Brain Rules for Baby (15 page)

My mother’s favorite artist in the world was Rembrandt. She was enraptured by his use of light and space, which transported her effortlessly into his 17th-century world. She was much less enamored of 20th-century art. I remember her railing about Marcel Duchamp’s
Fountain
—simply a urinal—being placed in the same artistic firmament as her beloved van Rijn. Toilets as art? And she
hated
it? For me as an 11-year-old boy, that was artistic Valhalla!

Mom, to whom I owe every atom of curiosity I possess, reacted with her typical parental insight and grace: She set aside her own preferences and followed my curiosity. She brought home two pictures wrapped in brown paper and sat me down. “Imagine, she began, with just a hint of eye-rolling, “that you tried to express in two dimensions all the information of a three-dimensional object. How would you do it?” I stumbled around trying to get the right answer, or any answer, but made no progress. Mom interrupted. “Perhaps you would come up with something like this!” With the flourish of an actress, which she briefly was, Mom ripped open the bag, revealing prints of Picasso masterpieces:
Three Musicians
and
Violin and Guitar
. It was love at first cube.

Not to take anything away from Rembrandt, but
Three Musicians
was a revelation to me, as was the creative mind that conceived it. Why did I think that? How does anyone recognize creativity? It is a tough question, saturated in cultural subjectivity and individual experience, as the differences between me and my mother showed. Researchers do believe that creativity has a few core components, however. These include the ability to perceive new relationships between old things, to conjure up ideas or things or
whatever
that do not currently exist. (Attempts to depict 3D in a 2D world come to mind.) Creativity also must evoke emotions, positive or negative, in someone else. Something—a product, a result—has to come of the process. And it involves a healthy dose of risk-taking. It took a lot of guts to make a painting of musicians that looked as if they had exploded. It took a lot of guts to plop down a urinal in a 1917 New York show and call it art.

Human creativity involves many groups of cognitive gadgets, including episodic memory and autobiographical memory systems. Like a TiVo recording a sitcom, these systems permit the brain to keep track of events happening to you, allowing you a reference to your personal experiences in both time and space. You can recall going to the grocery store and what you bought there, not to mention the idiot who stubbed your heel with a grocery cart, because of these episodic memory systems. They are separate from the memory systems that allow you to calculate the sales tax of your purchase, or even remember what a sales tax is. But that’s not all episodic systems do.

Scientist Nancy Andreasen found that these TiVos are recruited when innovative people start associating connectively—making the insightful connections across seemingly unrelated notions that allowed to them to
create.
The TiVos reside in brain regions called association cortices, which are huge in humans—the biggest of any primate, in fact—stretching out like cobwebs across the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes.

A second set of findings associates creativity with risk-taking. This is not the kind of foolishness where you as an undergraduate ate two 16-inch pizzas in one sitting because someone named Tom-Tom dared you (don’t ask). Abnormal risk-taking, which is also associated more with substance abuse and bipolar mania, does not make you more creative. There is a type of risk-taking that does, however, and the research community calls it “functional impulsivity. Researchers uncovered two separate neural processing systems that manage functional impulsivity. One governs low-risk, or “cold”, decision-making behaviors; the other governs high-risk, or “hot”, decision-making behaviors. A cold decision might involve a child going to a favorite restaurant with a friend. A hot decision might involve ordering the nuclear inferno chili appetizer on the friend’s dare.

With all the crazy things children do, how can we tell functional impulsivity from abnormal risk-taking? Unfortunately, there is no test that can distinguish “productive” from “stupid” in kids (or adults, for that matter).

Research on risk shows some sex-based differences. Boys are less cautious, for example. The difference starts showing up in the second year of life, and then things really ramp up: Boys are 73 percent more likely than girls to die from accidents between birth and puberty, and they break rules more often. But in recent decades, the sex-based differences have begun to shrink, perhaps because of changing expectations. Separating nature from nurture is darned hard with issues like these.

Whatever their gender, creative entrepreneurs have functional-impulsivity instincts in spades. They score atmospherically high on tests that measure risk-taking, and they have a strong ability to cope with ambiguity. When their brains are caught in the act of being creative, the medial and orbital sectors of the prefrontal cortex, regions just behind the eyes, light up like crazy on an fMRI. More “managerial types” (that’s actually what researchers call them) don’t have these scores—or these neural activities.

Can you predict creativity in kids? Psychologist Paul Torrance created a 90-minute exam called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. The tests are composed of some truly delightful problems. Children might be presented with a picture of a stuffed rabbit, then told they have three minutes to improve upon the design to make it more fun to play with. They might be presented with a scribble, then told to make a narrative from it in the same three-minute time frame. Torrance first administered the exam in 1958 to several hundred children, then followed their lives into adulthood, assessing their creative output all the way: things like patents filed, books written, papers published, grants awarded, and businesses started. The study is still ongoing, the participants christened “Torrance’s Kids”. Torrance died in 2003, and the study is now supervised by colleagues.

As a research tool, the exam has been formally evaluated many times. Though the test is not without its critics, the most amazing finding remains how well a child’s scores predict his or her future creative output. Indeed, the scores predict lifetime creative output with a correlation three times stronger than native IQ can predict. The test has been translated into 50 languages and taken by millions of people. It is the go-to standard for evaluating creativity in children.

The most memorable experience in my rookie year of parenting our younger son, Noah, was the moment he said his first multi-syllable word. Noah’s first six months had been a fountain of joy for our family. He is a glass-half-full kind of kid, with a smile as effervescent as root beer and a laugh like bubble bath. Noah approached his language skills with the same joy. He possessed a particular preoccupation with sea creatures, which I blame in equal parts on
Finding Nemo
and
National Geographic
. We put pictures of sea animals on the ceiling above his changing table, including a cartoon of a giant red Pacific octopus. He had not yet said any full words at the half-year mark, but he was about to.

One morning I was busy changing his diaper, just before work. Noah suddenly stopped smiling and just stared straight at the ceiling as I cleaned him up. Slowly, deliberately, he pointed his finger upward, turned his gaze from the ceiling, looked me straight in the eye, and said in a clear voice: “Oct-o-pus. Then he laughed out loud. He pointed at it again, said it louder: “OCT-O-PUS,” and giggled. I almost had a heart attack. “Yes! I cried, “OCTOPUS!” He replied, “Octo, octo, octopus”, laughing now. We both chanted it. I forgot what I was doing the rest of that morning—I think I called in sick for work—and we had a dance that day, celebrating all things eight-legged. Other words came in rapid succession in the days following. (So did my absenteeism.)

You can’t argue with the fact that verbal skills are important in human intelligence. They even make it into IQ tests. One of the seminal joys for any parent is to watch a child grapple with this unique human talent in the first months of life. What happened in Noah’s brain that made so many things come together at once on that changing table—or in any other child’s brain as language dawns on them like a sunrise? We don’t really know. Many theories abound about how we acquire language. Famed linguist Noam Chomsky believes we are born with language software preloaded into our heads, a package he calls universal grammar.

Once language gets going, it tends to develop quickly. Within a year and a half, most kids can pronounce 50 words and understand about 100 more. That figure explodes to 1,000 words by 36 months and, just before the sixth birthday, to 6,000. Calculated from birth, we acquire new words at the rate of three per day. This project takes a long time to finish. English will require the mastery of about 50,000 words, and that doesn’t even include idioms and fixed expressions like “hitting a home run or “pot of gold”. It’s pretty complex stuff. On top of vocabulary, children have to learn the sounds of the language (phonemes) and the social meaning of the words (affective intent).

Infants track these characteristics of language at an astonishingly early age. At birth, your baby can distinguish between the sounds of every language that has ever been invented. Professor Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, discovered this phenomenon. She calls kids at this age “citizens of the world”. Chomsky puts it this way: We are not born with the capacity to speak a specific language. We are born with the capacity to speak
any
language.

 

Unfortunately, things don’t stay that way. By their first birthday, Kuhl found, babies can no longer distinguish between the sounds of every language on the planet. They can distinguish only between those to which they have been exposed in the past six months. A Japanese baby not exposed to “rake” and “lake” during her second six months of life cannot distinguish between those two sounds by the time she is 1 year old. As always, there are exceptions. Adults with training can still learn to distinguish speech sounds in other languages. But in general, the brain appears to have a limited window of opportunity in an astonishingly early time frame. The cognitive door begins swinging shut at six months, and, unless something pushes against it, the door closes. By 12 months, your baby’s brain has made decisions that affect her the rest of her life.

What is strong enough, Kuhl and other researchers wondered, to keep that door from closing? Say you expose your baby, in the critical period, to a tape of someone speaking a foreign language. Does the brain stay open for phonemic business? The answer is not really. How about a DVD of someone speaking the foreign language? The door continues to shut. Only one thing keeps that door open to another language. You have to deliver the words through a social interaction. A real live person has to come into the room and speak the language directly to the child. If the child’s brain detects this social interaction, its neurons will begin recording the second language, phonemes and all.
To perform these cognitive tasks, the brain needs the information-rich, give-and-take stimulation that another human being provides.

Tucked into these data is a bombshell of an idea, one with empirical support across the developmental sciences.
Human learning in its most native state is primarily a relational exercise
. Intelligence is not developed in the electronic crucibles of cold, lifeless machines but in the arms of warm, loving people. You can literally rewire a child’s brain through exposure to
relationships.

Hear that laughter? That’s the sound of my son Noah, demonstrating to his old man how important honest-to-God active parenting is in teaching him how to do something as wonderful, and as human, as learning languages.

Though speech is a uniquely human trait, it is nestled inside a vast world of communication behaviors, many of which are used by other animals, too. But we aren’t always communicating the same thing, as a 2-year-old boy discovered one sunny day in Southern California. The mix-up put him in the hospital for a week.

The little guy was out for a neighborhood stroll with his mother. She stopped to chat with a friend. The wiggly preschooler sauntered off a short distance to a neighbor’s lawn. Or, should I say, the neighbor’s Doberman pinscher’s lawn. Unaware of canine territorial behavior, the 2-year-old spied a small shiny coin on the neighbor’s grass and moved to pick it up. The dog glared at the little boy, gave several warning barks, lowered her head to cover her jugular, and let out a threatening growl. Startled, the boy looked up, making direct eye contact. That was a canine declaration of war. And an extended stay in the emergency room. The dog lunged for the boy’s throat and got his arm instead—and, 20 stitches later, a court order to be euthanized.
The dog, though, was simply acting upon an ancient behavioral reflex involving a reaction to, of all things, somebody’s face.

Face-to-face communication has many meanings in the animal world, most of them not very nice. Extracting social information by examining the face is a powerful slice of mammalian evolutionary history. But we humans use our faces, including eye-to-eye contact, for many reasons besides communicating threats. We have the most sophisticated nonverbal message systems on the planet. From babies on up, we constantly communicate social information with our bodies in coordination with our smiles and frowns. Together they constitute the crown jewels of extrospective information—remember that term?—which is a potent way to get a point across quite quickly.

Though much mythology surrounds the idea of body language (sometimes people cross and uncross their legs simply because their legs get tired), real findings have emerged from the study of it, some relevant to parenting. Two of the more intriguing studies involve how body language and gestures interact with human speech.