Brain Rules for Baby (23 page)

Until they acquire language, what’s in store for young children as their tiny, emotion-heavy brains stitch themselves together is lots of confusion. This struggle is especially poignant in the early toddler years. Young children may not be aware of the emotions they are experiencing. They may not yet understand the socially correct way to communicate them. The result is that your little one may act out in anger when he is actually sad, or she may just become grumpy for no apparent reason. Sometimes a single event will induce a mixture of emotions. These emotions and their attendant feelings can feel so big and so out of control that the kids actually become frightened on top of it. This only amplifies the effect.

Because kids often express their emotions indirectly, you have to consider the environmental context before you attempt to decode your child’s behavior. If you are concluding that parents need to pay a lot of attention to the
emotional
landscapes of their kids to understand their behavior—all to get them properly socialized—you are 100 percent correct.

Things eventually settle down. The brain structures responsible for processing and regulating emotions will wire themselves together, chatting like teenagers on their cell phones. The problem is that it doesn’t happen all at once. The job really isn’t finished until you and your child start applying for student loans. Though it takes a long time, establishing this communication flow is extremely important.

Once it matures, here’s what emotional regulation looks like: Suppose you are at a play with some friends, watching a moving scene from the musical
Les Misérables.
It’s the strangely powerful (some say sappy) song “Bring Him Home.” You know two things: a) when you cry, you really sob, and b) this scene can really skewer you. To save yourself from social humiliation, you reappraise the situation as you sit in your seat listening and attempt to suppress your tears. You succeed—barely.

This overruling is emotional regulation. There is nothing wrong with crying, or any other number of expressions, but you realize that there are social contexts where the behavior is appropriate and social contexts where it is not. People who do this well generally have lots of friends. If you want your kids to be happy, you will spend lots of time teaching them how and when this filtering should occur.

“It glows! a little girl squealed in a mixture of delight and horror. “Ooh, I can see its claws!” said a little boy, just behind her. “And there’s its stinger!” said another girl, to which the boy replied, “Ooh. It looks just like your sister’s nose!” This was followed by some pushing. I laughed. I was completely surrounded by a group of bubbling, lively third-graders taking a field trip to a museum, in awe of the way scorpions glow under a black light.

One of the most beautiful parts of this exhibit was also its focal point, a display just out of reach above their shoulders. Here was a large, lonely scorpion, motionless on a rock, sitting inside in a larger, lonelier fishbowl. Ultraviolet light shining from above, the animal looked just like a glow-in-the-dark Lord of the Arachnids. Or, if you are a brain scientist, one of the most complex structures in the brain—the ones that generate and process our emotions.

Picture, if you will, that same scorpion suspended in the middle of your brain. The brain has two lobes, or hemispheres, which can be likened to two fishbowls that have been partially fused together. I’ll describe the fishbowls first, the scorpion second.

The partially fused fishbowls are the brain’s main hemispheres, logically called the left and right hemispheres. Each hemisphere is covered with a thick surface, made not of glass but a mixed layer of neurons and molecules. This cellular rind of tissue is the cortex. The
cortex is only a few cells thick, and it is like no other animal’s cortex in the world. It is the tissue that makes us human. Among many other functions, ours is involved in abstract thinking (like doing algebra). It is also involved in processing external sensory information (like spotting a saber-toothed tiger). But we don’t feel threatened by either algebra or tigers because of the cortex. That’s the job of the scorpion.

 

This cerebral arachnid is part of a set of structures called the limbic system, which means “border system. The scorpion’s claws, one for each hemisphere, are called amygdala, which for good reason means “almond” (that’s what they look like). The amygdala helps to generate your emotions and then store memories of the emotions it generates. In the real world of the brain, you would not see the scorpion shape. The limbic regions are obscured by other structures, including an impenetrable thicket of cellular connections dangling down from every millimeter of fishbowl surface. But the amygdala is not connected just to your cortex. It is connected to regions that regulate your heartbeat, your lungs, and areas that control your ability to move. Emotions really are distributed among assemblies of cells scattered throughout the brain.

Still with me? Things are about to get more complex.

 

The central region of the amygdala possesses big, fat connections to an area of the brain called the insula, a smallish region near the middle of the organ. That’s an important finding. The insula, with assistance from its amygdalar buddy, helps create subjective, emotionally relevant contexts for the sensory information arising throughout the body from our eyes, ears, nose, fingertips. How does that occur? We haven’t the foggiest idea. We know the insula collates perceptions of temperature, muscle tension, itch, tickle, sensual touch, pain, stomach pH, intestinal tension, and hunger from the rest of the
body. And then it chats about what it finds with the amygdala. Some researchers believe this communication is one of the reasons gathering information south of the head is so important to the creation and perception of emotional states. It may be involved in certain mental illnesses, like anorexia nervosa.

You get the impression this scorpion does a lot of talking. These connections are the phone lines allowing this part of the brain—and indirectly just about everywhere else in the body—to hear what the rest of the brain says. This is a big hint that emotion functions are distributed all over the brain, or at least announced all over the brain.

How the amygdala learns to brew up emotions and why it needs so many other neural regions to assist it are to some degree a mystery. We know the brain takes its own sweet time getting these connections wired up to one another—years, in some cases. (Ever watched a selfish little boy blossom into a thoughtful young man? All it takes is a little time, sometimes.)

Along with the ability to regulate emotions, the ability to perceive the needs of another person and respond with empathy plays a huge role in your child’s social competence. It’s big enough to be a Brain Rule: Empathy makes good friends. To have empathy, your child must cultivate the ability to peer inside the psychological interiors of someone else, accurately comprehend that person’s behavioral reward and punishment systems, then respond with kindness and understanding. The outward push of empathy helps cement people to each other, providing a long-term stability to their interactions. See what happens between mother and daughter in this story:

Notice what the daughter’s creative empathy did for her mom’s attitude toward their relationship.
It seemed to bind them together.
These empathetic interactions have names. When one person is truly happy for another, or sad for another, we say they are engaging in active-constructive behaviors. These behaviors are so powerful, they can keep not only parents and children together but husbands and wives together. If your marriage has a 3-to-1 ratio of active-constructive versus toxic-conflict interactions, your relationship is nearly divorce-proof. The best marriages have a ratio of 5 to 1. We talked in the Relationship chapter about the role of empathy in the transition to parenthood.

There is a neurobiology behind empathy, and I was reminded of it the first time my younger son got a shot. As the doctor filled the syringe, my wary eyes followed his movements. Little Noah, sensing something was wrong, began wriggling in my arms. He was getting ready to receive his first set of vaccinations, and he already didn’t like it. I knew the next few minutes were going to be excruciating. My wife, having endured the process with our elder child and no friend of the needle herself (when she was a little girl, her pediatrician’s nurse actually had Parkinson’s), sat this one out in the waiting room. It was up to me to hold Noah firmly in my arms to keep him still while the doctor did the dirty work.

That shouldn’t have been a big deal. I have a familiar research relationship with needles. In my career I have injected mice with pathogens; neural tissues with glass electrodes; and plastic test tubes with
dyes, sometimes missing the tube but not my finger. But this time was different. Noah’s eyes locked onto mine as the needle pushed into his little arm like a metallic mosquito from hell. Nothing prepared me for the look of betrayal on my youngest son’s face. His forehead wrinkled like cellophane. He howled. I did too, silently. For no rational reason, I felt like a failure. My arm even ached.

Blame it on my brain. As I witnessed the pain in Noah’s arm, some researchers believe, neurons that mediate the ability to experience the pain in
my
arm were suddenly springing to life. I was not getting the shot, but that didn’t matter to my brain. I was mirroring the event, literally experiencing the pain of someone about whom I care a great deal. No wonder my arm ached.

These so-called mirror neurons are scattered across the brain like tiny cellular asteroids. We recruit them, in concert with memory systems and emotional processing regions, when we encounter another person’s experiences. Neurons with mirror-like properties come in many forms, researchers think. In my case, I was experiencing the mirrors most closely associated with extremity pain. I was also activating motor neurons that governed my arm’s desire to withdraw from a painful situation.

Many other mammals appear to have mirror neurons, too. In fact, mirror neurons initially were discovered by Italian researchers trying to figure out how monkeys picked up raisins. The researchers noticed that certain brain regions became activated not only when monkeys picked up raisins but also when they simply watched others pick up raisins. The animals brains “mirrored the behavior. In humans, the same neural regions are activated not only when you tear a piece of paper and when you see Aunt Martha tearing a piece of paper—but also if you hear the words “Aunt Martha is tearing a piece of paper.”

It’s like having a direct internal link to another person’s psychological experience. Mirror neurons permit you to understand an observed action by experiencing it firsthand—even though you’re not
experiencing it firsthand. Sounds a lot like empathy. Mirror neurons may also be profoundly involved in both the ability to interpret nonverbal cues, particularly facial expressions, and the ability to understand someone else’s intentions. This second talent falls under an umbrella of skills called Theory of Mind, which we’ll describe in detail in the Moral chapter. Some researchers think Theory of Mind skills are the engines behind empathy.

Not all scientists agree about the role mirror neurons play in mediating complex human behaviors like empathy and Theory of Mind. It is definitely a matter of contention. The preponderance of evidence suggests a role for them, but I also think a great deal more research needs to be done. With more research, we may find that empathy is not a touchy-feely phenomenon but, rather, has deep neurophysiological roots. That would be an astonishing thing to say.

 

Because this type of neural activity can be easily measured, it is possible to ask if every child has an equal talent for empathy. The unsurprising answer is no. Autistic children, for example, have no ability to detect changes in people’s emotional states. They simply can’t decode another person’s psychological interiors by looking at his or her face. They cannot discover people’s motivations or predict their intentions. Some researchers think they lack mirror-neuron activity. Even outside of this extreme, empathy is uneven. You probably know people who are naturally highly empathetic and others with the emotional understanding of dirt. Are they born that way? Though separating social and cultural influences is tough, the equally tough answer is: probably.