Mustard – social environments 

Your experience when you are very young is determined by the environment in which you’re being brought up in. The mother’s capacity to support you, and give you the appropriate stimulation or experience for optimum development, the people that come in with your mother and support her, and that’s part of the social environment. And so what we now find is that if you’re brought up in a good social environment you will develop well, partly because you will be giving optimum stimulation to the epigenetic process in terms of the function of the neurons in your head. 

And thus we now can state pretty strongly that your experience in early life will, through the epigenetic process, affect neuron functions, which have a significant effect on health, physical, mental, throughout the life cycle, your capacity to learn and your behavior. So that’s what the social environment really means and you have to look at it in terms of how it influences the environment in which the mother and the young child exist.