> right. >> absolutely. >> which is an amazing thing. >> rose: what are we doing next time? >> we're doing the biology of gender identity. how brain encodes the difference between sexes and how does it handle transgender identity? so really it's a continuation of this further dealing with, you know, development of the individual. this time with sexual identity and changes in sexual identity. >> rose: i thank thank all of you. it's a pleasure to have you at this table and to help us understand this essential and remarkable thing called parenting. so thank you very much. happyand we'll see you next time. thank you for joining us. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> announcer: the following kqed production was produced in high definition. ♪ >> must have soup! >> the pancake is to die for! [ laughs ] >> it was a gut-bomb, but i liked it. >> good. i actually fantasize, in private moments, about the food i had. >> i didn't like it. >> you didn't like it? oh okay. >> dining here makes me feel rich. >> and what about dessert? pecan pie, sweet potato pie.

Transcripts For ALJAZAM News 20140111

tonight, water is on the way to west virginia. washington is sending it in the wake of the dangerous chemical spill into the elk river. this was just moments ago fema trucks arriving in charleston, west virginia bringing the water to hundreds of thousands who can't drink or bathe or use the tainted supply. a federal disaster declaration has been issued for the affected counties. at the same time, an investigation has begun into what happened, why, and who may be responsible. until then, the water supply there is off limits. jonathan martin is on the scene. >> fema and homeland security have brought in about 12 tanker trucks like the one behind me to help with this crisis. many people have been bringing sizable containers and filling them up with water because at this point it is not clear how long this problem will last. it all came to light yesterday morning when the industrial company freedom industries reported a leak from one of their containers, a chemical leaking right into the elk river. this was an immediate concern because their facility is really close about a mile and a half upstream from the water treatment facility. so this chemical got into the water line and many people started reporting a strange odor, a strange smell to that of licorice or a sweet candy. health officials tested the water and realized it was the chemical used in the preparation of coal. the question right now is how much of the chemical got into the water and hour serious is the risk. >> do not use tap water for drinking, cooking, cleaning, washing or bathing. at this time i do not know how long the order will last. >> the president of the company says they are working around the clock, testing the water and flushing it out and using chemicals that will oxidize the water. the state has ordered the company freedom industries to remove the chemicals from their property. there is an investigation wanting to know how this chemical leak happened and how authorities were notified in the state. >> jonathan martin in west virginia and the people of west virginia are not strangers to environmental disasters. chuck nelson was a coal miner for 30 years but after seeing the impact the industry is having on his family's health and the environment he became a activate against the coal miners of west virginia. i asked him if he's upset about what's happening. >> yes i'm upset. i live with spills every day and it impacts people's lives. i have seen people die of brain tumors and kidney cancer and some of the coal waste and stuff that i live is a toxic waste dump. you know, after they use this chemical, this chemical that spilled, with other chemicals, 237 schedules that they use to clean the coal, when they clean the coal you know they actually get it ready for shipment. and the coal floats to the top. you know, they use water, 95 globs per ton of coal and then the coal floats to the top. they rake the coal off, and then they have to do something with the waste they have. >> former coal miner chuck nelson tonight. now to our other big story. the massive security breach at target. the first reports reportedly only scratched the situation. 110,000 possible victims. john terrett is here. >> a target spokes woman confirmed to me that the information may have affected people who shopped at target before the holiday season got underway. that means anyone who shopped at target before the breach was discovered could have had their personal information stolen. let's take a look in detail of what target tells us has happened and how the company assessed the number of accounts hacked in this cyber-attack which went of course around stores nationwide. now originally target said 40 million accounts had been hacked and affected and they were absolutely right. credit and debit information was taken at that point. we learned that in dis. now today -- in december. now today the company says an additional 70 million accounts were seized and this time personally information may have been captured. now remember, there's an easy way to think about this. there was one hack, says target but two thefts. and in the 70 million one revealed today its names, streets addresses phone numbers and e-mail address addresses that were taind not credit or dibt information. it's possible your personal e-mail was stolen even if you didn't shop with them the date of the hack, november 27th and december 15th. even before that. you could be at risk and you should check your bill whit comes through. you can go to target's website, if you are worried about it, there it is on the screen and in the meantime, the kerry whose name is -- the ceo whose name is gregstein hoffel, we are truly sorry that they are having to endure that. he goes on understanding and sharing the facts related to this incident is important to te target team. now, target says customers will have zero, zero liability for the cost of any fraudulent charges arising from this breach, if they crop up on your card you won't have to pay. but target will. and target's also said today that it took a big financial hit over and above the cost of sorting all this out when people abandoned it albeit temporarily whether this came out before christmas. it released guidance, and target is right now telling wall street that it anticipates an overall sales decrease of 2.5%. that's compared to a flat forecast that they had before all this happened. now times are tough for all of us, we know that but they are particularly tough for discounters like target. the reason is there is no fat in the system, they cut everything back to the bone, it's very difficult for them to make money. this hack was not the kind of christmas present that target was looking for in its stocking this year. >> all right john terrett thanks for update tonight. hundreds of documents related to governor chris christie's office, were released tonight william with the apologetic grove at the center. david shuster has the story. >> so far the documents do not appear to undermine governor christie's position. he says he wasn't involved in the scandal and didn't know about it until this week. probing the scandal raised new questions about the lengths the staff would have had to have gone to keep christie in the dark. in a september 13th e-mail patrick foye warned a number of officials access to the bridge was critical, i believe this hasty decision, foye reported, i'm appalled by the lack of process, and the dangers created to the public. one of the e-mails went to david samson the chairman of the port authority. according to other documents samson met with christie, a week before bridged cel yeah asked the are authority to carry out the lane closures. >> i'm convinced that he has absolutely no knowledge of this, that this was executed at the operational level. and never brought to the attention of the board of commissioners. >> do you have any questions? >> yet in another september e-mail david wildstein at the time a christie appointee at the authority wrote to one of the staffers, quote, we are reportedly going nuts, samson helping us to retaliate. growing controversy under wraps. bill baroni wrote to colleagues, "i am on my way to the office to discuss. there can be no public discourse." taken together, the documents released friday paint a picture of bridge ant agency officials besieged by anger. e-mails were pouring into the port authority with complaints about the lane closures and the traffic jams in fort lee where four access lanes had been released to one. the latest batch of documents plan to issue subpoenas forcing christie's staffers to testify under oath. aides and appointees at the authority all of whom are staying silent for now. david shuster, al jazeera. >> on to the grim new jobs report. just 74,000 positions were adding to prms in december and -- to payrolls in december. there is more to that than you might realized. "rea"real money"'s ali velshi gs us the information. >> the problem is when people fall out of the workforce as they did in december basically the whole pool gets smaller and fewer people are working. so it doesn't reflect what's going on. this is something that you'll see in a dynamic job environment like this. the unemployment rate going down doesn't necessarily mean good news and an unemployment rate going up doesn't necessarily mean bad news. it's got more to do with how many people could be working are actually looking for jobs. that is something called the labor force participation rate. that dropped again this month and it's the lowest level since 1978, john. >> ali thanks very much. congress should extend jobless benefits for the long term unemployed? that program expired at the end of last year. mike viqueria breaks down what is happening in washington. >> the white house for their part when the data gives you lemons they try to make legislative lemonade. they're turning it around and talking about the need to extend long term unemployment insurance. that's bogged down in the senate and mowpts. at thhouse of representatives,le without benefits. that number is increasing every day. meanwhile the bickering goes on in the u.s. senate after some positive signs earlier this week. jayjay carney tried omake the distinction in the weekly briefing. >> that's something the president has talked about a lot. it is something that is very much at the heart of the debate on how to move forward on extending unemployment insurance benefits we are talking about people who have been unemployed and have been looking for a job and have been doing so for along time. >> the president's economic disparity are viewpoint, the white house has announced plans for the president to travel to north carolina and the high tech sector of the economy, the president continues to put pressure on congress to pass those unemployment benefits extension as well as raise the minimum wage. back to you. >> mike viqueria, thank you. an indian diplomat arrives home and an american is sent packing. capturing crisis, a photographer tells us the story behind the striking images from south sudan. >> the indian diplomat accused of lying about how much she paid her housekeeper in the u.s. is back in new delhi, her arrest created one of the most serious break downed in diplomatic relations in years and the backlash is not over. , nidhi dutt reports. >> a diplomat spat between india and the united states. >> i say no comments now. i want to thank my nation for the support they have given me. >> as she landed events took a new turn. india has asked a diplomat posted in new del high to leave, a twist in the standoff that began almost one month ago, when the diplomat was arrested in new york city. despite being granted diplomatic immunity, a grand jury in the united states has indicted kho braggade for charges including visa dprawd. >> i look forward to proving them wrong. however the nanny at the center of the diplomatic row stand by her are accusations of mistreatment. when i decided to come to the united states my hope was to work for a few years, to support my family. and then return to india. i never thought that things would get so bad here, that i would work so much that i did not have time to sleep or eat or have time to myself. because of this treatment, i requested that i return to india. but that request was denied. but in india, it's america's treatment of the diplomat and not nanny's case that is the focus of the attention. security barriers from outside the u.s. embassy and the withdrawal of diplomatic privileges traditional reply extended to american consular officials. >> translator: we should show the u.s. that we are equals. we should not be pressured by america or any other developed nation. >> she is not april individual, she is representing india in the u.s. i as an indian think u.s. woman is taking back step and indian woman the case ultimately. >> domestic political pressures have also played a part of the indian handling of this case. politicians want to be seen as strong leaders particularly when it comes to defending yifned on- india on the world stage. libi dutt, nu del high, al jazeera. according to a diplomatic cable cited by the washington post, dye has called for the release of prisoners accused of killing troops of the u.s. secure a deal in the coming weeks to keep 92nd troops in afghanistan beyond this year. celebration in the central african republic today. the residents in the capital bangui cheered the resignation of the interim president and his prime minister, comes two weeks after talks of neighboring corte madera. the president swept into power last year but critics are accusing him of not doing enough to stop sectarian violence in the country. thousands have been killed. an attempt to secure a assesceasefire. thousands have died during month long fighting and many more are trying to credi flee conflict z. >> the doors to this cargo plane have been closed. for now only the wounded have bebeen allowed in. a few civilians have been allowed on board, many women and children. they leave a community trying to recover from weeks of fighting. government officials say they have recaptured bentu and parts of eunof unity state. >> the images of the women and children killed some of them are even slaughtered and many of them are not buried. i was unable to sleep at all. this is not the nation we wanted. this is not the home i dream of before the independence at all. >> reporter: many people haven't returned. there are no civilians here. the place is deserted. when the fighting started, many ran to the u.n. base, others went as far as the capital juba. here is another blow to the state, production of the oil facility has stopped. before being sent to sudan along the appliance. the government blames the rebels for the destruction. >> they have destroyed the facility processing of taken and removed out all electronic machines, you know, in the operation rooms. and they remove all assets that belong to the staffs, and then also, the same damage reach up to thomas house and where the place under control of those people so they actually destroyed so many facilities. >> some locals believe the power struggle between president salva kiir and his former deputy is tearing along ethnic and tribal lines. government officials say they will soon capture towns captured by the rebels. south sudan. >> many have run to u.n. bases for safety. photojournalist nicole sobieki has been following had ongoing crisis and shared her experience from one rebel held camp. >> these are people who have gone through decades of war. the majority of their life has been lived in conflict. they are coming off these boats empty handed to arrive at a camp for displaced people that is freshly set up, barely has clean water, has very little shelter, and i think there is a real sense of lost hope. people have been traveling all night. left the bor region, swampy land full of modification. they have had to leave -- fr full of mosquitoes, most have lost relatives or friends in the conflict. so you can imagine this is not really where they want to be. the greatest humanitarian need is clean water right now. they are plifg alongside the nile -- living alongside the nile, it is not good drinking water. aids organizations are trying ramp up quickly, but there are not enough latrines or sanitary facilities, not enough shelter, the temperatures at night can become quite cold so people are trying to struggle to meet their most basic needs. this is a scene around one of the port areas and the child was lying on the ground. their family was not in sight and people were just walking past the sleeping child. and didn't appear to be ill. i'm sure her family was around. but it's -- there's just this sense of sort of everyone sort of trying to find their way. everyone seems a little bit lost. >> now, nick oh says she believes people of south sudan want their story told so the people of the world know what they're going through. now to tobacco and cigarettes. 50 years ago, ash trays were on nearly every table. then the motion senior doctor in america says smoking kills. kimberly halcut trveg has the story. >> it was 1952, the report concluded that smoking causes illness and death, the report was not well received especially by the biggest tobacco companies. hiring celebrities and even doctors to promote the joiment and even safety of cigarettes. >> more doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette. >> requiring warning labels on tobacco products and eventually it imposed tighter restrictions on tobacco advertising. most successful campaign in the united states. smoking rates are now down 59%. back in 1964, 42% of u.s. adults were smoking compared to just 18% in 2012. the government tobacco efforts, which included bans of smoking in public places have helped to save lives. >> nothing has come close to this contribution to the safety of americans, nothing. >> there is still more work to be done. they say the number of americans smoking may have dropped in the decades but globally that's not case. this antismoking campaigner says in the last century 100 million people have died from tobacco use across the globe and he says until big tobacco companies are restrained that number is expected to rise to 1 billion smoking deaths this century particularly in low and middle income countries. >> the tobacco industry is carefully meticulously and targeting people in those countries. everywhere we go, we see the kind of marketing in low and middle income countries that hasn't been allowed in the united states, europe and other wealthy nations in decades. >> even in the u.s. he says more than 3,000 children still try their first cigarette every day. it's a trend he says will will only be reversed by even stricter restrictions, kimberly hellcutt, al jazeera, washington. >> coming couple the win are is the colorful and unlikely players who decide who get golden globe awards. interwelcome back to al jazeera america. here are the top stories. a state of emergency in west virginia. about 300,000 people are without water after a chemical spill along the elk river in charleston. the white house issued a federal disaster declaration. the target credit issues are larger. the data breach could effect up to 110,000 shoppers. names, addresses, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. congress is stepping pressure to extend unemployment insurance. no secret that most members of congress make more money than the average american. turns out for the first time ever most law makessers are actually millionaires. that's according to the report of the center for responsible politics. morgan radford is with us. my morgan. >> hi john. financial disclosures from last year showed that at least 268 of them are worth $1 million or more on average. that's more than half. keep in mind these numbers ever estimates. the exact figures could be even higher and that's because members of congress don't have to specify how much their spouses are worth. they can check a box for assets more than $1. million. gop lawmakers have a net median worth of $1 million but for democrats it's slightly higher. republican member of the house darryl issa made his fortune secondly car lawrmts alarms. worth about $464 million. dave welcome. >> good to be with you. >> what struck you about the report? >> what struck me is not only are the numbers going up and up and up, president obama giving a speech about poverty, there being a huge debate in congress right now through december and january about unemployment insurance they're trying to be the party of the poor, of the working man, of the middle class and yet democrats are actually on average in congress as you just said a little bit wealthier than even republicans are. as we transition here into 2014, as we head into a mid term election cycle there is going to be a political struggle going on, doesn't play into the hands of the democrats, quite the opposite, we are in the same boat as democrats, coming from modest means, we are all kind of wealthy but at the end of the day, we're all kind of wealthy. >> the top 20 in congress, top 20 millionaires they make i guess from darryl issa is on top right? >> he is. there are several congressmen historically, you look back the past couple of years, the current study that's been out now, there are not millionaires, there are not tens of millionaires, but hundreds of millionaires. >> like 45 million, top 20 members of congress which seems pretty remarkable. >> at a broader scope here when you talk about members of congress and you talk about how in touch they are, with the average working person, somebody who's trying to make ends meet, who may have two or three kids at home, a single mom, go on and on and on, really what you have is a situation where almost all members of congress, there are some exceptions but almost all members of congress are factors of two, three, ten, 20 times richer and more wealthy than the average person who oftentimes are representing and in talking about representing and not only a political way but an economic way. >> where does a member of congress invest their money? >> in stocks that are very, popular, g.e, mobile, exxon, chase, on and on and on, in addition to being familiar names to most people, they're the companies that lobby washington the most, the companies that have the most contracts with washington. many of the most popular stocks and investments among lawmakers, members of congress, in 2012 were defense contractors. you have this very intimate intersection if you will between those types of companies, the political influence efforts they have in washington and the members of congress thems who have a financial interest in those, trying to press them for this that and the other thing and doing so every day. >> how do you think a report like this translates into the mid term elections? what are people going othink about this? >> it does dull the enthusiasm, it might be that much harder for democrats to hold that banner or have that mangt l and republicans may have stories of people, take steve stockman the representative in congress running against john cornan, he was homeless at one point. there are exceptions to the rule. the representative from arizona lived in an empty gas station when she was growing up with her mother. there are stories of people who came from almost nothing to practically nothing, who rose to a very high salary well into the six figures. >> did most of them inherit this big money or did they make it themselves? >> some of both some came if you will born with a silver spoon in their mouth, have never had a tough day in their life at least economically speaking, they have not wanted, been on food stamps calm the things that have been debairted in congress they have never been themselves, they came from wealth themselves, came from more than modest means, grew up in a middle class or upper middle class family, been able to build a life for themselves and found themselves in a position of power. you do have a bit of a dichotomy there but generally speaking the majority both democrats and republicans have not been born into poverty. they have not been born poor, they've been relative wealthy or at least solidly middle class throughout their lives and are here in washington today again earning a very nice salary and doing very well for themselves. >> interesting report, thanks very much. >> even though the state government refuses to do so, the supreme court will put civil unions on hold after an appeal by the state. recognize 1,000 couples married before the federal ruling making them eligible for federal benefits. >> federal benefits on the same terms as other same sex marriages. these families should not be asked to endure uncertainty regarding their status as the litigation unfolds. >> poandz oopponents of the meae spoken out against the ruling. same sex marriages and receptions are prohibited in their churches and overstepped federal authority. the u.s. government is urging americans attending the olympics to be cautious in sochi. it issued a warning about terrorist activity and hostage-taking. lisa stark has the story. >> it is not unusual for the state department to issue a travel advisory, they did it in 2008 when china held the summer olympics. this is a particularly extensive alert. the state department says it's not aware of any particular threats against u.s. citizens but it says americans who attend the games should, quote, remain attentive americans are to avoid large crowds and to exercise good judgment. the alert has pointed out there are three suicide attacks in a city close to sochi against public transportation, about 30 people were killed in those attacks. this is an area where there is a lot of unrest as part of the world and in fact there is an organization that the u.s. has designated as a terrorist organization that has threatened some sort of action during the games. that's why we're seeing this extensive alert. now russians are saying they are starting to ratchet up security in the olympic village area. they say there will be about 100,000 security personnel on site, that includes police as well as the russian army. the fbi is also involved. they are sending some two dozen agents to work with russian intelligence, some will be situated in the moscow some in sochi. the president, first lady and vice president biden have all indicated they are not going to attend the olympics. openly gay athlete billie jean king the tennis player, a signal from the u.s. about how it feels about the anti-gay laws that were passed not long ago in russia. >> our thanks olisa stark. and now to more olympic coverage and a conversation with one of the all time olympic greats. john henry smith. >> it was a fascinating interview, jacki jackie joyner r kerrsee. >> called the triple play, the game plan for the mind, body and soul, coca-cola company is the sponsor and we had over 200 families to enter into the contest and now it's down to five and they're going to be in los angeles and the winning family will have an opportunity to go to the olympic training center in colorado springs, colorado. >> let's get to the upcoming olympics and i tell you the olympics already are controversial. they haven't even started yet, partly because of the russian government stance on the lgbt community and also partly because there are concerns about safety. the state department has put out a message saying that americans should watch themselves over there. did you ever feel unsafe competing at the olympics? >> you were aware that there was a possibility that something could happen. no one could, you know, never forget what happened in munich. and so you were always very aware. but the olympic committee, and the international olympic committee will do their best to protect us. and so they really wanted us to focus on what we had to do athletically, but you know, we live in different times now, so you can't really ease up on just being too relaxed. you have to be aware of your surroundings and do everything in a group and just be aware. >> certainly the olympics like every other sport it seems has had to deal with the cloud of performance-enhancing drugs. how bad was it during your day, and do you think that situation is getting any better? do you think athletes are competing on a more level playing field at this point? >> you know what? you can't say if it was during our era, you know. they want to say every great performance maybe it was tainted and it's unfortunate because for someone like myself who worked day in and day out having a dream, and to not -- to be aware, you know, you have the drug testing, they are trying put things in place but you know if people are going ocheat they are going to cheat and it's unfortunate, it takes away from those who are putting in the hard work every day to be the very best. >> well, our thanks to jackie joyner kersee, the feaf female athlete of the century. john. >> thank you, shaking things up for charities that depend on the wealthy, melissa chan has that story. >> the symphony, the venerable pillar of light, but in san francisco, classical music has to keep up with the times. >> we are spending more money on marketing. we're working really, really hard to build that loyalty between our audience and the symphony. >> for decades, well centuries the music hall would be the one of the first places that see the largesse of millionaires but tech millionaires want to give different, reinvent philanthropy. take jason a startup millionaire and investor. he is employing miss entrepreneurial skills for good. at causes.com. the goal like they love to say here can is to change the world. >> working at causes is the best way i can think of to give back. >> the catch? causes is for profit. redefining charity and creating the confidence that as much as it makes money. >> they are treating it like a business and venture capitol. they are specific with their giving and they want results. >> some have called it philanthro-capitalism. they believe the same are issues that made their businesses successful ought to apply to giving, 20 million students powered by wealthy engineers to promote computer science education. >> certainly my brother and i but more importantly many of the other people are also very successful entrepreneurs who don't need to work but are doing it out of passion for the cause. >> daniel leery come from a family of philanthropists, working by measuring results, whether low income students read better. >> we have no endowment. every dollar we raise goes out the door within 12 months. >> depending on new philanthropy may turn out to be a struggle for traditional nonprofits like the san francisco symphony and fans may wonder how flen could put a number on the impact of beethoven. melissa chan, al jazeera, san francisco. >> up next, riding tides, new concerns that big changes could be coming to the california coast. >> the northeast has been dealing with rain today, started as snow. while temperatures were warming up we had a big problem with snow going to freezing rain, going to ice across the country and freezing rain advisors going up into maine. we are going to shift the concern from temperatures and freezing to rain and warming. wind advisories high wind watches in place all the way from manhattan to massachusetts. we are expecting the wind to increase saturday in places new york city to boston. winds gusting 35 to 50 miles per hour. and we have a high wind watch in place for parts of maine. now the forecast will call for plenty of mountain snow to the west along with several hits of rain with showers in between. it's going to be windy also for the northwest. montana into western washington and oregon we're going oget strong gusts lot of wind advisories in effect for the west. east coast as we get into sunday the mountain snow continues throughout the west especially the rockies. >> beach erosion is already causing problems in the california coast making exchanges like rising sea levels a real danger. city of los angeles is making bryan rooney reports. >> every at low tide, the study says that the pacific could rise by as much as two feet by the year 2050 which is a lot if there's a big storm. cities like los angeles are going to have to think about engineering a future that could survive rising sea levels and raging storms. >> the danger is that more severe storms and bigger waves, coupled with high tides, we will see more flooding, certainly see more flooding in those coastal areas. >> in potential danger are densely populated coastal areas, this waste water plant and power plants would be vulnerable to flooding. as storms become bigger and more powerful with bigger waves and higher tides, beach communities in southern california and beyond may have to begin building protective barriers for homes and public facilities along the coast. los angeles officials say they need to do it in the next few years, and not when it becomes an emergency. especially in communities where low-income renters live in older buildings that are not prepared to weather storm. >> those are the places where we expect to see the most flooding. they're also the communities that have the most social vulnerability, the pofntion he thad.the population he that popn danger of losing. >> no sand, no, sir at many tourists. >> that's brian rooney reporting. and one of the most feared features has a chance at redemption. creatures have a chance of redemption. 2300 pound great white shark up and down the west coast. julia yarborough reports. >> meet katherine, a great white shark who is helping researchers uncovered the secrets of one of the most feared and misunderstood predators. researchers at the shark biology program says recorded scientific data on great whites is limited but that's changing because of katherine and other sharks like her. >> i believe there is a general fascination and the general me public looks at this as a beautiful species, a majestic species. it's such a large species it plays into our primal fears. >> primal fears stoked by years for entertainment like jaws. the research organization osearch, a team caught katherine off the coast of massachusetts and tracked her. what's known as shark tracker allows anyone to go online and view data on katherine and other great white sharks. >> it sparked intrigue for great white shark. >> coming as far south as datona beach, florida and she roamed near cape canaveral. >> information on katherine's exact whereabouts and travel patterns. they hope the compilation of that data will let them know how many are in the region, if their presence here is in any way related to their breeding patterns. >> marine biology student brenda anderson is studying great white production and breeding. researchers believe their population is small and breed slowly. she performed an ultrasound on the shark. >> she was a wild one. >> anderson says her findings could be crucial to understanding great white sharks and ensuring their survival. >> we want to see if we can track their migration patterns, if 2003 find out later on that their population is declining we can know these areas and protect them. >> researchers hope that as technology improves they will learn even more about the greatly white and show that a feared predator is really much more intelligent than originally thought. julia yarbeau, al jazeera, california. >> stealing the show, it's not stars at this sunday's golden dploabs, it's the folks who choose the winners. >> that's a scene from gravity. , sandra bullock is up for a golden globe award. we're interested in the real power players, the people who decide who wins. and that may be the strangest group of folks you'll ever meet. david poled, editor of -- poanldpolepoland. who are they? >> sometimes it's 86, sometimes it's 89 depending who lives or dice. they basically spend all year wined and dined by studios. >> that compares to how many in the academy? >> 6,000. all who have been qualified. >> what sort of perks do they get as those 85 or 88 or 86 people who actually make the decision? >> well to start with they're traveled all over the world by the studios, throughout the year. they're given special access to the talent, their private press conferences, god knows if you are not one of them you're not allowed to be anywhere near the press conference. every time they see a movie they get a free dinner with it, sometimes they are given concerts, pretty much anything can you think of. >> what are the requirements to be a member? >> that you got in somehow. basically. >> who are they? >> they're people who do have -- who have written over the years for foreign papers. they are for that country but they live in los angeles now. and it's only one per country. so the 86 countries that are represented, it's one person per country. and so you kind of have to wait until somebody dies. >> they all live in l.a? >> they all live in l.a. now, all people who have moved to l.a. >> so what does that tell you about the awards, what does it make the awards in your opinion? >> it tells you about awards in general that ultimately if you can get a television slot which dick clark, they were on nbc but dick clark put them up into the big time about 30 years ago now. and once they became a television show all the jokes about pia zadora went away and they became a legitimate tv show and then all of a sudden everybody wanted to get on the gravy boat or the gravy train consume. >> how much does this organization maim now? >> eight to $12 million a year. >> where does that money go? >> they give away some of it which is lovely of them and probably has tax benefits. as a member you get two tickets to any film festival in the world. >> do you see anything positive about these awards? >> no, they become a marketing tool, they are usually between the nomination of the academy awards and the wins. if you have a tv platform, if you have a print platform, everybody wants to show up and look pretty and this gives them a chance to do so. >> it will happen and i'll probably watch it. david, good to see you, thanks for coming. >> always a pleasure, enjoy the globes. >> our top stories, coming up next. >> welcome to al jazeera america. i'm john siegenthaler in new york. here are the top stories. hundreds of thousands without tap water in west virginia. the white house has issued a disaster declaration after a chemical spill along the elk river. the data breach at target keeps getting bigger now the company says up to 110 million shoppers could have been affected and what's worse, target says hackers stole more than originally reported including names, mailing addresses, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. >> congress facing renewed pressure to extend long term unemployment benefits after job figures for the end of the year

Transcripts For ALJAZAM News 20140111

chemical spill that has contaminated the local water supply. now hundreds of thousands of people in the state capital of charleston can't drink or even bathe. a federal disaster declaration has been issued. an investigation is into why and who might be responsible. the water supply is completely off limits and our jonathan martin is on the scene. >> fema has brought in tanker trucks to help with the situation. at this point it's not clear just how long this problem will last. it it all came to light yesterday morning when the industrial company freedom industries reported a leak from one of their containers, a chemical leaking right into the elk river. this was an immediate concern because their facility is really close, about a mile and a half upstream from the water treatment facility. so this chemical got into the water line and many people started reporting a strange odor, a smell similar to licorice or sweet candy. realized this was the preparation used in the being preaption of coal, how much got into the water and how serious is the risk? >> do not use tap water for drinking cleaning washing or bathing. at this time i do not know how long the order will last. >> smelling it and including some chemicals that will oxidize the water. we've also learned that the state of west virginia has ordered the company, freedom industries to remove chemicals from their property. meantime there is a federal investigation going on officials really wanting to know how this chemical leak happened and when authorities were noifd here in the state. >> the people in west virginia are no strange to environmental disasters, chuck was a coal minorrer and he became an activist. we asked him for his take on this disaster. >> i'm upset about it because i live with these every day and it impacts people's lives. i've seen people die of brain tumors and kidney cancer from the coal waste, where i live is a toxic waste dump. you know after they use this chemical, this chemical that spilled with other chemicals, there's 230-some chemicals that they use to clean the coal. when they clean the coal we know they actually get it ready for shipment. and the coal floats to the top. they rake the coal off and then they have to do something with the waste they have. >> that was chuck nelson a former coal miner in west virginia. nearly 2,000 documents relating to the chris christie crisis was released on friday. >> so far the documents do not appear to undermine governor christie's position. he says he was not involved in the bridge scandal and didn't know about his staff's actions until this week. >> good morning. >> but e-mails released by this panel probing the constantly raise new questions about the lengths staff would have had to have gone to keep christie in the dark. in a september 13th e-mail, pack trifoye, laws of both states new jersey and new york. foye added, i'm appalled by the lack of process, failure to inform our customers in fort lee and most of all by the dangers created to the public. one of the e-mails went to david samson the chairman of the port authority. according to other documents samson met with christie a week before bridget kelley the groarve's chief of staff asked to carry out the lain closures. the governor said that samson was not involved. >> i am convinced that he had absolutely no knowledge of this, that it was executed at the time operational level. and never brought to the attention of the board of commissioners. >> david wildstein wrote to one of the governor's staffers, "we are appropriately going nuts samson helping to us retaliate." several e-mails show the growing controversy under wraps. wrote to colleagues "i am on my way to the office to discuss. there can be no public discourse." bridge and agency officials besieged by anger. e-mails were pouring into the port authority with complaints about the lain closures and the traffic jams in fort lee where four access lanes had been reduced to one. >> lawmakers who released the lateliest batch of documents, investigators feel the e-mails raise questions about authorities from the port authority all of whom as of now are staying silence. david shuster, al jazeera. >> the latest politics poll has governor christie the front runner in the 2016 presidential primary, but it's still unclear how these latest revelations will affect his decision to run. on friday target says more customers were affected than what they thought. at least 70 million customers had their information stolen by cyber-crooks now to help customers target will offer one year free of credit monitoring and identity theft detection. a bleak december jobs report, just 70,000 were added to payroll last month which were well below expectations. the unemployment rate fell to 6.7% but there's more as ali velshi explains. >> the unemployment rate measures the number of people who are actively looking for work or working. the number who are not working. the problem is when people fall out of the workforce as they did in december basically the whole pool gets smaller and fewer people are working. so it doesn't reflect what is going on. this is something you'll see in a dynamic job environment like this. the unemployment going down like this doesn't necessarily mean good news and.employment going up doesn't necessarily mean good news. something called the labor force participation rate dropped again this month and it's at the lowest number since 1978. >> those weak job numbers that ali just mentioned have renewed the where debate in congress as to whether to extend the exr unemployed benefits. >> the need to extend long term unemployment insurance has bogged down in the senate on hif disparity, of economy, travel to north carolina to talk about the high tech sector of the economy and the need to bolster that. all of this leading up to the state of the union. the president continues to put pressure on congress to pass those unemployment benefits extension as well as raise the minimum wage. back to you. >> a fire has destroyed a popular are attraction in china. at least 100 homes were damaged and so far there are no reports of injuries and investigators are trying to determine exactly what caused the inferno. this dates back more than 1,000 years. >> we've got a cool start but not as cold as we have been in the northeast. we've got temperatures starting out a lot warmer than what we've been experiencing. and the good news is high temperatures will continue to climb. so after a start, of a cold 17 for minneapolis, your high temperatures climbing a little warmer, 28, 58 for new york, with plenty of rainfall on the way. it's going to be rain also on parts of the west coast but mountain snow is going to be the big story really in the west from the cascade to the rockies. so our outlook as friday went on, we had a strong storm system moving through but ultimately it's been pulling up warmer air from the south. so temperatures climbing up and this same frontal system or the storm is pulling in all the rain and it's going to be getting heavier as we get through saturday. do be prepared with your rain boots and your rain gear but it's going to be snow gear in the mountains for the west. now as this storm moves through to the west it's got several components to it. it's going to keep swinging little fronts in and that will bring several shots of snow to the mountains. the snow level starting out pretty high tonight so it's mainly rain in the passes. but saturday-sunday the passes you are going to need to pack chains if you want to travel because it's going to be a big problem. already you will see snow and rain developing for the west as we get through the morning hours but really we're watching that larger storm in the east coast, going to be socking us as we get into saturday. winters warnings in the northwest, cascades, rockies, northern utah going to be problem with snow. a lot of avalanche concerns here. high concern for avalanche country, stay out of the backwoods in the washington cascades. area of yellow, considerable avalanche danger notice that stretches through wyoming and utah. that means you got to really know your snow pack before you go to your back country. >> thanks rebecca. as the conflit in south sudan rages on, plus it's been 50 years since the surgeon general spread the word that smoking kills. why more needs to be done. al jazeera america brings you more us and global news than any other american news channel. find out what happened and what to expect. >> start every morning, every day, 5am to 9 eastern with al jazeera america. >> they have threatened our lives, our families' lives, i don't think anyone should be subjected to these e-mails and threats. >> the club has alerted the fbi. samuel said this is probably just a distraction. >> the message is the life of the endangered species is on the line. >> so what is the future? president of the humane seat of the united states join us tonight. i assume its no stretch to assume that your organization would be opposed to this. tell us why? >> well, joie there are many rare species in the world, and the black rhino is one of the rarest. because of poaching and habitat loss we should do everything we possibly can to protect them. the idea of linking a trophy hunting exercise to conservation may make sense to folks who are involved in trophy hunting, but >> every sunday night, join us for exclusive... revealing... and surprising talks... with the most interesting people of our time... >> as an artist you have the right to fail... that's a big right to have >> his work is known across the globe. but little is known about the gorilla artist behind the glasses... we turned the camera on the photographer shaking up the art world. >> 2... 1... that's scary jr... >> talk to al jazeera with jr only on al jazeera america >> a jazeera america is the only news channel that brings you live news at the top of every hour >> here are the headlines at this hour breaking news... sports... business... weather... live news...every hour, on the hour only on al jazeera america judge the obama administration play be facing a huge hurdle in keeping troops in afghanistan beyond 2014. afghan president hamid karzai is threatening not to sign annal agreement keeping american troops in the country. the president and the prime minister of the central african republic have resigned and thousands in the country are celebrating. the leaders stepped down after admitting they haven't been able to contain the violence in their country. christian militia groups have displaced close to a million. a u.n. group has 15 days to replayerreplace djotodia. if humanitarian crisis on the ground continues to worsen. the international crisis group says close to 10,000 people have been killed in less than a month of fighting. >> the warring sides are meeting face too face in ethiopia. al jazeera mohamed ado is there. mohamed before we get into the premise of these talks can you remind us what the current fighting there is all about? >> well, currently, the -- both sides in the negotiations here in addis ababa are waiting for the mediators are waiting for a cease fire. concentrate efforts on what they say the suffering the people been displaced and the killings have to stop first before the two sides can take their time and talk about the political issues between them. now there's been a lot of pressure coming open the shoulders of the -- on the people who are here, because of the united states and china which purchases much of south sudan's oil. and these threats are of sanctions some of them targeted seem to be working as both sides now say they are willing to sign as long as the wording, as long as they are in agreement with the wording of the cease fire agreement. >> mohamed i want to go back to the sanctions you just mentioned. we have reports that the targeted sanctions is that going to play a role at all in these talks? >> um -- i didn't hear the question. but i think you asked about sanctions being threatened by the united states. >> yes. >> what the united states, whose officials are here, that are cent officials who are present as the talks are going on, thinks like a travel ban, freezing of the world or property or whoever is seen as being an obstacle to a peace deal being achieved here so this seems to be working for now and both sides say they are willing to sign agreement as long as they are in agreement with the wording of the cease fire deal. >> and mohamed ado in addis ababa thank you. >> same sex marriages are going to be recognized even though state refuses to do so. eric holder says they will be eligible for federal benefits. >> these marriages will be recognized as lawful and considered eligible for all federal benefits on the same terms as other same sex marriages. these families should not be asked to endure uncertainty regarding their status as the litigation unfolds. >> opponents of the measure have spoken out against it. in fact the mormon church told local leaders that same sex wedding ceremonies and receptions are now prohibited in that its churches. overstepped federal authority. so far gay marriage is legal now in 17 states. 50 years ago ash trace were on particularly every table and smoking was endorsed in cartoons. kimberly hellcutt loobs at what happened since that stunning rel vacation. >> it was 1964 when luther terry released his report. it said that smoking causes disease and death. tobacco was one of the most profitable industries in the world, hiring celebrities and even doctors to promote the safety of cigarettes. the surgeon general's report on smoking and health led the u.s. congress to explore warning labels on tobacco products. the legislation was part of the most successful public health campaigns in the united states. smoking rates are now down 59%. back in 1964, 42% of u.s. adults were smoking. compared to just 18% in 2012. in government tobacco control efforts which have included taxes on cigarettes and bans on smoking in public spaces have hepped to save as -- helped to save as many as 8 million lives. >> in the past half century nothing else has come close to this contribution to the health of americans. nothing. >> but antismoking advocates argue there's still much more work to be done. they say the number of americans smoking may have dropped over the decades but globally that's not the case. this antismoking campaigner says in the last 03100 million people have died -- 100 million people have died. until tobacco companies are restrained that number is expected to raise to 1 million smokers. >> targeting the populations in those countries. everywhere we go, we see the kind of marketing in low and middle income countries that hasn't been allowed in the united states, europe and other wealthy nations for decades. >> even in the u.s. he says more than 3,000 children still try their first cigarette every day. it's a trend he says will only be reversed through even stricter antismoking legislation in antismoking campaigns started in 1964. kimberly hellcutt, al jazeera washington. >> speaking of smoking, completely sold out and colorado is the first state to legalize recreational use of the drug. federal law still bans the use of cannabis for anything other than medicinal purposes,. martial arts is not something usually sorted with people in wheelchairs but a program right here in new york city is teaching people with cerebral palsy karate. >> unlike any he or anyone he know had every taught. >> people here don't depend on the use of their legs because they're mostly in wheelchairs. >> the students here all have cerebral palsy, some are also deaf, have limited body movement. 27-year-old angel navarro has been in a wheelchair since he was an infant. he focuses on moving his arms. >> difference is they stay seated they gain upper body strength by pushing themselves off their seats. >> here karate is less about self defense and more about learning to focus and release stress. like kenny and his girlfriend angie. >> i'm not really a fighter but when it comes to angie if she's in trouble, trust me, island fight, i'll fight to the death. >> karate is making students like angel strong per. >> you hear the bang, right? >> angel lives with his parents in public housing. his mom helps him with life's most basic activities though she's noticed that karate has made him more flexible. >> what are your hopes for angel for his future? >> to keep going independent right angel? he better get married. yes you're going oget married. >> most people with vee cerebral palsy will never be totally independent. but karate is giving these students a sense of inner strength. >> if you can turn inward and consider what you have achieved that is certainly a boost for self-confidence. >> this realization is ex powering. roxann sabei, al jazeera new york. >> helped many cerebral palsy students with their range of motion. coming up rising tides, change in climate could be coming to the california coast. >> beach erosion is already causing problems on the california coast making rising sea levels a real danger. brian rooney tells us about cities like los angeles that are looking for ways to adjust. >> marina del rey, cities like los angeles are going to have to start to think about engineering a future about rising california storms. >> as we have more severe storms we have bigger waves and when those are coupled with high tides we will see more flooding. we will certainly see more flooding in those coaflt areas. >> in potential danger are densely populated areas like the famous venice beach. these power plants will be vulnerable to flooding. bigger waves and higher tides beach communities in southern california and beyond may have to begin building protective barriers for homes and public facilities along the coast. los angeles officials say they need to do it in the next few years and not when it becomes an emergency. especially in communities where low income renters live in older buildings that are not prepared to weather storm. >> those are the places where we expect to see the most flooding. they are also the communities that have the most social vulnerability. the populations that are least able to deal with problems. >> and part of the danger of losing the beach is losing tourists, southern california gets 40 million tourists a year, no sand, not as much tourists. >> looks like the hand of god but it's actually a result of a star exploding and ejecting an enormous amount of material. this cosmic site is more than 17 million miles away. check that out. the tiled of lucky man, as transition has it, 1500 men and women gather at a shrine, then they rush, at the sound of a gong. the winner was awarded with the title of lucky man of the year, this year's winner was a 19-year-old college student. thanks so much for watching al jazeera america. i'm morgan radford. i look forward to seeing you again at 4:00 a.m. eastern. pl the largest number remain in any mi ni nimibia, a very unlikely source a group of hinters in texas who say they want to help the black rhino by killing one.

Millcreek Resident Calling for Maintenance at Civil War Cemetery on Wattsburg Road

Animal shelter on what to do if you can't care for your pet anymore

Knockout Homelessness: Round 15 Returns to Erie's Bayfront Convention Center

According to the Erie City Mission, two local celebrities will step into the ring on Tuesday, April 2 to fight homelessness head on in match against Erie's famous boxing family, the Bizzaros. 

Knockout Homelessness: Round 15

Knockout Homelessness: Round 15 included three fights full of action in front of packed Bayfront Convention Center audience.