Brain development in early life has always fascinated me. It’s intriguing to consider the extent that environmental factors, in particular social interaction, dictate neurological development. Is it nature or nurture? The first episode of the Netflix series, Babies (2020), titled ‘Love’ delves into the biology of a mother and father’s love for their baby. It touches on the work of the GUSTO project, which comprised of a series of social experiments investigating a mother’s interactions with her baby. It also analyses different parenting styles, specifically their attentiveness to the babies. It shows some mothers constantly checking their babies, and others leaving them to their own devices. The less attentive babies were visibly calmer and quieter, which I found interesting despite unsettling. Along with a series of MRIs on the babies brains, the experiment concluded that the less attended to babies had larger hippocampi, the area of the brain which deals with stress. This is theorised to be because they have to deal with discomfort and stress by themselves, and due to the plasticity of developing neural circuits, the brain has tried to accommodate this. I found this study deeply fascinating, and as an adoptee, it forced me to consider my own experience in an orphanage and how it may have altered by own physiology at such a young age.