Dr. Dana Suskind

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304 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Dr. Dana Suskind’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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ReThinking · Why a chatbot can’t raise your kid with Dana Suskind · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

Enmeshed in this world of

the importance of human connection in the early years.

So to contextualize how I got into this area, it was actually my experience in implanting children with hearing loss with a cochlear implant.

And then seeing huge disparities in outcomes of those patients who looked like they should both be thriving after implantation, really learning on par with their hearing peers and other same time out barely being able to communicate.

And it was that

Experience in seeing that that really took me on this journey of the importance of the early years, the importance of human connection, talk and interaction for building a child's brain.

Because for my own patients, it wasn't the difference in the surgery or the technology, it was the differences in how much interaction they were getting.

Understanding that has become my life's work, really the power of human connection for not just building cognitive skills, but building those human skills.

Yeah, no, so so you're talking about the Hart and Risley study that basically followed a relatively small number, about forty-two children, up until the age of three.

And what their research purportedly showed was that by the end of the age of three, children, especially children born into poverty, will have heard, quote, thirty million fewer words than their more affluent peers.

And this predicted not just test score and IQ.

But really their academic trajectories.

In truth, there are many issues with that specific study, but I view that as really just a first sentence in a robust literature showing the power of interaction in the early years for building a child's brain.

I sort of look at the way milk feeds the body.

talk and interaction feeds the brain.

And y really understanding the neuroscience, I think, gives a clearer view into it.

See, when babies are born, they're born with brains just the third the size of adult brains.

That's unlike any other species.

They're born with like I think a hundred billion neurons, as many stars in the Milky Way.

And really those early years are the time when you're

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