 Home |
© 2002, 2010 Susan Rich Sheridan |
|
Home |
© 2002, 2010 Susan Rich Sheridan |
If we start with scribbles, honoring little children's mark-making, we lay the foundations for a comprehensive educational program where learning is possible for every child, and pleasing to every child, and meaningful for every child in connection with the reading and writing of marks, or literacy, our special human endeavor.
If little children can talk about their drawings, they are reading. If marks are intelligible to the child, then reading adheres to the very mark-making process. If children read their own marks first, and another's second, they are more likely to become lifelong readers and writers.
-- SR Sheridan
Introduction.
Have You Ever Wondered?
Have you ever wondered why humans talk and animals don't?
Have you ever wondered why some people draw and write---- while your pencil hovers above the page? Do you wish you had the "gift of gab" --- instead of feeling tongue-tied? Do you secretly blame your parents for never giving you the chance to be what you wanted to be? Say what you wanted to say? Draw what you wanted to draw? Write what you wanted to write? Or do you know for a fact that the reason you love to talk, and draw and write and read is that your parents loved to talk with you, and read with you, and let you paint your first mural on the dining room walls?
Nature, nurture, genetics, the environment, it's all so complicated. And, as if that were not enough, scholars still do not know why or how humans first began to speak, while a lot less attention has been paid to why and how some ancestor, common to us and to apes and chimpanzees, began to draw and write and read.
Do you ever stop to ask yourself if you should be drawing with your children? Or scribbling with them? Or talking about scribbling and drawing with them? As parents, we know we should talk with our children. We know we should read aloud to them. But draw? Or scribble?
Families are forever. Change is constant. Learning is always a possibility. Somewhere, deep inside, you're the child of your own childhood. You may try to grow past that child, but he or she is always with you. Just as you try to raise your children the very best you can, in the same way, you're raising that child within, the one who is you.
This book is for all of us children. It's about growing up, able to speak and read and write with a degree of confidence and enthusiasm and belief. It's about being human.
First, let's get some of the big questions out of the way ---the ones scholars love to argue about, and parents already know the answers to:
One authority on how the mind works, including language and instincts and attributes, describes most advice for parents as "flapdoodle" (Pinker, 2002, page 384). This author maintains that mothers' special way of talking with infants (called motherese) doesn't teach children to speak. That's "folkflore" (Pinker, 1994, page 39). In addition, parents' attempts to "micromanage" their children's personalities is not only delusional but dumb (Pinker, 2002, page 387). Putting the frosting on the cake, this expert maintains that the arts are biologically useless (Pinker, 1997, page 522). If we take Pinker's statement to its logical conclusion, as good scholars should, then "child-art" --- in the form of toddlers' scribbles and four year-olds' drawings---have nothing to do with the biological unfolding of the human species. If this is true, why do parents tape their little children's scribbles and drawings on the frig? Why do we sense that these squiggles are as monumental as the first words, spoken or read, by our child?
Pinker's description of the arts as elitist activities --- "gew gaws" for the rich (1997, page 522), is not all there is to art as the commonplace behavior of human beings, especially very little ones, whose lives are intent on meaning-making. Toddlers are not concerned with status when they scribble. Furthermore, positions on the relative non-importance of parenting taken by authors Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate, 2002), Judith Harris (The Nurture Assumption, 1998) and Jon Bruer (The Myth of the First Three Years,1999) or, in fact, on the relative non-effect of early childhood on adult personality (positing an influence of 50% from genetics, 0% effect from parenting, and 50% from peers or, in Pinker's case, none from peers,which means that all the rest ---presumably 50% ---happens by chance (Pinker, 2002, pages 372-399) just does not make sense to parents. We parents know that just because, by genetics, a child may not be destined to be a gifted visual artist --- does not mean that this very same child can not use drawing in a perfectly acceptable manner as a way to explore the self and the world. Furthermore, if we never encourage the child as a draw-er, that child may never know whether he could have been a gifted artist or not.
This is where parental support for children's drawing and talking and writing, as described in Part Three of the following book, can have such a powerful effect. If we recognize that a large part of our human genetic make-up (who knows exactly what percent?) is a general predisposition toward self-organization around speech and marks of meaning, then it becomes clear that the attitude of the caregiver toward speech and marks of meaning can make or break the child as an everyday meaning-maker.
I believe the single most important effect of a verbal, literate childhood on adult personality and intelligence is the effect of the habit of self-reflection achieved through conversations, journals, letters, doodles, sketches, paintings, drawings, stories, poems, memoires. This reflective self-construction depends upon community. As they say, no man is an island. We do not exist alone. The absence of community or the negative effect of community or the positive effect of community (including parents, peers, other people, animals, things, chemicals and forces) affects how we think and act. It's the same for us as it is for any other organism. Our liveliness depends upon our environment. Still, we use marks to think and bluegreen algae don't.
Suppose we suggest that the effect of the self on the self has the possibility of being, say, 100%. If Pinker can attribute 50% to genes and 50% to chance, who are we to balk at 100% influence of the thinking brain on its ability to think. Brains are capable of "cortical override" (Little, 2003). This means that despite ancient and in some instances woefully obsolete emotional circuitry and even a bad hand dealt to us by genetics, we can, through conscious effort (or old-fashioned striving), change or avoid becoming the person we might otherwise be.
In fact, the contribution of genetics to the personality and capabilities of a child is only interesting to parents as potential mental and physical problems which may or may not be averted by medicine or therapy or, on the other hand, as potential special gifts.
What this book proposes is an approach to parenting that is therapeutic and remedial and enriching all in one, organized around what makes us especially human: speech and literacy. This neurobeneficial ("good for brains") parenting program takes a very strong stand on the importance of nurturing by our caregivers, and, by extension, as we become adults), our nurturing of ourselves. Brain science has made us a promise: we can change, grow, learn, self-repair, re-organize, re-group, evolve as a human being over a lifetime.
I am not saying that, as parents, we affect our children's basic natures as introverts or extroverts. It looks as if certain personality traits are inborn. I am saying that loving attention around invested conversations and the everyday practice of marks of meaning will effect the brain of a child positively in terms of the neurochemistry of attention and emotion, as well as with specific training in the basic skills of speech. Additionally, the everyday practice of marks of meaning will affect the child's ability to produce image and text, or to draw and write, including words, numbers, and musical notes.
To be verbal and literate in early childhood is no mean feat, and it is part of what parents and children do, instinctively.
Pinker's positions on parenting and personality, speech and art are too narrow --- and what's more, they're wrong. If we take a long look at cellular biology, anthropology, art history and neuroscience, we'll discover a panoramic, interconnected unfolding of organic life that embraces motherese and art. All it takes for such a long look is curiosity, and, well, scholarship.
Let's agree on the following:
Even if we agreed with Steven Pinker that all those hours of "motherese" did not teach our children to talk (a position made possible by resorting to technical criteria about the acquisition of language understood only by linguists)--- we know in our hearts that talking with our babies and toddlers teaches them, at least, that spoken language is worthwhile. (We also know that our talking in the high-pitched, exaggerated tones of motherese teaches babies the prosody, or special music, of our own mother tongue.)
Babies learn from us that speech is an effective way to get needs attended to, and things done. Our mothers teach us that verbal communication between human beings is and will continue to be not only possible but meaningful. This doesn't mean that a child can not learn to talk by interacting with orphanage attendants or other children in preschool. I am talking about the importance of the very beginning of a child's relationship with speech and literacy as emotionally charged in positive ways. If you do not believe mothers and fathers are important to the tone of your emotional life, let alone to speech and literacy, try growing up without them. You're going to spend your life looking for substitutes. Mothers and fathers are where speech and literacy and self-belief begin.
I am convinced that my love of words and of conversation is absolutely due to conversations with my mother who was a talker, a reader and a writer. I am convinced that my ability to spend hours in close textural analysis of scholarly texts is due to years of sustained attention around drawing and painting. I know that my belief in myself as a thinker and do-er came straight from my mother's belief in me which she communicated over and over again by interacting--- directly and personally--- with me.
This parenting book takes the position that speech, scribbling and drawing are connected behaviors which operate as a complex, integrated evolutionary adaptation of ancient cells' survival needs for a nucleus (or brain) and for pseudopods (or outreach mechanisms --- like eyes, ears, arms, hands, language, and the applied and performing arts, mathematics, music, science). Human language is an outreach device. As such, language---both as speech and as literacy--- is driven by three age-old biological rules: move, connect, and communicate. Because of the tubular construction of biological outreach devices, we humans have learned to reach out for meaning, and even for enlightenment as part of our survival strategies. That's pretty amazing! Our brains have evolved to need meaning the way cells need nutrients because of the ways we're made on quantum levels. (See Part Two, "Toward a Quantum Theory of Scribbling.")
If meaningful speech, literacy, self-belief and enlightenment are not important enough to underscore the importance of parenting as training in survival skills for an organism we call human, then we might as well label definitive tomes on the nature of mind and language "flapdoodle," too.
As long as toddlers babble and scribble, as long as parents talk motherese, these behaviors must play important roles in human development. Speech springs from early attempts at sound, just as literacy emerges from early attempts at marks of meaning. Babbling and scribbling are observable, measurable behaviors produced by a very young brain that's evolved to talk, read and write. These behaviors, including, of all things, mothers' list-making, provide the basis for an argument for a new kind of brain-based parenting---neurobeneficial parenting ---- which places importance on conversations around scribbling and drawing and other kinds of marks of meaning. We can explore parents' roles as everyday, no-frills, natural and intuitive teachers of speech and drawing, reading and writing, mathematics and music as part of what humans are meant to do and to be.
Mozart, Einstein, Picasso, C.S. Lewis, these human beings are known to us through their marks. Their marks are their thoughts. Their marks preserve those thoughts for us so we can actually experience those thoughts. As astonishing, marks made those extraordinary musical and mathematical and artistic and literary thoughts possible.
I can not overemphasize the importance of marks of meaning to the human "symbolic" mind. Other primates do not scribble. They do not read and write words, musical notes, mathematical formulae or paintings. Speech (including primate vocalizations, dolphins whistles, and birdsong) is not all there is to language. There's literacy, too. This is no "ho-hum" observation. In fact, it is probable that literacy as marks of meaning, starting with maps, "to-do" lists, botanical drawings of medicinal plants as well as notes on their usage, as well as maternal doodles and child "art" devised by hominid mothers and children drove the elaboration of speech grammatically, as well as in terms of vocabularly, or content. That is, marks of meaning in a variety of everyday manifestations - lines in the dust, scratches on trees, the lucky happenstance of fault lines in cliffs which looked like significant items to the eyes of mothers and, even more, to the imaginative eyes of children, put evolutionary pressure on human speech to develop beyond subject-verb, and subject-verb-object sentences like "I hurt," or "I eat the yellow roots," toward sentences like, "My pain is like the sting of a bee," or "That group of women with the five boys and girls gather more nuts and berries and kill more small game than we do. Why? How can we, who have new babies, change our approach?" (More on the elaboration of speech via the everyday interactions of mothers and children in the context of marks of meaning in Part Two).
Careful study of the development of toddlers' speech in the context of toddlers' scribbles should shed light on the connections between the development of drawing (aka art and literacy) and speech, and thus on the co-development of marks and mind in human evolutionary history. In my experience, there are no hard and fast rules. Most normal infants start vocalizing at about three months old, and beginning speaking understandable words, often starting with "Ma," between the ages of one and two. That is, all children babble and many children start to talk before they scribble. Still, as was the case with my grandson, some children do not start talking til they have been scribbling for about a year. If we take a quick glance at the history of writing, it is clear that humans read visual images, or pictures, before they learned to write and read verbal images, or numbers and words. It is a fairly safe bet that speech and mark-making as picture-writing co-evolved in the history of humankind. Speech needed pictures; pictures needed words.
Our hominid ancestors needed an extremely powerful stimulus to move beyond primate vocalization to speech. I nominate marks of meaning generated in the everyday play and communication between early Homo mothers and children as a major stimulus in the gradual, mutual unfolding of speech and literacy. Ultimately, a feedback loop must have developed between speech and marks, just as it exists now, between a toddler's speech and its scribbling. We see this feedback loop at work when a small child tells stories about its scribbles and drawings. Unless and until spoken language becomes obsolete, scribbles, drawings and other marks of meaning remain of considerable importance, biologically speaking, as the other half of the dynamic of language. If we stop talking to each other, then literacy will be all we have left of the biological experiment called language. And speaking of literacy, what about children's story books? There's been so much talk about art as non-verbal and right-brained that we've lost sight of the usefulness of pictures to words in children's lives. While you read a story aloud to your children, they listen and read the pictures. The purpose of readable pictures is to lead young children from the visual to the verbal by supporting the incomprehensible verbal marks with transparent visual marks.
There comes a day when you child picks up the book and reads it aloud to you! You are amazed. The first time she does this she is using the pictures as mnemonic devices to remember the story. She's memorized the words. She's reading the pictures. Then, the day comes when she really reads. It's as amazing as bird flight.
When wandering Cave Bear clanspeople came across Horse clanspeople, they must have communicated with gestures and pictures; their dialects would have been incomprehensible. Pictures are readable by everyone. Pictures are part of the universal language of visual literacy. Scribbles are where pictures and visual literacy begin, just as babbles are where our ability to speak one of the world's languages begin.
If Noam Chomsky is correct, children need to overhear a few sentences in early childhood - including, but not limited to, motherese (mothers' slower, higher-pitched way of talking with babies)--- to learn to speak. Those few overheard sentences, according to Chomsky, cue "innate grammar;" the child is off and running as a talker.
Children do not need to draw to learn to speak. Still, talking about scribbling and drawing has advantages for the modern child who is learning to think using the mental objects we call symbols---which is only a fancy way of saying "pictures of ideas created by marks of meaning-" especially at a time when many young children are talked to less than they used to be, say, before the invention of television and the computer, and before mothers went back to work several months after the birth of their babies.
Here's an important observation; all toddlers ---unless they are damaged in some way, or prevented in some way--- scribble. This means that being artistic, literary, mathematical and musical is for everyone, not just for geniuses. All of us carry the code for literacy, and, for some of us, our environment cues that code, while for some of us, the environment doesn't. Basically, this is what "inequalities in education" are all about. We're talking about literacy versus illiteracy. The phrase "functionally illiterate" doesn't just mean not being able to read and write at all. There's a new kind of illiteracy that includes not wanting to read or write because the person --- for a host of reasons, including a shorter attention span, as well as far less day-to-day experience with reading and writing for fun --- is unable to extract much meaningful information from images, text, or numbers.
The program in Part Three of this book shows parents how they can help their children to read and write with enthusiasm so that literacy is securely launched in the life of every child as well as in the lives of its caregiving adults!
Genetics, environment, it's all hard to understand and sort out, but I believe that, as biological organisms who have evolved to talk and to read and write, all of us --- parents and children alike --- can learn to love words and images, and to live by and through the power of words and images by paying a great deal more attention to the marks made by little children called scribbles.
In a very real sense, a child's brain and its capabilities, including speech and literacy, are in parents' and other caregivers' hands. The rest is flapdoodle.
Background to the theory Marks and Mind
In 2001, I delivered a paper at a conference called "Toward a Science of Consciousness" in Skovde, Sweden. Art Marr, an independent scholar, contacted me the following year. He was impressed with the work, but he said it left a major question unanswered: "Why do toddlers' want to scribble." Marr suggested I read Affective Neuroscience, by Jaak Panksepp (Oxford University Press,1998). Panksepp's work with mammalian emotions has helped me understand that toddlers do not so much want to scribble as must scribble, and that parents' interest in and praise for children's marks help children want to scribble and draw more. Parents' support increases children's motivation. As it turns out, Jaak Panksepp's model of our ancient emotional circuitry is important not only to this book's position on scribbling and mark-making, but to the neuroconstructive theory behind it called Marks and Mind.
My 1990 dissertation is an argument in support of an answer to a couple of questions. Starting in 1985, I asked myself, "What is drawing?" "What is writing?" (I had grown up drawing and writing. Both activities were important to how I felt about life and how I lived my life. Was I different from other people or were all children, now, and even once upon a time, just like me? I wanted to prove that drawing and writing were available to everyone, especially children.) By the time I published my dissertation in 1990, I had devised a brain-based rationale for encouraging both drawing and writing in children. Since then, I keep uncovering more and more reasons for why children should be encouraged to speak, draw and write as connected activities. Panksepp's work is a case in point:
Jaak Panksepp, author of Affective Neuroscience (1998) posits four major categories in our inherited emotional repertoire: RAGE, FEAR, PANIC, SEEK. It turns out that, as emotions, RAGE and SEEK are mutually inhibitory. Inhibitory means that when one circuit is "on," it "turns off" another circuit. So, when a creature is actively "seeking the fruits of this world," or SEEKing, as Panksepp describes it, that creature is not raging. The opposite is also true:
| Panksepp, page 53, Figure 3.5, "The Major Emotional Systems." |
 |
| The major emotional operating systems are defined primarily by genetically coded neural circuits that generate well-organized behavior sequences that can be evoked by localized electrical stimulation of the brain. Representative behaviors generated by the various systems are indicated, and the appropriate locations of the SEEKING, FEAR, and RAGE systems are depicted on a small frontal section through one side of the hypothalamus. As is evident, there is considerable overlap and hence neural interaction among systems. Some of the possible major interactions are indicated by the various interconnecting lines that suggest various excitatory and inhibitory influences among systems. (Adapted from Panksepp, 1982). |
If you look at Panksepp's diagram of the relationship between our emotions, you will note two additional points:
This means that when I am actively looking for answers, I am less likely to be panic-y and afraid. It also means that when I am panic-y and afraid, I want to find out why. Taken as a whole, the Panksepp diagram makes it clear that when we are raging, we are not looking for the answers, and when we are looking for the answers, we are not raging.
It looks as if RAGE is, for good and for ill, a major blocker.
Panksepp explains rage as the emotion we feel when we are trapped, when our freedom is suddenly limited (1998, 189). The infant thrashing on the changing table feels rage at being constrained. The oppositional teenager in the home or classroom acts out in response to feeling trapped in a confining situation with few options. Once we think of rage in this primitively useful sense, we may be able to give feelings of rage the immediate examination they require when we feel them, and then either act on this powerful feeling --- or not. Let's invent a little story to illustrate what I call the Rules of Panksepp.
I am driving my car in the fast lane, minding my business. A hulking SUV roars up behind me, or, even more likely, a young woman in a white Jetta. I feel threatened. My personal car-space has been invaded. My freedom to drive is, I feel, in jeopardy. This is what I should ask myself: Is my freedom as a biological creature being threatened by having to move over into the slower lane? No, of course not. But, for survival purposes, rage is a very powerful emotion. If you are cornered in a cave, rage will give you the power to fight your way out to live another day.
When we rage, it is hard to go through an evaluation process. A rush of neurochemistry takes over. The Rule of Panksepp predicts the following: Once I give in to road rage, that emotion is going to drive my actions, preventing me from figuring out other courses of action. Remember, RAGE and SEEKing are mutuallly inhibitory. Each shuts the other one down. Let's continue with our story. I retaliate by slowing down. What I am actually doing is striking back as I crouch, hissing, deep in my cave. What happens? My obstructional action provokes rage in the driver behind me and the road rage contest is on, with possible life-threatening consequences for me, the other driver, and everyone else on the road.
What if I felt rage, identified it, and said, "Whoa, it would be a whole lot better to feel fear or even panic rather than rage, so I can start SEEKing a way out of this fast lane." If we can exert a little emotional control, we might be able to change the emotion we're feeling, We might have a chance to figure out a better solution than obstructive retaliation on a four-lane superhighway.
Panksepp's diagram offers extremely useful information. We can use panic and fear to encourage our seeking instincts to discover ways to get out of dangerous situations. This kind of brain-based information is important to know, since a good part of our brain-based heritage is emotional.
In the last ten years or so, there has been a major shift in psychology. Emotions --- not reason --- drive action ( Goleman, 1994; Panksepp, 1998; Damasio, 1999). How we feel about a situation often determines what we do. This being so, it makes sense to learn how to examine and refine our emotional responses to situations. I believe that scribbling and drawing evolved to help us control our survival emotions, including rage. I know that little children immediately stop raging and crying from panic and fear the moment they start to make a mark. How is this emotional change achieved by marks neurochemically?
According to Panksepp, the ancient mammalian circuitry he calls SEEKing is dopaminergic; SEEKing releases and is driven by dopamine. Dopamine is a "feel-good" neurotransmitter. Finding the things that are good for us feels good to us. Feeling good keeps us on productive rather than destructive paths. SEEKing is self-stimulating, self-rewarding, self-sustaining activity for sound survival reasons.
After a lifetime of observation and personal experience, it's clear that drawing is fun, and "feels good." It's also clear to me that drawing is SEEKing behavior; its goal is discovery, finding out how things looks, operate, are. Drawing produces the same feelings as Pankseppian SEEKing: "intense interest," "engaged curiosity," and "eager anticipation" (Panksepp, 1998, 149). These feelings encourage the determination of the draw-er to get at the "truth." Drawing must be an extension of the ancient seeking circuitry designed to help us discover things that are good for us.
As an artist (that is, as someone who draws ( or a person who is a visual meaning-maker), an accurate, or "truthful" drawing is, for me, one of the "fruits of the earth." An accurate drawing "feels good" for me. Truth as it is incorporated in a drawing (or a piece of writing or a mathematical formula or a painting) must be one of the fruits of the earth for us human beings.
Writing is mark-making, too, of course, but it is something else. It does not feel like drawing. Its neurochemical rewards are harder to achieve. Maybe, to the ancient parts of our brains, the gesture of drawing is more like the sweeping arm of the pseudopod, more of a spontaneous, integrated gesture than the laborious construction word by word, stop and go, return and fix, cut and paste that is part of the incredible effort of writing, even for practiced writers. A finished book is much harder to achieve than a "solved" painting, and the difference has nothing to do with the length of the book or the size of the canvas.
The effort to seek the truth using words--instead of images --- is a tremendously worthwhile journey, of course. Every one of us who writes letters and journals, articles and books, marketting lists and "things to do" on scraps of paper knows that this is so. Still, I maintain from personal experience that drawing and painting feel very different emotionally from writing, and must, therefore, use different neurotransmitters and brain waves. Panksepp informs us that both dopaminergic and opioid activities register as pleasure in the brain, but the nature of the pleasure of each mark-making system must be qualitatively different. And it is not as simple as spatial versus linguistic or images versus words, or non-verbal versus verbal as the distinctions that determine the neurochemical variations.
I suspect that the more synchronized and integrative and global the brain waves, the deeper the pleasure the brain feels. Depth of pleasure must depend upon skill level, but it must also depend upon the very nature of the mark-making activity. For my money, drawing and painting are more pleasurable than writing. More centering. More peaceful. More wholly engaging. Until brain research includes fMRI's of brains drawing and writing, we can only hypothesize about differences in marks-based brain waves.
Although we share brain circuitry with other creatures, we differ from other creatures, too: we make marks. Emotionally, our circuitry is continuous with mammalian circuitry, as is our visual and aural circuitry, and, most probably, our language circuitry. We feel, see, and hear the way other mammals, especially primates, feel, see, and hear. We gesture and make intelligible sounds like other "verbal" creatures, despite major differences in sound-producing systems. (I am using the word "verbal" in a very broad sense to include all the ways mammalian, avian brain and the insect brains use "language" including vocal utterance, song, gestures, body-language, pheromones, and wiggle/dances).
But, when it comes to mark-making, our behavior branches off. I believe the reason for this branching off is marks-based pressure on human brains to evolve beyond the primate alchemy of emotions, so that humans have feel, think and act differently --- hopefully, more wisely. And whether or not poems and paintings and symphonies are wise, they are fun for the human mind.
Brain information about emotions (specifically the work of Jaak Panksepp) provides a solid rationale for using scribbling and drawing and writing as SEEKing behavior to encourage a positive emotional tone in early childhood. The continuity between human and animal emotional survival circuitry means that mark-making is an important strategy for discovering Panksepp's "fruits of the earth" --- the things that are good for us --- in ways that protect us from rage, and rescue us from fear and panic.
To be precise, I think the evolutionary reason for human mark-making is emotional control through the refinement of the limbic system via its connections backward to the visual cortex, and forward to the pre- and frontal lobes through the agency of an especially integrative feedback loop between vision, attention, emotion and reason. And what is the net result of all this refinement? A heightening of our awareness of awareness; an elevation of consciousness states peculiar to humans. If I am correct, then I have made an important observation about human marks and human emotions.
Because I have taught my method Drawing/Writing for the past twenty years with many populations, I can say that mark-making is an emotional organizer and regulator for the human brain, and that seeking, in the form of mark-making, makes little humans happy and big humans happy, even enlightened. I am not saying that drawing and writing and mathematics and musical composition are always easy or always make us happy or always enlighten us. I am saying that these marks-based systems for representing emotion, thought, and action have evolved to provide ways for the human brain to think away from rage, fear and panic toward intelligent thought and action for human beings. It looks like intelligent thought and action still turns on curiosity and discovery, but includes representation. We humans need to show what we know.
Animals achieve intelligent thought and action for animals. Their frontal lobes do not inhibit their survival needs. Their thoughts, actions and needs are one. If you corner an animal, it is going to rage or run. It is not going to think about pulling into the slower lane. The same holds true for very little children. Their frontal lobes do not inhibit their behavior; their behavior is designed to make sure they get what they need, via their caregiver. A baby does not decide to cry if it is hungry or cold or wet or frightened. It cries because it has to. It is only later that we learn to do or not to do things. It is deeply significant that very early childhood is the time when children scribble. Scribbling must be survival activity.
Parents and society temper, modify and change our mammalian brain and behavior. Mark-making is designed by neuro-evolution to help us modify brain and behavior all on our own, by ourselves, as we wrestle with our ancient emotional circuitry.
The unique break-through I make, the observation I have to offer parents and other caregivers of young children, is that human behavior becomes discontinuous with animal behavior around marks of meaning. We differ from other mammals and primates because we teach ourselves to pay attention and to think and to feel and to act and to use language in the context of the determining influence of marks, starting with scribbling and drawing.
We alone represent what we see, feel, and think, using not only sounds and gestures, but pictures, words, graphs, formulae, equations, numbers, whole notes and half notes, sharps and flats.
Can I prove this? Just the way you can prove this, by a lifetime of observations. Animals do not draw pictures or write words. Humans do.
Someday, fMRI's, functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery (multi-layer pictures of thinking brains in action) will show us what scribbling, drawing, and reading, and writing look like neurally, mapping the coordinates for symbolic thought (or what I call quidditas-thought as opposed to qualia -thought), showing how such operational networks in human brains compare with feeling and thinking, say, in the brains of rhesus monkeys, porpoises, dolphins, whales, song birds, honey bees, and Golden Retrievers.
You may disagree with me. You may think that "being literate" is not necessary to being human. And I might agree with you that there are perfectly wonderful, functional human beings who are illiterate. But, at this point in the co-evolution of humankind and technology, literacy is one of the brain's survival skills, just as it has been all along. In Part Two, I'll use arguments from cellular biology, anthropology, art history, and neuroscience to show why and how humans have been literate for millions of years, beginning with the moment a stick touched the dust with an idle flick of the wrist---and the eye of the mark-maker took note. Or a toe dragged a directional line through the sand, and the eyes of the mark-maker and other observers took note. And wondered. And wanted to ask. And had to tell.
 |
Please e-mail your feedback to Dr. Sheridan (susan.sheridan9@gmail.com) |
Original page design and construction by Plummer's Mines
Page redesign and maintenance by Jeannine Lawall