Childhood echoes

Your parents’ ideas, and their favorite sayings, seem to echo in your head for all of your life. It’s funny, but sometimes also annoying. Why do these echoes last so long? Annemiek Leclaire looks into it.

In this age where anything is possible, the way we shape our lives is more predetermined than we’d like to think. It all starts with our personality. Part of our personality blueprint is genetic and hereditary: the way we look, for example, and how we age. We have also been given certain inherent qualities that can be made stronger or weaker by our environment, but won’t disappear.

Personality traits such as anxiety, kindness, emotionality, being open to new experiences, and aggression are largely innate, according to psychologists and neurologists. For example, a 2009 study by the Washington University in St. Louis, US, and the University of Parma, Italy, showed that these diverse personality traits reflect actual differences in the brain. People who exhibit different traits are born with somewhat different brains.