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"Listen to Slate's show about the latest debate over antidepressants."

"A few months ago, a construction worker named Wesley Autrey leapt in front of a moving subway train in New York City to save a stranger who had just collapsed onto the tracks. Five days later, the New York Times speculated that this act of apparent altruism-"I just saw someone who needed help," Autrey said-might be explained by a bunch of cells thought to exist in the human brain, called mirror neurons. The idea that these particular cells might underlie a fundamental human impulse reflects the emergence of a new scientific myth. Like a traditional myth, it captures intuitions about the human condition through vivid metaphors. This isn't the first time that popular science has merged with the popular imagination. In the 1960s, for example, pioneering work on "split-brain" patients revealed real functional differences between the two cerebral hemispheres-an idea that quickly became a metaphor for ancient intuitions about reason and passion. Advertisement Mirror neurons have become the "left brain/right brain" of the 21st century. The idea that these cells could make a hero out of Wesley Autrey began with a genuine and important discovery about the brains of macaque monkeys. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, neuroscientists found a population of cells that fired whenever a monkey prepared to act but also when it watched another animal act. They called these cells "mirror neurons." It didn't take long for scientists and science writers to speculate that mirror neurons might serve as the physiological basis for a wide range of social behaviors, from altruism to art appreciation. Headlines like "Cells That Read Minds" or "How Brain's 'Mirrors' Aid Our Social Understanding" tapped into our intuitions about connectedness. Maybe this cell, with its mellifluous name, gives us our special capacity to understand one another-to care, to learn, and to communicate. Could mirror neurons be responsible for human language, culture, empathy, and morality? "

"A MOTHER sits in a playroom with her young son. The phone rings. When she picks it up, a researcher watching through a two-way mirror asks her to look into her son's eyes and ''show him, in the way that feels most natural for you, that you love him''. The mother is doing her best to connect, but this little boy won't return her gaze. He looks at her mouth, where the words are coming from, but it's as if he can't understand what she means. Advertisement: Story continues below Robert Thompson and Jon Venables killed UK toddler James Bulger. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables killed UK toddler James Bulger. Mark Dadds says some children literally cannot see the love in their mother's eyes. Professor Dadds, a parenting expert from the University of New South Wales, has just published results of his work in the British Journal of Psychiatry and the Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology that suggest the ability to make eye contact is vital in learning how to love other people. For the past five years, he has been working with children referred to his Sydney clinic for sustained rages, continual aggression, calculated violence and, occasionally, cruelty to animals. These are children with some of the worst behavioural problems, who score highly for ''callous, unemotional'' traits. In his studies in both Sydney and London, it was these children who did not meet their mother's gaze, even when told they were loved. People marvel at the resilience of children who overcome appalling family backgrounds to make good lives. We understand when childhood trauma sends a child off the rails. But we also have to accept that even good parents can have mean children - how else to explain families where only one child seems to be callous and unemotional, while the siblings are not? Dadds distinguishes between children who are emotionally ''hot'' - those who lash out at the world - and the much smaller subset of ''cold'' children - the ones who don't react emotionally, don't car

"In the 1980s, Dr. Lars Olov Bygren, a preventive-health specialist who is now at the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, began to wonder what long-term effects the feast and famine years might have had on children growing up in Norrbotten in the 19th century - and not just on them but on their kids and grandkids as well. So he drew a random sample of 99 individuals born in the Overkalix parish of Norrbotten in 1905 and used historical records to trace their parents and grandparents back to birth. By analyzing meticulous agricultural records, Bygren and two colleagues determined how much food had been available to the parents and grandparents when they were young. Around the time he started collecting the data, Bygren had become fascinated with research showing that conditions in the womb could affect your health not only when you were a fetus but well into adulthood. In 1986, for example, the Lancet published the first of two groundbreaking papers showing that if a pregnant woman ate poorly, her child would be at significantly higher than average risk for cardiovascular disease as an adult. Bygren wondered whether that effect could start even before pregnancy: Could parents' experiences early in their lives somehow change the traits they passed to their offspring? (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2009.) It was a heretical idea. After all, we have had a long-standing deal with biology: whatever choices we make during our lives might ruin our short-term memory or make us fat or hasten death, but they won't change our genes - our actual DNA. Which meant that when we had kids of our own, the genetic slate would be wiped clean. What's more, any such effects of nurture (environment) on a species' nature (genes) were not supposed to happen so quickly. Charles Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species celebrated its 150th anniversary in November, taught us that evolutionary changes take place over many generations and through millions of years of nat

"Daniel Kahneman spent part of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris. Like the other Jews, he had to wear a Star of David on the outside of his clothing. One evening, when he was about 7 years old, he stayed late at a friend's house, past the 6 p.m. curfew. The intellectual, cultural and scientific findings that land on the columnist's desk nearly every day. He turned his sweater inside out to hide the star and tried to sneak home. A German SS trooper approached him on the street, picked him up and gave him a long, emotional hug. The soldier displayed a photo of his own son, spoke passionately about how much he missed him and gave Kahneman some money as a sentimental present. The whole time Kahneman was terrified that the SS trooper might notice the yellow star peeking out from inside his sweater. Kahneman finally made it home, convinced that people are complicated and bizarre. He went on to become one of the world's most influential psychologists and to win the Nobel in economic science. Kahneman doesn't actually tell that childhood story in his forthcoming book. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is an intellectual memoir, not a personal one. The book is, nonetheless, sure to be a major intellectual event (look for an excerpt in The Times Magazine this Sunday) because it superbly encapsulates Kahneman's research, and the vast tide of work that has been sparked by it. I'd like to use this column not to summarize the book but to describe why I think Kahneman and his research partner, the late Amos Tversky, will be remembered hundreds of years from now, and how their work helped instigate a cultural shift that is already producing astounding results. Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that w