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Reader question: Please explain “hard-wired”, as in: The human brain is hard-wired to recognize faces. Babies learn to identify their parents’ faces within hours of being born, and even in old age people can remember what their childhood friends looked like. My comments: “Hard-wired” must have been a byproduct of the computer age, as Dictionary.com dates its origin to 1975-80. Anyways, wires refer to electric wires. Hardwiring refers to the connection between electrical and electronic components and devices by means of wires. This means they’re physically connected by “wires”, as distinguished from a “wireless” connection. Open your computer casing and look inside, and you’ll find clusters of electric wires. That means many components are linked with a “hard-wired” connection. Your mobile phone, on the other hand, is a wireless device. In the above example, the human brain is likened to a bunch of electric wires – obviously inspired by the intricately tangled web of blood vessels and the even more intricate nervous system and so forth. When it is asserted, therefore, that the human brain is hard-wired to recognize faces, the author means merely to say that this face-recognizing ability is innate, something that we humans are born with, not something we learn after birth. Similarly, when you hear people say that women are from Venus, men are from Mars, they are merely saying the men and women behave differently because they are wired differently. In other words, the differences are biological, due to tens of thousands of years of evolution (change and adaption). | 
