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What can we know and not know about who we are?

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Art, theatre and films have played a crucial role in my pedagogy. Although I am not an artist or a theatre practitioner, I appreciate what art and theatre do to uncover feelings, and to push the boundaries of our imagination. In one of our classes at Sholai school, we had read the opening paragraph of ‘The last moonrise’ from The Power to Forgive while sitting on the field, surrounded by lush green trees.

The story, set in Nagaland, describes the last few hours of a Sambar’s life, before he is hunted. The opening paragraph gives us a vivid imagery of the ‘majestic male Sambar, indigenous to parts of the little Naga hamlet. His coat was a rich ebony which glowed like burnished amber underneath the serene silver light and his liquid brown eyes brimmed with youthful innocence. The Creator had crowned this gentle creature with a pair of magnificent antlers which gratefully saluted the vast skies.’ From far away, we tried to imagine and paint this wonderful creature of Earth. In such a manner, art helps us give form to distant realities and to make meaning of the world.

Imagined Dialogue

In the section below, I imagine a dialogue between Alison Gopnik (1) as Alison, Daniel J. Siegel (2) as Daniel and Tina Payne Bryson as (2) Tina.

Q: In what ways are our learning similar to the ways in which other species learn?

Alison: There are two ways to learn about cause and effect: by trial and error, and by observing other people or events. Learning through trial and error is the most fundamental way that all animals learn. Even the simplest of creatures —flies, slugs, and snails—will repeat an action that has led to a reward in the past. Trial and error lets you test how your actions cause events and learn how to make new things happen.

Q: How is our learning different from how other species may learn?

Alison: Children use imitation to figure out how tools work. They imitate effective actions but not ineffective ones. But they don’t just imitate everything they see another person do, and they don’t even imitate everything they see another person do that leads to an effect. They imitate only intentional actions.

They try to reproduce what the actor wanted to do—not just the action itself. Suppose you show the children someone either making something happen on purpose (pushing a button that makes a box open) or doing exactly the same thing by accident (brushing against the box and making contact with the button). One-year-olds are much more likely to imitate the intentional action than the unintentional one.

Children take the intentions of the person into account in other ways, too. For instance, suppose you show eighteen-month-old babies trying but failing to pull a two-part toy dumbbell apart, their fingers slipping off the ends each time. The children don’t imitate the other person’s slipping fingers. Instead, they do the intelligent thing and firmly pull the toy apart themselves. But just as children won’t learn from the car that moves by itself, they won’t try to pull the toy apart if they see a robotic machine that brushes the toy ends with pincers, even if the machine does it in exactly the same way as the person did. It has to be a person.

All this means that even very young children aren’t just directly reproducing what they see a caregiver do. Instead, they’re reading through to the intention of the person—they’re figuring out what the person was trying to accomplish. They imitate the goal of the action instead of the action itself. They assume that the experimenter is trying to be efficient. They adjust what they do to suit their own goals and purposes. And they take statistics and probability into account, too.

Q: How do children’s brains accommodate all their experiences?

Daniel & Tina: Even when we are old, our experiences actually change the physical structure of the brain. When we undergo an experience, our brain cells—called neurons— become active, or “fire.” The brain has one hundred billion neurons, each with an average of ten thousand connections to other neurons. When neurons are together, they grow new connections between them.

Over time, the connections that result from the ring lead to “rewiring” in the brain. This is incredibly exciting news. It means that we aren’t held captive for the rest of our lives by the way our brain works at this moment—we can actually rewire it so that we can be healthier and happier. This is true not only for children and adolescents, but also for each of us across the life span.

This wire-and-rewire process is what integration is all about: giving our children experiences to create connections between different parts of the brain. When these parts collaborate, they create and reinforce the integrative fibres that link different parts of the brain.

Q: In what way is the young brain different?

Alison: Childhood is designed to be a period of variability and possibility, exploration and innovation, learning and imagination. This is especially true of our exceptionally long human childhood. We can even see this in the developing brain. Young brains are much more “plastic” than older brains; they make more new connections, and they’re much more flexible. In fact, a one-year-old brain has twice as many neural connections as your brain does.

A young brain makes many more links than an older one; there are many more possible connections, and the connections change more quickly and easily in the light of new experiences. But each of those links is relatively weak. Young brains can rearrange themselves effortlessly as new experiences pour in.In particular, as children grow older, the prefrontal area of the brain—the brain’s executive office—exercises increasingly greater control over the rest of the brain. Babies and young children pay attention to anything that’s interesting and informative, and they learn as a result. But as we get older more and more of our learning is directed toward particular goals.

Mastery learning requires a kind of controlled focus that is just not possible for younger children. All these changes contribute to transforming the young brain. The preschool brain is enormously flexible and changes easily, but it is also noisy. The school-age brain is much more efficient and effective, but it is also more rigid.

Q: How does genetics explain our differences?

Alison: Research in epigenetics shows how features of the environment, even quite subtle ones such as the quality of caregiving, can make genes active or inactive. For example, mice who are stressed early in life express certain genes differently. The same thing happens in human children. Genes vary, but children’s experiences also vary, and this influences how those genes are expressed. So these children not only are different from one another—they also react differently to their surroundings.One of the most striking findings concerns what is called the nonshared environment.

If the parenting view was right, you might expect that siblings, who share most of their genes and also have the same parents, would be very similar to each other. In fact, behavioral geneticists find that siblings are much more different from one another than you would expect. The nonshared environment is simply a way of describing all the factors that influence children other than genes and the shared experiences they have as members of the same family, including parenting.

Those factors may range from prenatal influences to epigenetic variation, to birth-order differences, to sheer random events like accidents or illnesses. They even include differences in exactly how children interpret their parents’ actions. Put the risk-taking baby in the bouncy swing and he’s exhilarated; put his timid brother in the swing and he’s terrified.

Citations

(1). The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik

(2). The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson

Thinking Rhizomatically

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