Origins - How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives

Zusatztext “Informative and wise…Structuring her exploration of the subject around the nine months of her own (second) pregnancy! she provides a balanced! common-sense view of an emerging field of uncertain science.” –Jerome Groopman! New York Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor Annie Murphy Paul is a magazine journalist and book author who writes about the biological and social sciences. Born in Philadelphia, she graduated from Yale University and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A former senior editor at Psychology Today magazine, she was awarded the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine , the New York Times Book Review , Slate , Discover , Health , O: The Oprah Magazine , and many other publications. She is the author of Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives and The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves . Klappentext Could it be that many of our individual characteristics are influenced by the conditions we encountered before birth? That's the claim of an exciting and provocative field known as fetal origins, which offers a bold new view of pregnancy as a crucial staging ground for our health, ability, and well-being throughout life. Zusammenfassung What makes us the way we are? Some say it’s the genes we inherit at conception. Others are sure it’s the environment we experience in childhood. But could it be that many of our individual characteristics—our health, our intelligence, our temperaments—are influenced by the conditions we encountered before birth? What makes us the way we are? Some say it’s the genes we inherit at conception. Others are sure it’s the environment we experience in childhood. But could it be that many of our individual characteristics—our health, our intelligence, our temperaments—are influenced by the conditions we encountered before birth? That’s the claim of an exciting and provocative field known as fetal origins. Over the past twenty years, scientists have been developing a radically new understanding of our very earliest experiences and how they exert lasting effects on us from infancy well into adulthood. Their research offers a bold new view of pregnancy as a crucial staging ground for our health, ability, and well-being throughout life. Author and journalist Annie Murphy Paul ventures into the laboratories of fetal researchers, interviews experts from around the world, and delves into the rich history of ideas about how we’re shaped before birth. She discovers dramatic stories: how individuals gestated during the Nazi siege of Holland in World War II are still feeling its consequences decades later; how pregnant women who experienced the 9/11 attacks passed their trauma on to their offspring in the womb; how a lab accident led to the discovery of a common household chemical that can harm the developing fetus; how the study of a century-old flu pandemic reveals the high personal and societal costs of poor prenatal experience. Origins also brings to light astonishing scientific findings: how a single exposure to an environmental toxin may produce damage that is passed on to multiple generations; how conditions as varied as diabetes, heart disease, and mental illness may get their start in utero; why the womb is medicine’s latest target for the promotion of lifelong health, from preventing cancer to reducing obesity. The fetus is not an inert being, but an active and dynamic creature, responding and adapting as it readies itself for life in the particular world it will enter. The pregnant woman is not merely a source of potential harm to her fetus, as she is so often reminded, but a source of influence on he...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Annie Murphy Paul, Annie Murphy Paul
• Editore: Free Press USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 01.07.2011
• EAN: 9780743296632
• ISBN: 978-0-7432-9663-2
• Dimensioni: 140 mm x 215 mm x 20 mm
• Categoria: Guide e manuali > Libri sul benessere, vita quotidiana > Vita di coppia, sessualità