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Athens put her chips on pluralism. She was a breeder of a cross-cultural diversity. Sparta bet on the one-size-fits all hypothesis - a cradle-to-grave, cookie-cutter conformity. ... Which hypothesis, the courting of many voices or the push for only one, would prove the brightest of them all? The answer would emerge through trials of circumstance whose tide continually rise and fall. (p.164)

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Today's cyber-era Spartans are bone crushers of conformity. They are the fundamentalists of both the left and the right. ... Brooking no tolerance of those who disagree, they invoke a golden past and a higher power, both of which demand submission ot authority. ... Their opposites are Athenian, Socratic, Aristotelian, diversity-generating, pluralistic, and democratic. ...

The Athenian strategy moves to the top when things are going well, Spartanism grabs the throne when the world is going to hell. (p. 192)

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Our brains differ as much as our bodies. Indeed, they may differ more. One part of the brain, the anterior commissure...varies seven fold in area between one person and the next. Another part, the massa intermedia..., is not found at all in one in four people. The primary visual cortex can vary three-fold in area. Something called our amygdala (it is responsible for our fears and loves) can vary two-fold in volume - as can something called our hippocampus (involved in memory). Most surprisingly, our cerebral cortex varies in non-learning impaired people nearly two-fold in volume. (p. 143)

Dr. John Robert Skoyles

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Because human infants react differently to the same potentially stressful events, several children growing up in the same household will each perceive a vastly different environment. What's more, a baby wailing unstoppably at three a.m. trips a different frame of mind in parents than a cuddly infant who sleeps through the night and whose tears can be turned to smiles almost instantly. Other researchers agree with Kagan that an infant partially shapes its parents' behavior, molding the contours of what it and it alone perceives as the nature of its family. (p. 149)

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Now here's the rub. Many of us are conceived as twins. Roughly 150 million people alive today are victors in a competition with a brother or sister who never made it past the early embryonic stage. We helped kill them off well before birth. (p. 147)

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This [physical differences in human brains] has a lot of implications, that people are wired to respond wildly differently to the same environment, that we may perceive the world in very different ways, etc. One interesting detail is the interaction of parents and children.

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In one shocking example, Bloom mentions how inner judges are at work even in the womb. Twins in utero may behave differently, with one dominant and one introverted, with this interaction continuing after birth. " Now here's the rub. Many of us are conceived as twins. Roughly 150 million people alive today are victors in a competition with a brother or sister who never made it past the early embryonic stage. We helped kill them off well before birth. (p. 147) "

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Some of us are born with inner-judges whose verdicts are perpeutually harsh. The result is depression, shyness, and heightened susceptibility to pain. Others arrive from the womb with inner-judges preset to treat us generously, endowing us with energy, few inhibitions, a deep sense of security, and little sense of guilt or shame. But most of us are in the middle - our inner-judges sentence us sternly or magnanimously depending on the smugness with which we fit our social network's needs. (p.145)

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