Love at Goon Park (44 page)

Once again, we are left with one of those imperfect and complex answers. Clearly, some cultures, such as the Efe, do indeed practice a cotton top tamarin approach to life. Clearly again, Bowlby's model was based more on the mother-first model of the rhesus macaques—not to mention those passionately imprinted greylag goslings. If you assume that the best clue to our basic biology is in the majority pattern, then you can't simply dismiss Bowlby as an artifact from a less egalitarian society. Culture to culture, we still look mostly like a mother-centric species. That doesn't mean that mother is the only option. But it should remind us that for human babies a central parent figure is absolutely, undeniably important. Someone in the family has to be paying full attention to that baby. Bowlby was right when he said those early attachments—to mother, father, or loving caretaker—are always among the most powerful influences in our lives. Where we may indeed be flexible is at the individual level, in paying specific attention to the needs of our own specific children. If that seems too small a beginning, there is plenty of research to assure us that even small gestures matter.

Consider one of the first and most deceptively simple results of Harry's cloth-mother tests: that babies crave a soft touch. Since that time, researchers have been trying to figure out why. Why would a terrycloth-towel-wrapped mother be night and day compared to a wire one? What in our biology makes contact comfort so critical to healthy development?

The scientist who did some of the first and best work on the basic chemistry of touch is Saul Schanberg of the department of pharmacology at Duke University. Schanberg started in a non–Harry Harlow
way, by looking at rats. Schanberg found that when mother rats licked their babies, the action produced a cascade of much needed compounds, in fact, the growth hormones that produce normal body development. Remove the mother—remove the touch of her tongue, and the baby rats became stunted beings. Put the mother back into the nest and the babies gratefully began to stretch outward and upward. In another reminder of the basic mechanics of motherhood, Schanberg also found that you could—at least with rats—simulate the mother's lick with a wet paintbrush.

The Duke mother-touch studies fit smoothly into the evolutionary concept of Bowlby's attachment theory. Schanberg suggested that the intense response to touch alerts us to a primitive survival mechanism, one that probably exists in many species. “Because mammals depend on maternal care for survival in their early weeks or months, the prolonged absence of a mother's touch, more than forty-five minutes in the rat, for instance, triggers a slowing of the infant's metabolism,” he wrote. If his mother was missing, the baby rat used less energy. That meant he consumed less fuel. And that meant he could survive a longer separation from the mother. All well and good as long as she wasn't gone too long. Once she returned, Schanberg says, “The mother's touch reverses the process, so that growth resumes at normal rates.” The baby who huddles into his crib and the little monkey who curls up at the edge of her cage appear hopeless. But we should be aware that some of the huddling is just conservation. It is a curious mixture of despair and hope. As they hunker down, the young animals are waiting for their mothers to come home and for everything to be all right.

Myron Hofer, at New York University, also explored the power of touch by studying rats. Hofer was a genius at considering the mechanics of mothering. He would take the mother rat out of the nest and substitute her essential elements: warmth, milk, stroking with a brush, sound (recordings of her squeaks); he even pumped her odor into the cage. Hofer found that only touch made a difference in how the little rats grew. So he brought the mothers back into the cages.
There was one catch. He kept them under anesthesia, so there was no touch and nuzzle and lick. A mother's inert presence helped not at all. The babies continued to quietly shrink away.

Schanberg then went on to do a classic study with Tiffany Field, at the University of Miami. The two researchers went back to Klaus and Kennell's concern with preemies, but from a different angle. They weren't looking at whether the infants bonded through touch, just whether the babies physically needed the human contact. Field and a crew of graduate students went into one preemie nursery and simply touched the babies. They did this just for fifteen minutes, three times a day. The touching was very deliberate—slow firm strokes, the gentle stretching of tiny arms and legs. The stroked infants grew 50 percent faster than the standard isolated preemies. They were more awake and active. They moved more easily. A year later, on cognitive and motor-skill tests, they looked stronger and smarter than preemies left alone in the standard incubator. Touch therapy is now a routine part of hospital procedures for premature infants.

Field went on to head up the University of Miami's Touch Research Institute (TRI), where she conducted numerous massage therapy studies. The bottom line in all those studies was that touch is good for your health, your immune system, your sleep, your anxiety level, your life. Eventually, researchers discovered that touch could be an antidote to the painful effects of a still-faced mother; if she gazed blankly but also touched and stroked, the babies seemed to feel connected still. If the mother added touch, her infant would continue to respond, smile, and look back.

Recall Gig Levine's studies that found a small, interesting break from mother actually improved a baby rat's life? That effect has been found over and over and since his first surprising—and nearly rejected—research. Researchers have polished, refined, and better explained those inexplicable results. Robert Sapolsky at Stanford and Michael Meaney at McGill University in Montreal expanded on Levine's original three minutes of handling by increasing it to a fifteen-minute
break. Two years later, they could still pick out the handled rats by their capable responses—their smooth easy reactions to a strange situation. Their comparison rats—oversheltered and unhandled—were easily startled and prone to rapid increases in corticosterone, a rodent stress hormone comparable to cortisol in humans and other primates.

Corticosterone—and, scientists suspect, cortisol as well—turns out to provoke some chemistry that can actually damage neurons, notably in the hippocampus, where memories are often processed. So handled rats—and, Sapolsky speculated, well-nurtured children—may grow into a healthier adulthood, complete with a brain that stays efficient longer. “Real rats in the real world don't get handled by graduate students,” Sapolsky notes. “Is there a natural world equivalent?” He and Meaney decided to compare natural mothering styles. Surely, they reasoned, not all rat mothers raise their young with equal attention and care. They were exactly right, of course, and you would find the same thing in humans, monkeys, and just about any other species. “There's lots of natural variation in mothering,” Meaney says, “from good, to not very good, to very bad.”

By very bad, he doesn't mean physically abusive. He means unreliable, distracted, neglectful. Even baby rats need a mother who pays attention—licks and cuddles and feeds and protects. What Meaney suspected might be really important was simply what a mother does—or doesn't do—as part of the everyday routine. So he looked at mothers who focused on their young by devotedly licking and grooming them. He then compared those nurturing females to others who just couldn't quite stay interested in the little rat pups. Meaney found that the rat pups blessed with mothers who spent a lot of time caring for them had less of that simmering stress chemistry and, therefore, distinctly healthier brains.

In other words, what Sapolsky calls “this grim cascade of stressrelated degeneration” can be slowed, or even stopped, by something as apparently mundane as a mother who pays attention. “It doesn't have to depart that far from normal to have profound influence
on development,” Meaney emphasizes. “You don't have to beat children, to compromise development.” He did look at childhood stressors beyond the usual variation in mothering. To do that, Meaney turned to a tried and true Harry Harlow technique—isolating baby from mother. In one study, he collaborated with Emory University psychologist Paul Plotsky. They lengthened the separation from mother rat to three hours a day for the first two weeks of their baby rats' lives. “The most potent effect on stress reactivity that we can achieve is with maternal separation,” Meaney says simply. The two psychologists found that these more severely separated rats grew into chronically stressed adult rodents. Plotsky described them as skittish. They were anxious in new situations. They tended to crouch in one place. “They stick to dark protected places like corners or tunnels,” Plotsky says.

And as they hunched into a corner, the rats' stress chemistry soared. Outwardly, they were sitting as still as possible. Inwardly, everything was vibrating. Heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose, adrenaline, noradrenaline, the whole stress system was ratcheting up. Even in their familiar cage, the separated rats stayed restless and unusually aggressive. In monkeys, Plotsky says, you can sometimes induce this kind of chemistry without physical separation. A little mental separation will do—the kind you get with a distracted and overbusy mother. If researchers put a mother monkey and her baby into an environment in which the mother had to forage constantly for food, worry about meals, she paid less and less attention to her infant. When these baby monkeys were tested later, as adults, they looked—in their stress responses, anyway—a lot like rats who had been separated from their mothers. They stayed always just a little frantic.

Does this transfer to the way we treat our own children? Yes and absolutely no. If we've learned anything since the Watsonian psychology of the 1930s, it's that rats are not, after all, a flawless model of human behavior. They don't build that intense face-to-face attachment in their mother-and-child relationships. But rat work certainly
raises some reasonable questions about early environment and relationships. The monkey studies raise more questions. And there is evidence, as Plotsky points out, that early experience does sensitize circuits in human brains, especially if it is a stressful experience. “Infant organisms are learning machines,” Plotsky says.

A research team at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, led by psychiatrist Martin Teicher, has been using brain imaging technologies to compare people from a safe and protective family and those who grew up in an abusive one. In children from unhappy homes, the researchers have seen arrested development of the left hemisphere. That left side tends to be the hemisphere associated with happiness and positive emotions. The scientists have observed similar stunting in a structure called the
cerebellar vermis,
which is linked to emotional balance. Teicher and his colleagues suspect that the wild swings of stress hormones and neurotransmitters, responding to abuse, can subtly restructure the brain to create such differences. They also think the changes may mean that the individual is “wired” to superimpose hostility on an environment. “We know that any animal exposed to stress and neglect early in life develops a brain that is wired to experience fear, anxiety, and stress,” Teicher says. “We think the same is true of people.” He also cites the “seminal” work of Harry Harlow as a major influence on his modern, high-tech exploration of the influence of parent on child.

A person too prone to perceive a threat may be equally prone to overreact to the perception. “You can imagine how a child with a history of physical abuse, entering preschool, might get into considerable trouble and have difficulty making stable friendships if he or she tends to see a ‘threat' where none exists,” Plotsky says. The researchers who study the effects of early damaging environment on children, almost to a person, want to find ways to turn that around. As they better understand the biological damage done by abuse and neglect, they wonder whether that hard-won knowledge can be used to help those children. Can we undo what is harmful to us in childhood? Can we preserve what is best?

Recently, Meaney again focused on rats with indifferent mothers, females who weren't particularly interested in licking and grooming. By now, you'd predict that these rat pups were doomed to corrosive high-stress chemistry. You could also envision them as those neurotic adult rats, hustling aimlessly around their cages. Meaney tried two kinds of therapies. As Steve Suomi had, he gave the baby rats better mothers. Again, he found that an anxious baby rat given to a nurturing mother will change for the better, become less stressed and happier. In this newer study, though, Meaney was also interested in trying to help animals that don't have a chance for a better parent. So he put other stressed infants into an enriched environment. Several times a day, he took the baby rats out of their plain home cages and placed them in larger pens equipped with ropes for climbing, running wheels, wood blocks, and other rodent entertainment. This was Gig Levine's idea of “handling” taken to a newly sophisticated level. It worked, too. In response to that engaging playground, as the rats looked about with interest, their stress levels came down—and stayed lower. The rats—compared to those from similarly neglectful homes—were noticeably easygoing as they grew up.

There was a curious catch, though. The enriched playground wasn't nearly as effective at fixing the problem as having a better mother. When Meaney studied the brains of these newly calmed rats, he found their internal stress response was still set on a high anxiety level. The psychologists tracking those rats now suspect that they didn't actually correct the stress problems. What the enrichment program did was strengthen other parts of the brain, enough that the rats could compensate. In effect, the rest of the brain was able to stabilize the system. Paul Plotsky thinks of this as not so much a fix as a bandage. “When you improve the rats' behavior, are you correcting the initial problems or are you creating a patch?” Plotsky asks. “The answer seems to be, at least in some cases, you are creating a patch.”