Harry F. Harlow, “The Gruesome Twosomes,” undated ALREADY A FEW OTHER REBELLIOUS scientists were arguing that love and intelligence could be connected, literally, from dot to dot. These were not animal researchers but doctors and psychologists working directly with children in orphanages and foundling homes. They suggested that social intelligence and cognitive intelligence might be linked. The end point was that children raised without affection might lose more than their ability to relate to others. Isolation and loneliness might dull the brain in other ways—and that dimming down might even show up on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. To those opposing the idea—and Lewis Terman was definitely among them—the concept was ridiculous. Sentimental. And unnerving. If the healthy development of the brain depended on being loved, wouldn’t that suggest that affection and nurturing were akin to breathing, basic to life itself? If that were so, wouldn’t we be impossibly vulnerable to loneliness or isolation or the vagaries of parents and home?
