My latest article for the Boston Globe Ideas section is now online. This piece was inspired by my brand new beautiful nephew, Jude Lehrer - may this blog post increase your Google presence!
What is it like to be a baby? For centuries, this question would have seemed absurd: behind that adorable facade was a mostly empty head. A baby, after all, is missing most of the capabilities that define the human mind, such as language and the ability to reason. Rene Descartes argued that the young child was entirely bound by sensation, hopelessly trapped in the confusing rush of the here and now. A newborn, in this sense, is just a lump of need, a bundle of reflexes that can only eat and cry. To think like a baby is to not think at all.Modern science has largely agreed, spending decades outlining all the things that babies couldn't do because their brains had yet to develop. They were unable to focus, delay gratification, or even express their desires. The Princeton philosopher Peter Singer famously suggested that "killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all."
Now, however, scientists have begun to dramatically revise their concept of a baby's mind. By using new research techniques and tools, they've revealed that the baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation - they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are.
This hyperawareness comes with several benefits. For starters, it allows young children to figure out the world at an incredibly fast pace. Although babies are born utterly helpless, within a few years they've mastered everything from language - a toddler learns 10 new words every day - to complex motor skills such as walking. According to this new view of the baby brain, many of the mental traits that used to seem like developmental shortcomings, such as infants' inability to focus their attention, are actually crucial assets in the learning process.
In fact, in some situations it might actually be better for adults to regress into a newborn state of mind. While maturity has its perks, it can also inhibit creativity and lead people to fixate on the wrong facts. When we need to sort through a lot of seemingly irrelevant information or create something completely new, thinking like a baby is our best option.
If you're interested in learning more about the baby brain, I highly recommend the work of Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist and philosopher at UC-Berkeley. I just finished reading her forthcoming book, The Philosophical Baby, which is an utterly fascinating investigation of what we can learn about being human from the baby brain.
Brain & Behavior
Comments (18)
It's nice to hear advice to "think like a baby", and I would agree. But how to do it?
As a long term meditator, it's clear to me, through my experience and the long experience of others, that it's very, very difficult to change habits of the mind. Do those habits only occur at the level of thought, or do they also reflect on how we sense the world on a pre-verbal level?
A psychologist named Les Fehmi Ph.D (himself a long-time meditator) has, for years, been questioning HOW we pay attention, and has done research on it's effect on our nervous systems. There is an assumption that paying attention means focusing, and that is true. But to what extent do we focus and how "wide" is that focus? It seems to me that the baby's "thinking" (a term I find a bit sloppy, but that's another discussion) is closer to what Fehmi calls "Open Focus".
Indeed, the difference between paying attention with a tight focus (on details), and paying attention with increased "width" (less detail oriented attention, more whole sensing), not only has effects on the mind and its activity (thinking), it also has measurable effects on the body.
Tight focus tends to stimulate the sympathetic nervous system, while open focus encourages parasympathetic activity. This type of attention does not simply change thinking, it changes perception and the lived experience, and what type and how much information is available to us. Learning Open Focus involves changing how we pay attention to our fives senses, our bodies first, and with time and experience thoughts themselves. Do we use focal vision primarily, or peripheral vision? For tasks like typing this response, focal vision will dominate because of the nature of the activity. Using focal vision stimulates the sympathetics, while using predominantly peripheral vision tends toward parasympathetic activity. This orientation works for all aspects of our senses, not just vision.
According to Fehmi, we are as a culture addicted to tight, narrowly focused attention and the result is a host of physical and mental health problems, because perpetually tight focus leads to chronic stress on our nervous systems. Our bodies evolved using the tight focus much less than we use it now, and our culture has developed its activities around this type of attention. This is not necessarily bad, but it does have its consequences.
I think it's one of the reasons many people enjoy being out in natural settings and find time there refreshing and restorative. The natural world is stimulating in a way that encourages a wider field of attention in all of the senses, and so naturally encourages open focus type attention.
Posted by: Gary Gurney | April 26, 2009 3:28 PM