"Social connections are essential to mental health.
German Emperor Frederick II conducted a barbaric thirteenth-century experiment. What language and words children would speak if they were raised without hearing any words at all?
He took a number of infants from their homes and put them with people who fed them, but had strict instructions not to touch, cuddle, or talk to them.
The babies never spoke a word. They all died before they could speak.
This powerful finding has been rediscovered over and over. In the early 1990s thousands of Romanian infants were orphaned and warehoused without touch sometimes for years at a time. PET studies (similar to SPECT studies) of a number of these deprived infants have shown marked overall decreased activity across the whole brain."
Excerpt from The End of Mental Illness - by Daniel Amen, MD
