All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:17
Babies, Brains, Nature and Nurture | Stuart Shanker and Stefan Molyneux
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat.
This is Stephan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio and I have the esteemed Dr. Shankar from York University on the line with me and thank you so much for taking the time to chat with myself and my listeners.
I was quite intrigued, I must say, by a statement that was attributed to you, I hope accurately, in a recent Toronto Star article where you had talked about the reality that brain surgeons have concluded that every adult brain is so different that even basic landmarks can be hard to find and that statement kind of blew my mind and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about what you meant by that.
Well, that was a book that was written by Bill Calvin called Conversations with Neil's Brain and really it's a reminder of, this is a story that Bill tells right at the start of the book where A neurosurgeon is looking for one of the most prominent of the sulci and has difficulty finding it.
And all of a sudden, it struck him just how variable an individual's brain is.
Now, if you think about that in terms of a lot of other research that we have, there were these incredible studies, for example, that were done on individuals with hydroencephalus.
Where it was discovered, this is the stuff that was done by Lorber, it was discovered that in fact that they did have intact things like language or other cognitive skills, but that it was in parts of the brain that were really never associated with these functions.
And so this is a pattern that we see over and over again, and it's a reminder of the enormous plasticity and variability of the human brain.
And it was fascinating for me to read the observation that one of the ways that nature has solved the problem of requiring a very large brain for human beings because it has such evolutionary advantages, and the challenge of course of women both wanting to walk upright and also not wanting to give birth to a brain the size of a bowling ball,
It's the idea of I guess the brain being born with the neurons but not the connections and the connections being so dependent upon the early experiences of the child and how much that influences the way that our brains development.
I was wondering if you could share your thoughts on that which is to me completely fascinating.
Okay, so just tell me, do you pronounce your name Stephan or Stephen?
Stéphane.
Stéphane.
Okay, so Stéphane, you have to tell me, how long do you want to talk about this?
Oh, listen, you know, I am a sponge for this stuff, and I run a philosophy show that's really devoted to finding peaceful solutions to social problems, and if we're dealing with different brains, that to me is a very, very important thing, so whatever time you have, I am completely overjoyed to soak up as much as I can.
Okay, well, this idea that you're mentioning now, it's called secondary altruism.
This was an idea that was first broached in the 1940s by a Dutch scientist called Adolf Portman, but it was sort of rediscovered by Stephen Jay Gould in the late 70s, early 80s, and Gould started to write about it.
And he wrote a very famous paper in which he essentially said that the human infant is a fetus outside the womb.
And it's a fetus for about the first nine months for the reasons that you just mentioned.
And that idea has now been picked up by a number of developmentalists.
It has enormous implications for our understanding of essentially three basic questions.
And the three questions that we ask ourselves are what's inside this little tiny brain when the kid comes into the world?
What's not inside the brain?
And the stuff that's not inside the brain, how does it get inside the brain?
We know that the implications of this are the incredible plasticity and adaptability of the infant's brain to essentially any environment known on earth, apart from deep sea.
That's the only part of the world we haven't inhabited, but it means that this very malleable, very undeveloped brain can adapt to whatever the contingencies are that the child is exposed to from birth.
And, you know, you see obvious implications of that in things like the extraordinary variability of human languages.
I won't go into that, but let's just pause and think about these three basic questions that I raised.
So, first question, what's in the brain when the child is born?
Well, we know that the senses are all functioning, and some better than others, but they're all fairly develop that birth.
What they don't have is they're not interconnected.
The senses aren't yet working together and somehow the child's early experiences are critical for the neural connections forged between different senses and for the connections between the senses and the motor system.
The sensory affect motor connections.
So this is very much a function of the kinds of experiences that the child undergoes in the first year of life.
And one of the interesting things about this is that it would appear that humans have passed down from one generation to the next over the course of our evolution.
So at a very minimum, a couple of hundred thousand years and quite likely far longer than that, caregiving practices that enhance these connections between the different senses and between the senses and the motor system.
All right, so that's present in the brain.
The next thing that's present in the brain are all kinds of reflexes and some of these reflexes are very very old and they date back to when our evolutionary ancestors lived in the trees and many of these reflexes serve as what we refer to as reactive self-regulating mechanisms.
What that means is that the infant Because the brain is so unformed, because it's so, in a sense, vulnerable, the child has to have a number of automatic mechanisms which will shut down interactions or shut down stimuli if they become too strong for this little brain.
In other words, the infant It needs to be stimulated by a primary caregiver.
It needs to be aroused.
This is what sort of fuels the brain to start learning about the world to form these connections that I'm talking about.
But if the arousal gets too great, there have to be certain mechanisms that will shut down the interaction to protect the brain from basically being hurt.
And so these are mechanisms like, you know, shutting your eyes, crying, turning away as the child gets a little older.
And then the third thing that neuroscientists are looking at are what are now known as primitive emotion circuits.
And this is based on the work of Jaak Panksepp and we look at things like love, anger, curiosity and fear.
These are very ancient reflex systems, mechanisms that essentially trigger an emotion like fear based on a stimulus.
And the function here is to, of course, it's a survival function, to protect the infant, to draw the caregiver close to it.
So now, if you think about a little baby, so the baby has these reflexes to protect itself and it has a motion, primitive emotion circuits that get triggered.
What is it missing?
Well, what it's missing are the systems necessary to deliberately, to intentionally control or modulate an emotional response.
We refer to these today as executive functions or voluntary self-regulating functions.
They're known as effortful control.
And somehow what the baby has to acquire are these systems on the basis of its interactions with its primary caregiver.
So, do you want me to still keep going, Stefan, or not?
Oh, absolutely.
I have some questions bubbling, but I don't want you to lose your train of thought, so I'll hold off.
So now we start to think about the primary unit of early brain development, or the primary mechanism, is in fact the dyad.
It was nature's way of Resolving this paradox of giving birth to this very, very immature, this almost fetal brain.
And the way the system works is you have a higher order brain, the brain of the primary caregiver, that is quite literally hooked up through things like facial expressions, eyes, touch, hooked up to the lower brain.
And this higher-order brain exercises the regulating function, the effortful control for the lower-order brain, and it is by being regulated that the child, the baby, acquires the capacity to self-regulate.
It is by being in these interactions that the necessary information is delivered to those parts of the brain that are coming online in the early years of life.
delivering this information so that they become organized to perform this function.
So, sorry, just to make sure I understand that, so you mean that a baby learns to self-soothe emotional upset by being soothed, externally cuddled, and held, and shushed, and so on?
Exactly.
Okay, sorry, go on.
And so now, one of the reasons why this is absolutely critical for our views about education Can I now apply this to the neuroeducation piece?
Please do, please.
Okay, so one of the things that we know is that when a child enters school, when a child comes into grade one, we can do certain tests and we can make certain predictions about how well that child will do in school, how far they'll go in education.
We can even make predictions about What sort of job they'll end up having, whether they'll be married, things like that.
And it is very difficult for us to change a child's trajectory.
It's very difficult to take, say, a child who comes into grade one with, you know, essentially a C minus grades, and to help that child become an A student.
Yes, it's possible, but when you look at the average student, when you look at the population, It turns out that we can hardly nudge trajectories at all.
And then the question is, why?
For much of the 20th century, especially in the late 20th century, the thinking was that it must be because of IQ.
It must be because that somehow there is this biological substrate which determines a child's educational potential.
And so what you're confronted with are the limitations that formal education has in enhancing beyond a certain couple of points, five points was the figure that was commonly used, enhancing much beyond that what the child's biological potential was.
And, of course, this is the famous bell curve argument.
And it was really only in the year 2000 when Jack Shonkoff and Deborah Phillips published a book called "From Neurons to Neighborhoods" that all of a sudden people began to realize that there was a very different explanation of what was going on.
In that book, what Shonkoff and Phillips argued, they had a team of 34 leading American developmental scientists that contributed to this.
And the consensus was that this was really a story about self-regulation.
It was not A story about IQ.
In fact, IQ is a fairly minor factor in how well a child will do in school.
It really is a function of how well the child does the sorts of things you just mentioned one second ago.
How well the child self-soothes, how well they can deal with their frustration or their anxiety, how well the child can pay attention.
And deferral of gratification, which really is essential to success in life.
Yeah, absolutely right.
So now the question is, let's take this back now to this little, you know, picture we're trying to paint of these early mother-infant interactions that are delivering this information to the child's brain that the child needs to develop these very systems.
It's in these early interactions that it's, you know, in these early regulating interactions that this stimulates These stimulate get into the developing systems in the brain, which will take over this function.
But now we start to look at a kid and we start to say, well, what sorts of things might block these interactions?
What kinds of biological factors, for example, might impede a child's ability to engage in these back and forth interactions that help build these self-regulating systems?
Well, One of the things that can happen is, suppose that the child is very sensitive, suppose the child is hypersensitive to certain kinds of stimuli, hypersensitive to visual stimuli or auditory stimuli.
What does that mean?
Well, it means that if the child is highly reactive to these kinds of stimuli, that they actually hurt, then what will happen The second of the things I mentioned, those reactive self-protective mechanisms kick in.
They block the interaction.
They block that thing that is essentially an aversive experience for the baby.
The problem is that if this happens too much, it is blocking, it is obstructing the very experiences necessary for the development of effortful self-regulation.
Right.
So, what may be happening, and we think it's happening with most kids, it can happen for biological reasons, it can happen for social reasons.
It happens, for example, when we study children that are raised in orphanages, or when we study children that are raised in war zones, what we see is they have very undeveloped self-regulation.
And this makes perfect sense.
It's because they haven't had enough of these early interactions, these regulating interactions that help them develop the systems themselves.
And I mean, it would seem to be quite empirical in that if you think about a child in a war zone, of course, the child is physically unable to control the stimuli of bombs or whatever.
And so you sort of give up trying what you can't succeed at as a kid.
So I can see how that could work.
Yes, and that's exactly right.
And in fact, we talk about, this is called withdrawal in the baby.
And withdrawal is actually as serious in a young baby, in looking at young babies, as overstimulation, as overexcitement is.
They're two extremes of the same problem.
So now, what we're trying to do is, you take this book by Shonkoff and Phillips, telling us how important self-regulation is for how well a kid's going to do in school.
And there are a couple of lessons that we're learning from this in terms of changing our views about education.
The first thing is it tells us that we want to get to kids young.
We want to see, you know, how are they interacting?
Are they doing what you just said for reasons that may be much more subtle?
It could have to do with something as subtle as that the child finds being touched an unpleasant sensation and so they avoid physical contact.
So we really want to start as early as we can with little babies and find out how they're engaging and how all the senses are working and are they working together.
Now we know that there is a special kind of window of opportunity between the ages of around three and five when the parts of the brain that are going to take over these functions are literally exploding in their growth.
And so now what we ask ourselves is, What can we do to try to ensure that every single child during these critical years is getting these kinds of experiences?
This is very much the reason why in Ontario we are introducing universal kindergarten for first five-year-olds and then four-year-olds and then other kinds of programs that we have in place for younger children.
So that's the first point.
The first point is trying to prevent problems or mitigate problems as young as possible, to open up, to expand the child's developmental horizon by constraining to expand the child's developmental horizon by constraining these problems in early self-regulation.
And just because I mean I've done some research for this interview and I'll just give a very very brief and you correct me wherever I go astray what it is that we're talking about physiologically that the brain is born with about a hundred billion neurons and that is as many as you're going to get throughout your life but what is missing is the connection between these neurons and that is something that occurs
in distinct phases during the development of the brain, and particularly in the limbic system, which manages stress and a failure of the development of that can lead to problems with depression or cardiovascular problems, just stress problems in general, and of course, a lack of capacity to concentrate, to defer gratification, and of course, a lack of capacity to concentrate, to defer gratification, all the things necessary for academic or
And it is very much the external stimuli that the child receives that is very responsible for the development of the higher order of functioning in particular I mean the stuff that happens with the senses is fairly common.
The cells are created, they migrate to the proper areas in the brain and then they sort of fuse these things, these neurons together with synapses and it is these connections really that we're talking about.
That's a real amateur stab at an overview.
Is that more or less what it is that we're talking about?
That's actually pretty good.
Excellent.
No, it's pretty good.
So, I think one of the big changes that we're seeing, say, today from where we were 15 years ago, is that when neuroscientists started to do these studies, it gave birth to this explosion of, you know, interest in the idea of stimulating a young brain, which people interpreted as a matter of, you know, trying to teach a child at a very young age abstract concepts or whatever it was.
And so now where we are today, there were many problems with this interpretation of those early studies.
And now what we understand is it's really not a, it's not a case of saying to parents, well, you know, look, what you want to do is you want to try to teach your kid, you know, a third language by the time they're six months or, or, you know, teach them math while they're, you know, in their diaper.
It's a case of self-regulation.
And so what do we mean by that?
These experiences that you're talking about that are critical, well, critical for what?
So, we look at this in terms of five levels for the child, and the first level is the child's temperament, their actual biology.
They have to learn how to regulate their own arousal states, what sorts of things to do to calm them down, what kinds of experiences to avoid, things like that.
The next level up is emotion regulation.
And so with emotion regulation, what the child needs to learn is how to monitor, modify, and modulate their emotional responses.
It means the child has to learn how to control their fear or their anxiety, how to self-soothe or self-distract the things you said.
But there's another side to it, which is equally important, and that's the positive emotions.
The next level up is the cognitive level.
And there what we mean is, in simplest terms, that the child has to learn how to pay attention.
and social interactions and in subsequently learning.
The next level up is the cognitive level.
And there what we mean is, in simplest terms, that the child has to learn how to pay attention.
But attention is a very dynamic process.
And it involves things like ignoring distractions, inhibiting your impulses.
It also involves things like sequencing your thoughts, sequencing your thoughts and actions, holding thoughts in memory so you can play with them.
So there are a number of abilities that the child has to acquire that the child can acquire in the early years and also in school.
So let me come back to that one second, okay?
Because I don't want to lose an important point about the development of self-regulation.
The next level up is co-regulating, and what that means, or social regulation.
And what it means is, when we look at the traits that a child needs to develop in order to thrive, consistently at the top of our list is the ability to form warm intimate relationships, beginning with the caregivers and then subsequently with siblings and peers.
And it really is incredibly important that the child has this ability to form warm friendships, but it's not something that is a given.
It's not just something that is, we call it, maturational.
It's not like puberty, it's something that has to be integrated through experience.
Exactly.
Why should that be the case?
Well, it's because there are a lot of demands involved in social interaction.
For one thing, you have to be processing what the other person is both saying and communicating, communicating with their body with nonverbal language.
You also have to be processing the impact that your words or your gestures are having on them.
So you have this very complex processing demand that is constantly going on moment by moment in a social interaction where you're adjusting your behaviors according to what they're saying or feeling and according to what you perceive as the effects of your own actions on them.
And this is something that a child only learns Through social interaction and then the fifth level we don't need to worry about now It's it's really becoming very reflective or conscious of your own styles of self-regulating now What's?
Such an important dimension of this whole Approach is okay fine.
It tells us that the early years are very important.
It tells us that the child has to have these early Social interactions, these brain-building interactions in order to develop nice, robust self-regulation.
But what about the kid who doesn't have this?
Or what about the kid who's come into Grade 1 and he's done pretty good?
Is that it?
Does this see itself through?
There are two points that need to be made here.
The first one is that the more we understand about this, the more we are starting to learn about what sorts of activities and experiences will promote the development of self-regulation in, say, a kid who's come into school or a kid who's had a sudden regression, say when they hit puberty, that will help them develop these abilities, these underlying foundational abilities.
The second point that's important here is that this is something that has to be constantly nurtured.
It's something that continues to grow, continues to reach higher and higher levels, which is an essential aspect of growing up because the challenges are going to continually increase.
And these challenges aren't just academic challenges, they are social challenges, they are personal challenges.
So we look at some of the studies that are being done, and I'll give you just one example.
We're very interested in the studies that are being done on tools of mind.
And we have here not just psychology experiments, but also neuroscience done by Adele Diamond.
And what's so fascinating about this is that Tools of Mind is essentially a Vygotsky program developed by Elena Bedrova and Deborah Long, in which when you design your curriculum, you pay as much attention to trying to develop self-regulation as to the actual facts that you're trying to teach.
So, yeah, it's fascinating.
Yeah, because if you don't have the self-regulation, you have too much of a barrier to the facts as it is, right?
Exactly, exactly.
And so what they look at, they've developed all these techniques now where, you know, in class ways of delivering the material that work on both things at the same time.
They work on the child self-regulation and the particular material that you're trying to disseminate.
And what was interesting about Adele's work is that she shows that, in fact, what you are doing is you are enhancing the functioning of the specific prefrontal systems that are the sort of house, the seat of higher-order self-regulation.
So now that's got us thinking there's this new society that was formed, Mind, Brain and Education, which is thinking, well, you know, look, you know, this is a point that easily applies throughout the entire education system from, you know, from 7, say, until 17.
And what sorts of things should we be looking at that will constantly enhance the functioning of these systems?
Now, would you like me to say something about this?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, please do.
Okay, so that's a very interesting question.
What kinds of activities should we be looking at?
Well, here, let's take some, for example, the work done by John Rady.
And a number of others looking at the role of sports and exercise on the development of self-regulation.
What's fascinating about these works, about this research, is that the effects that they're seeing are neurobiological as well as developmental.
So it's not just, you know, like sport is great because you learn rules or you learn how to pay attention or you learn how to be part of a team, but there's an actual neurobiological effect in terms of the secretion of neurohormones that are necessary for the development of these systems. but there's an actual neurobiological effect in terms of the Then guys have now started to branch out, so they're seeing the same effects in music.
Music has the same effect, and we have some significant studies done here.
So these are the sorts of, let's call them extracurricular school activities that will have a profound effect on school performance.
Then there's the actual activities going on inside the school.
So, for example, there are studies now that have been done on the effects of the buddy system using cues that Tell the child for a young child say when it's time to pay attention when it's time to speak Helping the child to organize their thoughts and the child internalizes these strategies Which have an effect on their ability to control their attention?
there are studies looking at the effects of cohort teaching now cohort teaching is when the teacher stays with the same class for four years and I'm aware of the drawbacks of this, but the advantages of it are very interesting because what it means is that the teacher gets a chance to know the child.
She'll know what kinds of circumstances the child are going to trigger the child, what they'll find hard.
Anyways, the point is that more and more what we're looking at here is exercises or practices that will help the teacher understand why this child is having problems with self-regulation.
There's just one last thing I'll say here and then I'll stop.
What applies to the child applies every bit as much to the parent and, say, to the teacher.
In other words, if the child has to continue to develop their self-regulation, well, so do we as parents and so do teachers.
And so some of the most interesting studies that are going on now are studies looking at the sort of system, it's a dynamic system, looking at how certain kinds of enhancements or what kinds of enhancements to a community or to a school or to teacher training help parents or teachers or even communities to self-regulate to continue to develop theirs.
And guess what?
The better we self-regulate, the better the child does because the whole system is now functioning at a higher level.
That's what we're thinking about.
Yeah, it is.
You know, whenever you have a problem with the child, the first place to look is the mirror.
But we have this habit of looking at the child and saying, you fix it, you know, without recognizing that it's really an effect of the environment.
Absolutely, yeah.
I was wondering, Yeah, this is not scientific.
It's just my nonsense opinions.
But it seems to me that in life you run into three kinds of people and I was wondering if these may correspond to certain phases of development.
There are the kinds of people who are, you know, more or less mentally healthy and have the capacity for empathy and curiosity and deferral of gratification.
All of the self-regulatory and empathetic systems that you talk about seem to be in place and those people, I guess, aren't causing a huge amount of problems in society and are very pleasurable to deal with and so on.
There's another kind of person who has deficits in emotional or cognitive functioning but is able to overcome those deficits through therapy or through some sort of behavior modification or introspection, reading books, doing journaling, whatever it is.
They seem to be able to get over that hump and find a way to resurrect or create through the plasticity some sort of backup system to that which was not perfectly well developed.
But there's another kind of person who seems to be not a candidate for that kind of process.
They really act out, externalize.
They don't seem to have the capacity to have the observing ego view of their own behavior, externalize all causes to other people, and so on.
And I know that's a simplistic division, but it's something that I've kind of noticed.
Does that sound like it might correspond to any kind?
Because there are some people who are healthy, people who can change, and people who can't change.
And so, our big question is, if that is the case, what do we do about it?
Because, let's take as an example, in Canada, we know that about 85% of our social services budget is spent on around 5% of the population.
And so this is a serious issue for us.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
I just want to clarify the number.
Do you mean 5% of the population that the services are dealing with or 5% of the general population?
5% of the general.
Okay, sorry, go ahead.
And so this is a serious, but it's a serious issue.
And so I've, you know, I've been part of various debates where I've been exposed to these guys who say, well, you know, what you have to do is you've got to really crack down.
So, you know, we're going to have zero tolerance.
So zero tolerance for a child or zero tolerance for the young adolescent.
And the problem is, is that this doesn't work.
Right.
And if it did work, you know, we would, you know, I mean, I'm as eager as anyone else to find societal solutions.
But in fact, it makes it worse.
Well, problems that are caused by a lack of empathy cannot be solved by a lack of empathy.
That would be my amateur assessment.
But I would agree.
I would agree.
And I don't think it's amateurish.
I think it's I think that's the right I think that's exactly the right argument.
And and in fact, we have now we have studies that tell us Let's take, for example, let's start with the child.
So the child that's displaying what you called externalizing problems.
So the kid has behavioral issues.
Well, we now know that the worst thing we can do with this kid is to yell at the kid.
The very worst thing you can do is to hit the kid.
But yelling, hitting, or applying punitive, harsh discipline, or being very directive with the child, in fact, is a terrible predictor for downstream behavioral problems.
Well, because all it does is it externalizes the reinforcement.
It means that the child is not internalizing any rules, but simply avoiding punishment, which is pointless.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
Exactly right.
That's what our research tells us too.
And so now, let's take, let's go a little older.
So there's a new book called Young Thugs.
It's a really, really good book.
Where are you?
Oh, I'm in Mississauga.
I'm at Stone's Throw.
Where are you?
I'm in Mississauga.
Okay, so this book, Young Thugs, by, what's his name, Michael Kettelberg.
It's a great book, and basically what he's saying is that we now know the very worst thing we can do with an adolescent offender is to put him in, say, juvenile or prison, because basically what you're doing is you're taking a kid that might have been saved and now you're ensuring a life of crime.
But what do we do, especially when we're confronted with young children or older that do have this complete and utter lack of empathy.
And we do see this.
Well, scientifically, the first thing we want to do is we want to figure out why.
So what's blocked these experiences?
And it could have been social.
It could have been biological.
But something has blocked the child because one of the consequences of the early dyadic interactions that I talked about, we essentially look at 20 core attributes of mental health that are a consequence of these early dyadic interactions.
And empathy is clearly one of the most important and is critically involved with your ability to form or have social relationships.
And empathy, if I understand it rightly, empathy is fundamentally first and foremost around self-empathy.
You have to know what it is that you're feeling in order to be able to find out what somebody else is feeling.
And if your own emotional experiences are blocked because of an overwhelming nature of maybe abuse or maybe, as you say, hypersensitivity, then you don't develop the empathy for yourself.
And I can't imagine how you would have empathy for another human being if you don't even have empathy for yourself.
Yeah, and okay, so I have to just think through how much I want to say here.
It's something we've been working on a lot lately.
There's also a problem here.
One of the problems with empathy is that you have to understand what the other person is thinking, feeling, etc.
You have to have this distinction in mind between their thoughts and yours, but it's more than just mind reading, isn't it?
It's more than just knowing what the other person is experiencing, but also feeling compassion for them.
Somehow, if a child hasn't had these experiences for whatever reason, then it's very difficult for that child to... I mean, we see this in sociopaths, where they have, in one sense, tremendous empathy, in the sense of understanding exactly what's going on in another person's mind.
But far from caring about it, they use this to their own advantage.
Yeah, I've sort of used the distinction in my show before between sympathy and empathy.
Yeah, it's a good one.
Yeah, so a woman who's walking down the street and some guy is slithering up behind her, she feels fear because she empathizes with his desire to harm her, but he is not feeling sympathy for her and she's not feeling sympathy for him.
But, sorry, go on.
I think that that's the right point.
And so what we talk about is, we'll say that there's what we call an internal relationship between empathy and sympathy.
for full empathy to occur, there has to be this connection with sympathy.
Because you can also be sympathetic without being empathetic, right?
You can be sympathetic with someone without really knowing what the hell is going on in their mind.
So we want to see both in a child.
We want them to, and the word that you use is the word we use too, we want them to internalize this.
We want them to internalize certain feelings, principles, et cetera.
So now the question is, well, what can we do?
Well, what we have to do is we have to somehow figure out how we can get these experiences into the kid or into the older adult.
And it is doable.
And there are studies that have been done now that have shown that even in the worst possible circumstances, it is possible to reach these people.
It takes a lot of work, but there are a couple of principles that are incredibly important here.
The first one is that suppose I'm working with a little kid.
I can support that kid.
I can scaffold the kid.
I can tell the kid, I'm going to pick you up if you fall down.
I can try to set the challenges that the child has to meet in such a way that they are doable so that the child doesn't have that frustration, that the child has that feeling of satisfaction, of achievement.
It is the child who has to make the effort.
I can't make the effort for the child.
I can't do it for the child.
I'll give you an example.
I have a young son who's a hockey player and he was having a lot of trouble learning how to skate.
And so what I could do is I could go out on the ice with him and I could pick him up when he fell down and I could hold him by his arms, but ultimately he was the one who had to make the effort in order to experience that coordination involved in skating.
Synapses can only be coaxed, not commanded.
It's a teasing kind of challenge.
That's very well put.
So now it's exactly the same principle if we're working with a teenager or with a young adult.
First of all, in order for the child to make the effort, they have to find the activity pleasurable.
We're working on the motivation system.
In order for them to make the effort required, To overcome what is essentially a synaptic block, the connections have not yet been formed, they have to make an effort, they have to make such a large effort which will only occur if something is strongly motivating them.
So it has to be fun, it has to be rewarding, and it's exactly the same principle if you're working with a teenager or with an adult.
You can't now suddenly say, well, I'm going to resort to, you know, I'm going to use harsh discipline.
I'm going to say, you know, you either do this or this is going to be your future.
It's not going to work with them any more than it works with a little kid.
So in the studies that have been very effective, and there's a wonderful book about this by Stanley Greenspan called Infants in Multi-Risk Families.
It's a zero to three book published around 87, but it's been replicated over and over.
That when they design activities that these adults in your third category, that draw them in, right, you see your third category, the ones that really are having a lot of trouble making these changes, when the activities are designed in such a way that they want to do it, they're not being forced to do it, they want to do it, what happens
is that if the process is carefully thought through, carefully scaffolded in the way you would scaffold, say, for a child that's having problems, they can't... I'm sorry, could you just explain, you've used that word before, and I meant to interrupt you before, the word scaffolding, I mean, I understand the metaphor, but I'm not sure about the precision in terms of how you're using it.
Yeah, okay, so this is the famous term of Jerry Bruner, who was my psych prophet Oxford, and the idea is exactly what we were just talking about a second ago.
So the idea here is that You have to provide the support, you have to set the challenges within the reach of the child or the adult, and they have to be challenges that they can meet.
So, let me give you an example of how this applies to a community, okay?
Because what we're talking about here is, we're still talking about self-regulation.
So, if we want the child to self-regulate, then we're not going to put the child in an activity that the child can't handle.
We're going to try to choose activities like, for example, if I want to teach my son how to swim, the last thing I'm going to do is just throw him into the pool.
In fact, this is the worst way to teach someone how to swim.
It is immersion therapy almost.
Yeah, it is too.
So, okay, what are we going to do?
We're going to get in the pool, maybe we'll put a life jacket on him, we're going to hold him, you know, and it's a gradual process where he'll get that feeling of comfort and self-confidence and so on and so on.
So everybody understands this principle of scaffolding when it comes to teaching a young child.
Somehow they think that when you're a young adult, scaffolding is no longer relevant, but of course it is.
And if I now take the kid who's having certain, let's say behavioral issues, and confront him with challenges that are above, the technical term is zone of proximal development.
What it means is if I demand from him demand that he perform some action which is above his present abilities, what's going to happen is he's going to shut down in one way or another.
He might get angry.
He might get frustrated.
He might just withdraw because he's going to feel that he can't meet that challenge.
And so he has defense mechanisms to protect himself.
And it's another way of giving up on or hindering the development of the deferral of gratification because it's like, well, I can't bother.
Don't try.
So you don't learn how to overcome those humps.
And trust me, teenagers are unbelievably sophisticated in how well they can conceal what's really going on in their mind.
So I mean, I'll give you just one quick example.
We were working with a kid just a little while ago that was presenting.
He was a 14 year old presenting behavioral, a real behavioral challenge to his teachers.
And what he was doing was he'd start to really, really misbehave.
When they were doing some, I can't remember what the exact activity was in the class, but it turned out that he just didn't understand what was going on.
He was way behind in that subject.
And he knew his turn was coming up.
And so what he was doing was, he was causing the behavioral disturbance because he knew he'd be thrown out of class.
And by being thrown out of class, he avoided being shamed in front of his peers.
Right.
So kids are pretty clever about all this.
I don't think the genius phase ends in babyhood.
Now, the last point I'll make here is that we talk about scaffolding, the importance of scaffolding for a kid or for a parent, but it's also important for a community.
One time I was called in about two years ago to work in a community that was a very, very low-functioning community.
In fact, it was so low-functioning that it had no sense of itself as a community.
The residents had no sense of themselves as And somehow being part of a community, part of a neighborhood.
And if you came in with some sort of a program that was too far above their self-regulating capacity as a community, where the first requirement is that you see yourself as the members of a community, what will happen is that program will fail.
And we see this over and over again.
So whoever it is that we're working with, what we want to do is We want to understand what the causes are for the blockage in their self-regulation, but then we want, if we're going to work on it, we have to do it in a way that is within their reach and that they want to reach.
It's only if they want to reach that they'll make that effort, which always involves the risk of missing, always involves the risks of failure.
And believe it or not, the fear of failure is absolutely huge with little kids as much as it is with adults.
We can't protect them from failure.
I mean, failure is a reality.
It's just like, again, I think about my son's hockey team.
They have a wonderful hockey team, and they finally met a team a couple of days ago that beat them.
And it was important for their development as a team that they experienced loss as well.
So this is one of the problems with this school that grew up in the U.S., the Touchy Feely School, that you want to tell a child that no matter what they do, they were terrific.
Well, kids are smart.
They know when they failed.
Anyway, the point here is that what we want to do is we want to help develop their self-esteem.
It also has to be realistic, and we have to accept with them Yes, we did fail, but we're going to get it the next time or the next time.
I'm here to support you in these efforts, and I'm here to make it fun.
Well yeah of course life wouldn't be any fun if we won all the time and that's why a challenge and I think it's Alison Gopnik who's written about the degree to which if you praise a child for being intelligent the child will accept that praise but will avoid situations where the intelligence is challenged will actually avoid situations which would expand his intellectual abilities because he's praised for being intelligent therefore he can't be in situations where he's not intelligent because he feels he loses value so I think those things are very important.
By the way, Alison and I went to school together.
We both had the same prof. Oh, really?
Okay.
Well, she's a delightful writer as well, and I've certainly enjoyed your interviews.
And if you interview Alison, get her to talk about Jerry Bruner.
I've listened to some of her lectures.
Is he the mother that she talks about?
Yeah.
Yeah, I will.
I will definitely try to get her to talk about that, because it's quite delightful, the warmth at which she speaks about that kind of mentoring.
Now I just and I don't want to take up your whole day though I certainly would like to.
You had said earlier at the beginning of the conversation about the degree to which the trajectory was very very hard to change and I just want to make sure I think I understand but both for myself and the listeners to make sure that we understand the degree to which you're talking about altering the same kind of trajectory that you said was very difficult to alter.
Beforehand obviously prevention is far better than cure Though it's hard in a sense to have prevention without cure because you want to make sure that future caregivers are healed to some degree of these deficiencies in empathy and self-regulation so that they can be better parents and their children improve and so on.
Were you talking about a different kind of trajectory before that you're talking about here?
Before it was a bit more academic and here it seems to be a bit more, you know, obeying social rules and so on.
Yeah, so the first one is much more academic and it's grounded in a view of the development of the brain which I can explain.
And now what we try to do is we try to sort of generalize from that in the way you just described so that we can apply these basic ideas to, you know, examples like you just gave, you know, the development of empathy or moral reasoning, whatever.
The former, which is what you want me to clarify?
Yes, please.
So what's happened in neuroscience is we have this theory that's basically referred to as developmental pathways.
And the idea here is that there is something called a cascading constraint.
There's a part of the brain that subserves our ability to read facial expressions of emotion.
Now, for that part of the brain, the fusiform area, to become activated, the child has to be engaged in the social interactions that we've been talking about.
And it's through those interactions, those back and forth interactions with the caregiver, that the information necessary for the organization or the wiring of the fusiform is delivered.
I suppose that the child does have the kinds of biological problems that we were talking about which inhibit these dyadic interactions.
And sorry, these would be equated to caregiver problems should those be there as well, is that right?
You know, yes, but that would be the topic for another lecture, but yes.
You know, I always get very, very, I'm very cautious about this.
I've heard you dance around this at least half a dozen times and I don't want to corner you.
I just drew from my own sort of sense of clarity.
You see, part of the problem here is that so often, like I'll take as an example, my two kids.
So, you know, I had one kid where it was really, really easy to be sensitive, to be a sensitive caregiver.
She was a dream.
And my other kid, you had to be, you know, he was a lot harder.
He was a highly reactive baby.
And so often what we refer to as parental sensitivity is in fact a reflection or a consequence of the baby's temperament.
And it's something that, it always bothers me when people talk about parental sensitivity or maternal sensitivity, that they don't acknowledge just how much sensitivity is a function of, you know, a temperament that makes it easy to be sensitive.
So, you know, sometimes that's not the case and we all realize that and so we all study these, you know, examples like, you know, the drug addict, the drug addict caregiver, Well, you know, yeah, I mean, we know that there are examples where there is a complete lack of sensitivity or a serious lack of sensitivity because of a psychopathology.
But, you know, for most parents, this kind of delicate tension gets somehow lost.
And so that's why I dance around it.
That's what worries me about it.
I lost my train of thought.
I'm so sorry, I just wanted to... So the point about pathways, the point about cascading constraints is that, let's say we are talking, I mean look, it could happen, it can also happen if the caregiver just isn't there.
The caregiver can't be there and the child, or there isn't a caregiver.
And then we do see, we see deficiencies in the development of these systems.
Now here's the point.
Suppose then that we have Something like the Fusiform, which is the system that subserves our ability to read facial expressions of emotion.
And we know that this ability to read facial expressions is critical to how well we're going to do things like have empathy.
The problem is that if the area, if this system is A little hypo-functioning, the child will naturally avoid those experiences which stress that particular system.
So you get a sort of rebound effect.
That's what they mean when they talk about a cascading constraint.
That this system that has to be fully functional in order to open up or to broaden the child's developmental horizons is in fact getting constricted.
And so the child avoids the very experiences or starts to avoid those very experiences that are needed in order to get information into other systems.
And sorry, just to make sure, I hate interrupting you, but I just want to make sure I understand.
So if a child is very afraid of failure, they will avoid competitive situations which actually, if they did not avoid, would have beneficial effects on other systems unrelated to the sort of success failure problem?
Okay, sorry, go ahead.
Okay, so we look at it at a very low level, sort of much more biological level.
So, for example, if I'm dealing now with this problem in facial expressions, so what happens if the child starts avoiding more and more social interactions because they find them overwhelming and they find them even, you know, they're very stressful social interactions?
Well, then we start to see downstream effects in, for example, the child's development of language.
So our own research at the Harris Institute is very much geared towards children with autism and one of the things that we see repeatedly is that if the child is avoiding social experiences because for biological reasons and these overwhelm the kid that we do see as a result deficits in language or in more generally in nonverbal communication as well.
So that's what we mean about how You know, the brain sort of gets organized in a hierarchical fashion, and that's what the developmental pathways model is about.
It's about looking at how certain initial conditions can have downstream constrictions.
So when we talk about prevention, what we really mean is that these initial conditions are neurogenetic in most cases, and what we want to try to do is mitigate their Downstream effects.
So if you're talking about say the case of autism, what that would mean is we know that for biological reasons the child is going to avoid social interactions.
Can we figure out how to get the kid to engage in these social interactions so that we can mitigate the downstream effects?
Is that clear enough?
Oh, it is, really, and the metaphor that I would put forward is the brain is so plastic when we're very young that it's like, oh, the kid's born without an arm, let's just grow another one.
I mean, it's really that bizarre how many complementary systems and how many backup systems there are in the mind.
That's the point, Stefan.
That's exactly the point.
That's it.
And I think, and I'll let you go in a sec, but I just wanted to thank you, obviously, for the interview, but also for the work that you're doing, and work that people like yourself are doing in the field.
I think that in many ways, in terms of mental health and brain structure, we're still a little bit medieval, you know, where they would blame epilepsy on demons, you know, and they wouldn't understand that it's a physical condition.
And we of course would never yell at a child with a withered leg to run faster and expect that that dude would do anything other than make them not ever want to run again.
But there is something when we look at people who have emotional or cognitive deficiencies that are environmental or biological.
I think biological we kind of understand it and I mean very few people would yell at autistic but When it comes to things that are more subtle, we tend to conflate... I could not agree more.
Yeah, we conflate exposure with character, exposure to particular stimuli or lack of exposure to some sort of character, and that seems to me very medieval, and that is, strangely enough, a great lack of empathy, which I think has contributed to the exacerbation of this kind of problem.
By kind of lifting the lid on the brain, we can see the withered leg, so to speak, that we can't see otherwise, and we no longer conflate it with character.
Look, I should just tell you, I just published a couple of months ago a paper called Moving Beyond the Middle Ages.
I can't remember the rest of the title, but it's exactly what I was arguing.
And look, you know, we want people to understand, you know, you've got a kid, let's say a seven-year-old, he's coming to grade one, there is no such a thing as a stupid kid.
There's no such a thing as a lazy kid.
And there's no such a thing as a bad kid.
Now, there are kids with various issues, and we've got to try to figure out what they are.
And if we don't, then they might well become stupid, lazy, or bad.
But it's just a kid.
And so what we want is, we want not just a sense of compassion and not just a sense of understanding, but you have to become a little bit of a scientist too.
And sometimes it takes a lot of work to figure out what's going on with the kid.
But we want, as a society, we want everyone to realize we can do this.
We can do this for every single child.
Yeah, and end up with a very different world in the future, a world with much less crime, a world with much less abuse, a world with much less war, if we can spread it widely enough.
Why, you know, as a guy who runs a philosophy show, I'm fascinated in ways that we can reduce conflict and violence within society.
I think starting with this understanding of the degree to which our brains are literally molded by our experiences, and not to the point where they can't be undone, but to the point where it is a challenge we have to take on to make these changes to build a better society.
As you say, if we could get all of the money back that we're spending on 5% of the population, either return it to people or at least find some better use for it, That would be fantastic, but that's not going to be around spending more money, but I think approaching these things with more scientific knowledge and a greater and deeper human empathy to what is caused and how to ameliorate these problems.
I love what you're saying.
If you've written on this, could you please send it to me?
I've done some podcasts which you can pop in your CD and I would be happy to send some of those to you.
I'd very much like to have it.
I absolutely love what you just said.
All right.
Well, thank you very, very much for your time.
I appreciate it.
I will send you a copy of this and you can do whatever you like with it, but thank you so much for your time.
I appreciate it.
You're welcome.
▲
Export Selection