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© 2002, 2010 Susan Rich Sheridan
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Saving Literacy: A New Book by Susan Rich Sheridan!
Research Questions
Answers to the following research questions will benefit parents, professional caregivers, and children. These research questions can be organized in five categories: One: Early Child Development and Language Learning, Brain and Behavior The following questions, speculations, predictions and propositions are based on direct experience with drawing and writing, and with research, reason, intuition, and observations and interactions with children. When I use highly technical language, I am resorting to the language of the research article in an attempt to make sense to readers in that specific field. I am not a neurobiologist nor a quantum physicist. I am, however, a thinker and I care about children’s needs and rights to grow and flourish as thinkers and communicators. For them, I will try to understand anything that is necessary to that cause. My strong SEEKING drive will not let me rest until my theory of marks of meaning is clear and comprehensive. My goal is the truth about scribbles and, as importantly, applying that truth for the sake of children’s mental and emotional and spiritual well-being. Marks change minds. Marks create meaning. Children create the marks. Children deserve the meaning. Logic and intuition made the Quantum Theory of Scribbling possible; I suddenly understood the possibility, the probability, of transcendent moments of understanding in the human brain, made possible by the power of the manipulation of symbols. It has been critical to extend arguments and explanations of Neuroconstructive theory and the practice of Scribbling/Drawing/Writing beyond the fields of child development and child art to dignify the radical importance of that “art” to the development of the human mind. For this reason, research in anthropology, biology, neuroscience and quantum physics has been necessary a third volume, The Scribble Hypothesis: Marks Change Minds, will present this combined research. ONE: EARLY CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND LANGUAGE LEARNING, BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR 1) Research with babbling and scribbling as integrative, cohering, bilateral brain organizers for speech and literacy will shed light on the importance of early sounds and early mark-making to the brain activity and organization underlying speech and literary. PREDICTION: An experiment could test whether spontaneous early speech (babbling) and spontaneous scribbling demonstrate bilateral excitation in both hand areas of the motor cortex. The same could be done with intentional speech and intentional scribbling in, say, three year-olds. Neuroconstructivist theory predicts stronger right sensory-motor cortex excitation by the age of three, especially in male children. Female brains are more balanced bilaterally, so should show stronger bilateral excitation in both hand areas of the sensory-motor cortex during early speech production, as well as during early mark-making, from the spontaneous to the more intentional. 2) Research with motherese (mothers’ distinctively higher-pitched, slower speech around infants), with infant cooing and laughter, and with infant-babbling and toddler-scribbling should show the degree to which this group of behaviors is integrative and interdependent, operating as a developmental series of cohering, bilateral brain organizers for speech and literacy. PREDICTIONS: Neuroconstructive theory proposes that these activities relate to each other as synchronizers and accelerators of brain activity. Research with scribbling and drawing will determine whether the same purpose is served; that is, scribbling and drawing operate as synchronizers and accelerators of brain activity in brain areas responsible for language and literacy. 3) Research in connection with positive emotion. “Many positive emotions... broaden the momentary thought-action repertoire… For example, the negative emotions of fear and anxiety involve defensive responses, ... that appear to have evolved to operate very rapidly and automatically, without any necessary conscious processing…. (there may have been) different kinds of natural selective pressures that may have shaped evolution of cognitive consequences of negative versus positive emotion. Different evolutionary histories would be consistent with the possibility that positive emotion might more likely involve conscious processes in the mediation of its effects on problem-solving and decision. This possibility deserves empirical testing...” (Frederickson in Kaszniak, 2001, p. 565). SPECULATION: The importance of emotions to brain function and human thought,66,67,68 especially the work of Jaak Panksepp, 1998, who identifies a quartet of human emotions (PANIC, FEAR, RAGE, SEEKING), allows us to think about literacy in new ways as positive, conscious, problem-solving, problem-oriented SEEKING behavior. SEEKING behavior receives the benefit of rewarding, motivational neurotransmitters. If literacy, as a SEEKING behavior, is a refinement of an ancient, powerfully positive emotional drive, designed to encourage humans to discover and explore and use things in their environment of special usefulness or pleasure, allowing them to solve problems and make decisions in the context of that SEEKING, then we’ve redefined literacy as a survival skill for which evolution selected, strongly. Seeking and playing with symbolic meaning makes human brains unique. PREDICTION: Work with Scribbling/Drawing/Writing as SEEKING behavior encourages positive emotion around literacy. Positive emotion, emotional control, sustained attention, and learning are connected. The opposite is true: negativity, impulsivity/hyperactivity, attention deficits, and learning disabilities are connected. Scribbling/Drawing/Writing works to mitigate or even eliminate these connected non-useful conditions in early childhood. QUESTION: Can integrative, regulatory mind/body activities like Scribbling/Drawing/Writing lessen the need for - or even make unnecessary - the use of drugs in childhood to influence attention, impulsivity, mood disorders, hyperactivity, and learning disabilities? 4) Rage Control/Anger Management/Impulsivity Control SPECULATION: Longitudinal studies with children and adults using training in sustained visual attention in the context of marks of meaning via the Scribbling/Drawing/Talking/Writing program, should clarify the degree to which mark-making - as an extension of the Panksepp’s SEEKING system (from which emotional mode, as we recall from the diagram in the introduction to this book, there are no return mental/emotional/neurochemical paths to RAGE, PANIC or FEAR) is capable of moderating rage or even of repairing brain areas (amygdalas) shriveled by the caustic effect of too much cortisol, the stress brain chemical. QUESTION: Can parents and children generate their own intervention strategies for panic, fear, and rage through the seeking and playing strategies provided by scribbling and drawing as important aspects and outreach systems for the positive emotional circuits in the brain? In addition, do scribbling and drawing help children control negative emotions, like anger? Can the simple activity of making marks on paper change frustration or worry or fear into a happy mental state? Only gently, noninvasive intervention with a pad of paper and a handful of bright markers will help us to understand the therapeutic value of mark-making for the child who needs to learn to self-distract and self-regulate in terms of attention and emotion. QUESTION: Are communication and emotional control two sides of the same coin? Communication and emotional control may not be separable in humans. The frontal lobes, the limbic system, and the language areas, as well as the sensory motor areas for both hands and the tongue may have co-evolved as densely integrated neural systems to provide the brain’s own regulation/intervention/correction strategies in situations where fear, panic or rage might occur and should be avoided for the sake of the health, safety and the well being of the individual and of the group. SPECULATION: As SEEKING and as PLAY, scribbling, speech, drawing and reading/writing a range of symbols and emotional cues may require an integrated circuit in humans for optimum, full and complete performance. Research could be designed in support of this integrated theory of human mental/emotional/linguistic development. QUESTION: Are sustained attention and the ability to delay gratification connected? If so, Scribbling/Drawing/Writing - as an attention booster - should contribute to the ability to delay gratification because control over attention provides delaying tactics.69,70 This ability to delay gratification by refocusing attention has been shown to correlate with success in life - from relationships to academics to jobs (Walter Mischel's famous Marshmallow Tests conducted in the 1960's and 1970's introduced the importance and the challenge of delaying gratification in the four year-old child.69,70 5) Autism SPECULATION: The importance of scribbling and drawing to child development is missing or under-represented as prevention and/or as intervention with very young children at risk for autism or with autism. A child’s eyes, mouth, hands, and his/her attentional/visual/verbal brain development are intricately interrelated. How the young child uses his/her eyes, mouth, hands, and attentional/visual/verbal brain in early childhood determines his/her emotional, cognitive, and linguistic development. The television and the computer and white noise machines and other environmental noise levels - including mesmerizing and pervasive visual/aural aspects of technology - may disrupt and/or retard normal brain visual/aural development in young children who are dependent upon shared gaze, face-to-face visual and verbal communication and other exploratory body/brain interaction with people and the world organized by nature or by human intention as appropriate stimulation for very young sensory/emotional/motor systems. QUESTION: How do the brain scans of children born with autism, as well as those who “acquire” autism, differ from the scans of children who are developing normally and who continue to develop normally? Normal brain scans of children babbling, scribbling, drawing, talking and writing can be compared with brain scans of children who are either born autistic or who present as autistic at a certain age (often between two and three years of age). Careful histories can be compiled of the day-to-day experience of both sets of children in terms of exposure to the television, the computer and to meaningful, visual and verbal conversational, human interaction, including shared maternal gaze and other aspects of mother/child interactions in infancy. Measurements of babbling levels, scribbling, drawing, talking and writing levels, can be compared. Besides genetics and the putative influence of a range of toxins in the environment, how does technology effect the brain of the young child? But, also, how does invested human interaction around words and mark-making influence the developing brain of the little child? PREDICTION: Research with brain scans of very young children babbling, scribbling, talking about scribbles, drawing, talking about drawings, pre-writing and doing early reading, may answer some of the questions about normal development, including the ability to sustain attention and to achieve emotional control as well as acquiring speech and literacy. 6) Research with mathematics in connection with child development: Speculations on Zero from the point of view of scribbling. Walter J. Freeman asks in his 2009 paper “The neurobiological infrastructure of natural computing: Intentionality”4 where the concept of zero comes from in mathematical thinking. Neuroconstructive theory proposes that the idea of zero may arise from the shape of zero. As the beginning point and as the end point of the spiral, the proto-zero exists, a mark of rounded potential meaning. SPECULATION: In Freeman’s 1991 paper, “The Physiology of Perception”, brain scans, or EEG’s of rabbits sniffing familiar and pleasing items, reveal increasingly organized, ascendant waves of circling, spiraling lines.2 As the child’s scribbles move from random, all–over, spaghetti-like, straight lines and dots, to ascending circles, or spirals, (and from thence to circles containing circles and so forth) - children’s scribbles become increasingly thoughtful and organized, indicating not only an increasing ability to focus and to direct attention, but to make intentional, meaningful marks. Is it possible that embedded as both the “alpha” and “omega” of the spiraling scribble, the zero begins and ends, or encloses, early scribbles? Does the shape of a zero, as a place where all spiraling activity both arises and subsides, enchant the young mind, requiring, with time, an explanation powerful enough to let the zero stand alone as a meaningful mark as an important abstract perception? SPECULATION: Neuroconstructive theory proposes that the shape of zero is inherent and/or prefigured in the child’s circling, spiraling scribbles. Once the zero mark has been made, it can be used to create a body, a head ---- or a zero. The ultimate point of focus is at once almost nothing and almost everything… All of nothing and all of everything might well be defined as the tiniest dot and the hugest, most perfect circle, or, indeed, two reversing spirals, or the simple of infinity. TWO: THE EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGY ON BRAIN DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN 7) Research with technology, including frequencies and wavelengths of analog and digital vision and sound production in television, and computers, as well as in dish antennae and other receivers/transponders, including DVD’s and VCR’s could be conducted to determine whether any of these frequencies retard or damage normal development in fetal and infant and toddler brains. Television and dish antennas produce noise which is considered negligible to adults. But is it negligible to fetal, infant and toddler brains? Do some kinds of electronic noise block or scramble immature brain signaling systems? In addition, neural abuse may be delivered to infant brains by electronics and technology designed for adult brains. “Adult brain” screen and sound, or visual/verbal technology, may mis-align and/or retard the immature body/brain sensory/motor/mind systems of very young children. The child in the infant seat in front of the TV or computer screen has no recourse. It cannot move. It has to receive the inappropriate stimuli. PREDICTION: If the emotions required for interaction with computer games are hyper-alertness to danger and FEAR/RAGE, then these emotions will be selected as biologically useful. Still, if the conservation of energy remains a cellular requirement and if the biological system is squandering energy emotionally by playing such games for long periods of time, while under-utilizing the rest of the body kinetically, then a neurobiological conflict should arise, resulting in biological break-down. This break down (perhaps signaled currently as a dramatic increase in autistic children) will eventually produce new neuro-bio-techno body/brain systems appropriate to life lived in virtual worlds. Then, the only enemies we kill will be imaginary but, by then, we may be, for all intents and purposes, virtual, or imaginary, too. 8) Research with the possible therapeutic use of a lighted screen as it could be designed to be in synchrony with normal human immature visual systems. Might it be possible for “machine vision” (in the context of both television and computer screens) which matches normal immature human visual oscillatory phases, to remediate severe existing neurological disturbances like infantile epilepsy or even other conditions relating to vision and attention like hyperactivity, dyslexia, autism, even Tourette’s Syndrome? This would necessitate redesigning hardware, not just software. 9) Research with neurofeedback and Scribbling/Drawing/Writing. Can work with Scribbling/Drawing/Writing prevent or alleviate hyperactivity, attention deficits, mood disorders, and learning disabilities? Clinical work with neurofeedback (Nora Gedguadas, CNS, CNT, Seigfried Othmer, Ph.D., www.eeginfo.com71) shows that children can learn to self-regulate brain activity, using computer-assisted brain exercises. QUESTION: If we compare brain waves of children receiving neurofeedback, which facilitates or rewards the child’s ability to calm and regulate right hemisphere brain waves, with the brain waves of children whose brain activity is ineffectually regulated and patterned, lacking any level of intentional control, what signature wavelengths and patterns do we see? How do the brain waves of children receiving neurofeedback training via computer games and EEG’s compare with the brain scans of children scribbling and drawing in an intent, focused manner? How do the brain waves of children receiving neurofeedback for human interaction and emotional control via electronic game therapy compare with children making marks and talking about their marks with parents and other invested caregivers using the Scribbling/Drawing/Writing program? Learning to control emotions and behavior is a life skill. Normal, interested interaction between adults and children around marks and speech may achieve, routinely, the kind of right brain organization which neurofeedback clinicians are looking for. If we make sure some of the critical, if unsung, components of early childhood are supported, including visual and verbal exchanges with loving adults and interested and supportive verbal exchanges around scribbling and drawing, won't normal right and left hemisphere brain patterning in children occur in the context of everyday parenting and caregiving? THREE: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: MODELING SYMBOLIC THOUGHT AND LITERACY 10) AI, or artificial intelligence can be used to model pre-verbal, scribbling thinking in infants and toddlers for the sake of analyzing and understanding the pre-conditions for, and the dynamics of, early acquisition of speech and literacy in humans. SOME REQUIREMENTS OF AN INTELLIGENT SYMBOL-USING SYSTEM: To model human intelligence, AI would need to build a robot (with eyes and hands) which scribbles and draws and reads its scribbles and drawings, creating internal “neural” models from these actions and shapes. If the child’s scribbles and drawings are driven by neural shapes of thought which are already internal as the sensory motor patterns of a biological organism bent on movement, connection and communication, then these neural patterns would have to be programmed into the robot brain, first. This, as I see it, is the conundrum. To model an intelligent system that uses languages and literacies as the human brain uses them, an AI device must be able to scribble and draw, but this device, this system, this robot can only scribble and draw if its computer/brain/body has already been programmed to do so - which would mean that the programmer had tapped into the algorithms responsible for the neural shapes of young children’s pre-verbal babbling, scribbling thought. The developmental compendia of children’s unfolding marks as collected by Kellogg and Fein and reproduced in the Sheridan books logically provides some of the mental/motor operations necessary to modeling the mental/motor pre-conditions of verbal, literate thought, supported by intentional symbolic reasoning. As scribbling matures and the stages of drawing unfold, these marks of meaning influence the brain via the hand and the eye and the sensory/motor cortex, deep within Dr. Walter Freeman’s koniocortex (Freeman’s term for brain tissue appropriate to the generation of symbolic reasoning as neural behavior, 20094), to organize and to generate the neural patterns necessary for symbolic thought. Rather than trying to model the neural conditions and operations necessary for symbolic thought using a computer/robot, we can look to the actual unfolding of the neural operations of the thinking child, as he/she babbles, scribbles, draws, speaks, reads and writes. PREDICTION: If humankind is becoming technological as a whole (and if ontogeny both recapitulates and modifies phylogeny: Dean Falk, in correspondence, Dec. 200372), then the pressure on the child’s brain to adapt to technology will bring about changes in line with the requirements of technology for its kind of motility, its kind of adhesion, its kind of transduction. Clearly, technology requires quick eyes and quick fingers. It needs the rest of the body peripherally, as a support system for the hands/eyes/brain as these three entities interact with a keyboard, a mouse and a lighted screen - which is projecting information via certain raster rates and certain colors and certain codes determined by hardware and software with which the human hardware and software must be able to interface. FOUR: PRIMATE BRAIN RESEARCH: (from the Sheridan position paper, “A Theory of Marks and Mind: the effect of notational systems on hominid brain evolution and child development with an emphasis on exchanges between mothers and children”, Medical Hypotheses, 2004 Elsevier Ltd.1). PROPOSITION: Bipedalism and upright posture created reverse blood flow, which cooled the brain allowing for a larger brain. Thereafter, marks of meaning --- beginning with doodling in the dust by solitary toddlers as well as notational systems invented by hunter/gatherers,73 both male and female, to keep track of natural cycles and periodic events and processes --- placed substantial visual/attentional pressure on the proto-hominid visual cortex, the dextrous, expressive hands, and the vocalizing mouth, as well as on the motivational/emotional limbic system, driving brain growth in terms of: SPECULATION: brain lateralization, allowing increased specialization and thus, increased efficiency for spatial and linguistic tasks.
This brain growth, in turn, created: SPECULATIONS: adaptive pressure for increased prefrontal lobe capabilities with symbols.
11) These questions arise around hominid evolution in connection with speech and literacy: QUESTIONS: Were until-now-unidentified marks of meaning near hominid footprints in lava dust, especially those marks located in the lava dust beyond sight-lines for lakes, springs or groves, actually directional indicators and/or locators (maps) for water or more abundant food sources? That is, were marks of meaning already being “drawn/written” at this time? Did the sling-nursing position (which would have been horizontal in immature hominid neonates as opposed to vertical baby chimps' nursing posture) create a swallowing challenge, helping to modify the organization of the throat, larynx, and hyoid bone for speech? How do primate and human vocal apparati differ in childhood and in adulthood? (For instance, the hyoid bone descends in chimps as they mature, as it does in humans.77) Did hoot-pant primate laughter76 --- in hominins --- increased through mother/child exchanges in response to the extended childhood of dependent, vulnerable offspring, modify the lungs and breathing apparatus to accommodate the explosive sounds necessary for consonants in human speech? How do the lungs and other breathing apparati of primates and humans differ today? What discontinuities do fMRI's identify in brain waves/oscillations/locations in primate and human brains when we focus on the first two to three years of life when very young primates (including humans) start to vocalize and gesture? fMRI's of mother/child vocalizations among primates, and verbal exchanges between human mothers and children around scribbles and drawings should provide information on differences in the locations of neural substrates dedicated to language-use in primates and humans, as well as their metabolic profiles, electrical frequencies, and wave sines. In young children who scribble and talk at the same time, what happens to the neural substrates?73,78 Do scribbling and drawing organize the child's brain for attention, memory, and articulation? Controlling for contrast, luminosity and spatial arrangement, can we design experiments with infants, rather than with adults, using human faces, ape faces, and objects? We can extend these experiments by presenting abstract versus representational art to infants: how does their N170 response differ when they look at Mondrian’s “Boogie Woogie” versus his earlier painting of a willow tree? Do infants look longer at Picasso’s “Demoiselles D’Avignon” than at a “more realistic” blue period painting of acrobats? How about a Cezanne still-life versus a Dutch still-life? Like mature abstract artists25,26 and toddlers,1,5 do newborns show a preference for abstract geometric shapes? What might this mean for embedded geometric systems? If all notational systems derive from a child’s earliest marks, then literacy springs from the internal geometry of the neural shapes of intentional thoughts and actions in time and space. If infants are shown geometric shapes in two-dimensional arrays, say the triangle and the square as objects with 3 and with 4 sides, do infants associate 3 sounds or 4 sounds with such shapes, extending the research with the counting of objects in conjunction with hearing a similar number of sounds?79 If so, such research might suggest that not only is numeracy, but number-of-sides-sense, or appreciation for the two-dimensional arrays we call geometry, exist as an additional category in an embedded computational system in the human brain. The fact that toddlers scribble 3- and 4-sided shapes spontaneously,29,33 using the same basic line invented by Ice Age notational carvers to describe the lunar-based passage of time on bone and stone,73 might extend the notion of embedded computational systems in children's brains to include marks of meaning as embedded systems in humankind. What happens to speech and language in a baby whose limbs, especially the hands, are restrained from birth? Is the acquisition of speech impaired? Delayed? If a child is prevented from doing any kind of mark-making throughout early childhood, is there any effect on his/her brain patterns for speech or for reading and writing? Would this child exhibit some of the symptoms of autism? Attention deficits? Learning disabilities? Acting out? Oppositional behavior? Inability to make human contact? Since primates will scribble, can they be trained to draw? If so, might they "bootstrap" signed language (which some primates already use) onto drawings in such a way that they acquire a large enough vocabulary for original statements, along with a demonstrable understanding of the signs they use, as expressed by the drawings they make to accompany this signing? Other primates do not scribble spontaneously as part of their normal developmental unfolding, nor do they routinely draw, and in this simple absence of mark-making alone may lie the critical deficit in connection with the acquisition of symbolic language and reasoning in primates. Since apes and chimpanzees do not need symbolic language at this point to flourish, this should not matter to them. How do mother to child vocalizations among bonobo apes compare with the pitch and cadence of human motherese? How do the rates of delivery of sound, or the hertz, compare? Matrilineal DNA suggests that only one mother had to speak a motherese at 20 Hertz to tune up infant primate brains for language. How do sensory-motor maps in humans and apes compare in amount of tissue dedicated to hands/thumbs/feet and mouths/tongues? What inferences can be drawn from differences (if such differences exist) in these sensory-motor maps? FIVE: A QUANTUM THEORY OF SCRIBBLING “The Scribble Hypothesis,” Sheridan, 2002 supports the importance of handmade marks to the development of the symbolic human mind and includes a quantum theory of scribbling. PROPOSITION: Vision and attention are connected operations.1,5,6 We propose that, in sighted infants and children, sustained visual attention is necessary for speaking, too, as well as for drawing, reading, writing and other marks-based expression. Arguably, the work of the hands as marks extended (and still continue to extend) the attentional capabilities of the visual cortex for language. The first six tenets of "The Scribble Hypothesis" anchor this position: One: Very young children’s scribbling trains the brain to pay attention and to sustain attention, setting up self-organizing feedback loops between the eye/hand/ear/mouth and the inter-hemispheric brain. Two: Very young children’s scribbling stimulates individual cells and clusters of cells in the visual cortex for line and shape. Three: Very young children’s scribbles help them practice and organize the shapes or patterns of verbal and visual symbolic thought. Four: Very young children’s scribbling encourages an affinity, or love for marks, preparing the mind for his/her determining behavior: literacy. Five: Marks of meaning operate like “super-radiant surfaces,” or mirrors, encouraging self-reflection, capable of producing consciousness states describable as self-induced transparency, or epiphanic consciousness (including understanding, wisdom, peace, transcendent at-oneness), rewarding the brain emotionally and neurochemically for its hard-won self-clarification3,80A,80 while, at the same time, allowing the brain to settle into minimal, coherent energy states. This resolution across emotional/neural levels is energy-efficient, a highly desirable state in dynamic systems. Six: Marks of meaning including scribbling are not only critical to the neural development of visual, verbal and emotional thinking in the child, but, as mark-making in general, are instrumental in the maintenance of healthy neurophysiology, including the visual, verbal, emotional, and memory/learning circuitry in the adult brain. Based on tenets #5 and #6 of the Scribble Hypothesis, it is possible to propose the following neuro-molecular advantages of SIT’s, or consciousness states described as Self-Induced Transparency5 in the literate human brain. In these speculations, the 1995 paper by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hammeroth,80 “What Gaps?” provides the technical language. As explained above, I use this technical language as logically as I can to make my arguments, even though I have no experience of the actual experiments on a quantum level. PROPOSITION: PROPOSITION: SPECULATION: PREDICTION: QUESTION: Do the terms "self-induced transparency" and "super-radiance" associated with quantum microtubular consciousness states80 have relevance for the emotional motivation of special, higher-order "transcendent" brain states responsible for neural resolution? Do these terms provide, in fact, apt descriptors for how such clarified higher-level mental states feel? A brain that has worked hard to figure out a major problem in life feels lightened (in the sense of being filled with light), even ecstatically clear. PROPOSITION: Multiple literacies, including art, literature, music, mathematics and spiritual practice are major tools for resolving the over-heating brain consequences of problems encountered in a language-based life. The Advantage to the Brain of Minimal Energy States The interesting point about quantum states from microtubules to consciousness is that they protect the brain from its own disruptive thermal energy. As here proposed, “quantum consciousness” as SITs act as a super-coolant, helping the brain to settle into states of minimal energy, lattices intact, coherent superposition in hydrophobic pockets stabilized. It is in the ability to be wholly focused as mind/body that the child and the artist/writer/mathematician/composer align in unified consciousness states. In fact, mark-making allows the adult mind, surrounded by distractions, to achieve the single-minded focus of the child so evident in play, including the play of scribbling and drawing, when the organism and the environment exist in harmonious synchrony. Quantum Conclusion Linguistic thinking in humans can be described as an over-layering of kinds of information from the sensory to the linguistic, with a major goal: settling into minimal energy states.3 In a brain which uses symbolic meaning to achieve such equilibrium, there must be motivation for such cooled-down states. We propose that the neurochemical rewards of the SEEKING and PLAY systems provide such emotional motivation. SIX: HOW DOES THE QUALITY OF MATERNAL GAZE AND ATTENTION INFLUENCE THE CHILD’S BASIC ABILITY TO PAY ATTENTION? The closing research question targets mother/child interactions around attention. To what degree does the mother’s ability to pay attention to the infant and child determine the infant and child’s ability to pay attention? How does the quality of maternal gaze influence the infant’s ability to attend? Are there levels of attention, which the mother gives to the child and which the child learns to return to the mother and, thereafter, to use throughout life?84,85 This research should shed light on which elements in one-on-one interaction between mothers (and/or maternal substitute caregivers) and infants contribute to normal emotional, social and cognitive development. The ability to pay attention is fundamental to survival. An organism orients toward nutrients and away from toxins. To do so, the organism must recognize nutrients and toxins. Recognition requires attention. The thoughts of a person in shock or suffering trauma or finding herself in the throes of mental illness are scattered. That person is distracted. She can not pay attention. Her thoughts go everywhere… or remain stuck on one disturbing theme. Attention is the brain mechanism by which we control and organize our thoughts and our brain waves. Without attention, our brain waves go helter skelter. Like gravity, attention is an illusive, pervasive, comprehensive force in the TOE, or Theory of Everything, of mental health. Attention is at the heart of “mom” binding,7 and “time” binding,73 the glue of social and time/space coherent experience. As mindfulness, attention is the portal to the experience of timeless unity, where everything is bound together, seamlessly. Both kinds of attentive consciousness - the time-full and the time-less - are necessary to effective, satisfying, illuminating thought and action over a lifetime. The mother/child relationship, including shared gaze and directive, instructional attention, as well as mindful, non-directive attention, would not exist unless these qualities of attention were necessary to the mental/emotional well-being of mother and child. Shared gaze and shared attention are mutually therapeutic. Both mother and child thrive on shared attention. This “human” element in childcare is critical to the normal unfolding of the child. At the heart of this human experience is one-on-one attention --- the giving, the sharing, the learning of attention. Research has shown that the temperament of the child influences the mother’s ability to care for the child. Difficult children are harder to bond with and attend to.86 The importance of the child's potential contribution to parent/child interaction is considerable.87 Child temperament also determines how susceptible a child is to parenting,88 including responses to "maternal bids" for joint attention and communication. Autistic sons are often unaware of such bids.89 Maternal depression restricts the level of interaction between mother and child, to causing the child to expect less interaction from her during play sessions and to show less discomfort over this lack of engagement, even at two months of age, while demonstrating shorter attention spans for a larger number of objects because depressed mothers themselves initiate and terminate short attention spans to a range of objects.90,91 There is a direct relationship between the mother’s attentional, social and didactic influence on the child and the child’s ability to attend and to interact socially, as well to acquire and develop and express cognitive skills.84,85 If the mother’s ability to pay attention to the child sets the stage for the development of social and cognitive skills, then maternal attention is a fundamental issue. Research with four month-olds shows that human infant brains – more than other primates -- specialize in recognizing gaze, frontally or even from the side. This ability to perceive face-to-face, directed gaze, including lifted eyebrows and smiles -- as cues to communication -- are “essential for infants’ interactions with, and learning from, others.” The human eye is unique in the size of its exposed sclera, or white areas, which surround a darker iris, creating the kind of light/dark pattern which provides a strong stimulus to the infant’s immature visual system. Infants not only prefer to look at faces with open eyes, but they have a strong tendency to “attend to faces that engage them in mutual gaze when compared with averted gaze… It has been argued that an early sensitivity to eye gaze serves as a major foundation for later social skills. Indeed, an impairment of the sensitivity to eye gaze in general, and mutual gaze in particular, might be one of the early signs of a typical social development manifested in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.92,93,94 Research with children with attention deficits and learning disabilities, including autistic children,93,94,95 underscores the importance of trained sustained (visual) attention, starting with a sensitivity to shared gaze. If the quality of the attention of the mother or other primary caregiver is critical to the normal development of this basic ability to attend and to recognize communication cues in the infant brain and if such attention and recognition is the neurological bedrock for social and cognitive development thereafter, including the development of expressive language,96 then we need to focus on, analyze, define and support the range of growth-promoting attentional cues provided by mothers and other primary caregivers. An infant babbles, but he is taught/learns to speak. A toddler scribbles but he is taught/learns to write and read. An infant’s eyes are drawn to lights and darks and edges, to open eyes, and to faces which offer an attentive gaze, but a child learns to attend. If there is no face to offer shared gaze, what happens to the visual/emotional development of the child? Evidently, something in the brain wiring of the actually or potentially autistic infant fails to respond to the maternal gaze. In the cases of acquired autism, as opposed to genetic autism (if such a category as acquired autism exists), the gaze shared between mothers and infants becomes of critical importance as an influence and as a predictor in terms of normal infant and child development. The lighted screen does not provide maternal gaze. Parents need to know what stimuli are appropriate in terms of encouraging an infant's "amazing" capacities for alertness and attention.86 If there is a supportive environment, the appropriate kinds and levels of attention will develop naturally between mother and child. Many mothers, for a host of reasons (often economic, and/or health-related), can not provide attentive gaze nor extended mother/child interaction. This absence or inability in the mother or primary caregiver to provide a loving gaze and other levels of instructional and/or directive and/or mindful attention has long-term consequences for the child in terms of the ability to attend as well as to expect attention. In Dr. Sigmund Freud’s practice as it developed over time, as well as in contemporary psychoanalytic practice supported by Buddhist meditation, a quality of nonjudgemental, mindfulness in the therapist is important to the the patient’s ability to recover information and achieve understanding.97 This mindfulness model is provided by mothers, too, as a non-interfering, yet attentive presence.97 This quality of mindful attention - without franticness, without the distraction of multi-tasking, without any need for constant entertainment – is the kind of attention which the child needs, later, to flourish, from about the age of 4.84 It is enough to be together in the sunshine while the child plays. From birth until about 3.5 years of age, the child needs shared gaze and directive, instructional attention. This is the optimum stage for introducing Scribbling/Drawing/Writing as a strategy for encouraging maternal/caregiver interaction around visual and verbal attention on a one-to-one basis in a consistent manner. After age 4, the open-ended, non-directive aspects of Scribbling/Drawing/Writing have attentional value, too. We can revisit Dr. Jaak Panksepp’s description of basic emotions, with a small change: PANIC, FEAR, RAGE, AND ATTENTIVE/SEEKING. Feeling the emotion, attending to it, but not reacting to it is an important tenet of Buddhist psychotherapy.97 The child who can recognize and identify her own PANIC, RAGE AND FEAR but also learn to meet strong emotion with a non-reactive attentiveness will be able to move into the positive mind/body benefits of the SEEKING mode more easily. Again, the Scribbling/Drawing/Writing program promotes a committed, patient attentiveness which can be transferred to experience, teaching the child how to hold herself apart from destructive emotions. This kind of emotional coaching in childhood has important benefits in adult life and in society in general. Society would benefit by being more astute and more capable emotionally. The ability of the child to pay attention does not develop overnight. It grows from the moment the child is born. The mother reads the child’s level of attention, attunes to it and encourages it, helping the infant’s attention span to grow. The child learns to respond to different kinds of attention from the mother, from the less intense to the more intense, mirroring and matching these levels. Autistic brains experience mirror neuron dysfunction,98 which interferes with the childs ability to receive and reflect other's emotions. One of the simplest games invented to match and mirror and encourage and extend attention between mother and child is the game of Peek-a-Boo. The following Peek-a-Boo Principle underscores the importance of this attentional, lovingly emotional, increasingly language-based, give-and-take, call-and-response relationship between the mother and the child. PREDICTION: The mother’s/primary caregiver’s ability to pay attention, to interact via shared mutual gaze with the infant and to provide didactic and social instruction throughout early childhood, determine (in general, with the exception of the diagnosed autistic child) the child’s ability --- from early infancy --- to pay attention, to interact emotionally and to think. The social and mental abilities of the child as that child is influenced early in development by mothers and/or substitute caregivers in the context of the intuitive and intentional development of sustained attention, including the ability to delay gratification, provide important topics for longitudinal research.85 1Sheridan, S.R. 1990. "Drawing/Writing: a brain-based writing program designed to develop descriptive analytical and inferential thinking skills at the elementary school level." UMASS School of Education doctoral dissertation.
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