The infant brain seems to begin life like a wilderness of neurons, and that brain is helpless while its body is free of mental regulation. Little by little, though, as the infant gleefully learns to subsume its cellular biology (learns to domesticate and control its eyes and limbs), that neuronal wilderness becomes mapped. What does the infant brain take control of first? The eyes? The limbs?
Hi Lonny! It's so very nice to read your new question. And very strange too, because I'm just doing an amazing training course on this topic! It's about reflexes like Babinsky, Galant, Perez... Newborns are wired with a lot of reflexes to face their new aerobic life. Then they coordinate and integrate them in behavioral schemas. If they don't do it correctly, it leads them to later malfunctions like anxiety, dyslexia... The training course is about diagnosing which reflexes have not been integrated, then to do it by gentle physical manipulations and short exercises to do at home during six weeks. The results are remarkable! But it seems there's no reflex that the newborn controls at first... Of course, face-head-mouth-eyes coordination is crucial at first, but they are just reflexes working in chains. It's controlled when acting voluntarily. I would say that it's so when an infant rolls from his back to his front and lifts his head up to see farther.
The mouth, to loudly and forcefully proclaim the need to eat, and then to eat.
Remarkable. I was going to say exactly the same thing!
But I would recommend reading the Bishop Berkeley on this from the eighteenth century. He understood that the eyes and the limbs teach each other the nature of truth.
Thanks Albert! Awesome response for me on that. I can run with that.
And thank you Jonathan (as always!). I am a big fan of Bishop Berkeley, I started off with "Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous". To-be-perceived resonates very much with me. There's so much out there... thank you both. Oh - what would come after proclamation and feeding? This is cool.
Hi Lonny! It's so very nice to read your new question. And very strange too, because I'm just doing an amazing training course on this topic! It's about reflexes like Babinsky, Galant, Perez... Newborns are wired with a lot of reflexes to face their new aerobic life. Then they coordinate and integrate them in behavioral schemas. If they don't do it correctly, it leads them to later malfunctions like anxiety, dyslexia... The training course is about diagnosing which reflexes have not been integrated, then to do it by gentle physical manipulations and short exercises to do at home during six weeks. The results are remarkable! But it seems there's no reflex that the newborn controls at first... Of course, face-head-mouth-eyes coordination is crucial at first, but they are just reflexes working in chains. It's controlled when acting voluntarily. I would say that it's so when an infant rolls from his back to his front and lifts his head up to see farther.
Hi Philippe! So good to hear from you again. Wonderful - you've given me another clue... "acting voluntarily" (intentions vs. natural signals). So much of our "wiring" exhibits *both* voluntary and involuntary affordances. (I'm thinking of the smile: the zygomatic major is involved in both voluntary and involuntary smiles, but the orbicularis oculi is not reachable by volition. We call it the Duchenne smile -- the one we cannot fake for the camera, yet cannot hide if a smile wants to come here despite our intentions). Vision and hearing exhibit dual pathways too! (perhaps voluntary/involuntary, since the dorsal-visual provisions motor-out control, while the ventral-visual affords mostly afference in?)
It is *amazing* that only involuntary nonverbal behaviors are socially understood to be authentic/sincere... why would that be? Why does mental control make things ingenuine? Now I can research human developmental subsumption of involuntary reflexes! What happens to the plantar, the palmar, the Moro infant reflexes? What is the true significance of the Babinsky, Galant? (are we detecting the lack of cognitive subsumption/dominion of our plural biology?)
As always, you are such a huge help Philippe. Thanks! Maybe we can chat sometime soon again? Thanks everyone, please keep 'em coming. More ideas?
Reference
Damasio, A. (2005). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York, NY: Penguin.
Goodale, M. A., Milner, A. D. (1992). Separate visual pathways for perception and action. Trends in Neuroscience, 15(1), 20–5. doi:10.1016/0166-2236(92)90344-8. PMID 1374953
Meinecke, L. (2015). Smile when you say that. Available at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/smile-when-you-say-lonny-meinecke
If you watch Gabor Mate' - his TED talk in RIO - he related a story about his infancy in Budapest - Nazi Wehrmacht is rolling in to town and all the Jewish infants are crying. As relates to "newborn infant's mind learn to dominate first?" it seems the emotional locus is and probably has been "online" peri-natal. If one believes in Noam Chomsky's concept of the Language Acquisition Device, then the audition (Wernicke's Area) is primary and this dovetails with Lev Vygotsky's ideas about the stages of speech development. Van Acker Philippe's inclusion of dyslexia into the mix of possible "malfunctions" is not fair! (Forgive this momentary lapse of mine into Concrete/Conventional Morality), but the human brain is not "hard wired" for reading as we are "hard wired" to develop speech and language, something Plato recognized in children long before Alfred Binet (q.v. Maryanne Wolf's Proust & the Squid Harper Collins 2007). Now what is tricky about answering this question altogether is the word "mind" as opposed to what one might want think of as "brain," or more complex yet, consciousness. From that standpoint gaining "control" of one's caregiver is the most primary phenomenon as someone like Dr. Heidelise Als would assert (q.v. Baby's Brain: Wider Than The Sky, PBS video 2000).
This is awesome David... thank you. Your insight suggests to me that the principle struggle of a perinatal life is "listening with intent". That is the first thing within a new human life, to seek to modify its affording periphery (and the last to let go during clinical death). I really like what you said: "gaining "control" of one's caregiver is the most primary phenomenon". That speaks loads to me... our primary caregiver isn't human. Everything within reach of intent is fair game.
Thank you, Lonny Meinecke of King University. Alison Gopnik has made the case for conscious attention in infants and toddlers as being analogous to a lattern that becomes more like a flashlight beam as we age. We can feel the "lattern affect" again for brief periods of time when enter into new environments like traveling to a foreign country.
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