Recent commentary on parenting has concentrated on the importance of the first three years with a particular emphasis on neuroscience. It is suggested that between 0 and 3 years the infant brain develops the capacity for empathy and concern but stress, abuse, deprivation, poor parenting, poverty or some combination of those and similar factors can prevent this development. More worryingly, once prevented, there is no means to later learn empathy and concern because of permanent changes in brain organization and brain chemistry.
2. Allen and Smith argue that there is a “sheer predictability of children’s early years for their future outcomes… if a child is born into a home where they are nurtured, where conversation takes place, where someone reads to them then, quite simply, their brain develops properly… it is in that delicate and vulnerable period [0-3 years] that our lives can be made or not.”
4. The report argues that there have been exciting new developments in neuroscience that we must capitalise on “to build a strong foundation for improved learning and behavior that will produce better outcomes in academic achievement, economic productivity, responsible citizenship, and succesful parenting of the next generation.”
9. Critical Periods Just 3-days of monocular deprivation just before 1-month of age causes a profound shift of cortical innervation to favour the non-deprived eye
11. Deprivation A healthy 3-year old with an average (50 th percentile) head size compared with an extremely neglected 3-year old (3 rd percentile)
12. Functional Implications Infants (mean age 9 yrs) placed into a Romanian orphanage by 6 weeks of age for a mean duration of 38 months before adoption compared with a control group of non-institutionalised infants There is reduced glucose metabolism in and around the hippocampus Chugani et al (2001) NeuroImage 14: 1290-1301
18. I’m a Mind, Get Me Out of Here “… we suppose that by conducting ever more penetrating brain scans… we shall understand how thought becomes possible. These expectations are not going to be fulfilled… We shall never be able to capture what happens between people in a brain scan. To be sure, we may see patches of colour that betray all kinds of neurological goings-on when individuals relate to one another. These events in the nervous system are a necessary part of the story. Yet they amount to only one small piece of a much broader picture. It is a picture that involves another person, and each person’s experience of the other. The roots of thought are embedded here.”
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Hinweis der Redaktion
Effect of early closure of one eye on the distribution of cortical neurons driven by stimulation of both eyes. (A) Ocular dominance distribution of single unit recordings from a large number of neurons in the primary visual cortex of normal adult cats. Cells in group 1 were activated exclusively by the contralateral eye, cells in group 7 by the ipsilateral eye. Diagrams below these graphs indicate procedure, and bars indicate duration of deprivation (purple). “Exp”= time when experimental observations were made. (B) Following closure of one eye from 1 week after birth until 2.5 months of age (indicated by the bar underneath the graph), no cells could be activated by the deprived ( contralateral ) eye. Some cells could not be activated by either eye (NR). Note that the closed eye is opened at the time of the experimental observations, and that the recordings are not restricted to any particular cortical layer. (C) A much longer period of monocular deprivation in an adult cat has little effect on ocular dominance (although overall cortical activity is diminished). In this case, the contralateral eye was closed from 12 to 38 months of age. (A after Hubel and Weisel, 1962; B after Wiesel and Hubel, 1963; C after Hubel and Wiesel, 1970 .)
The consequences of a short period of monocular deprivation at the height of the critical period in the cat. Just 3 days of deprivation in this example (A) produced a significant shift of cortical innervation in favor of the nondeprived eye; 6 days of deprivation (B) produced an almost a compete shift. Bars below each histogram indicate the period of deprivation, as in Figure 24.4 . (After Hubel and Wiesel, 1970 .)
Terminal arborizations of lateral geniculate nucleus axons in the visual cortex can change rapidly in response to monocular deprivation during the critical period . (A) After only a week of monocular deprivation, axons from the deprived eye have greatly reduced numbers of branches compared with those from the open eye. (B) Deprivation for longer periods does not result in appreciably larger changes. Numbers on the left of each figure indicate cortical layers. (After Antonini and Stryker, 1993 .)
Also has enlarged ventricles and evidence of cortical atrophy.
Both Mead and Vygotsky recognized that human beings do not merely enter into a world consisting of random elements, bric-a-brac, but they enter into a world of stuff that contain meaning and have symbolic status. Conscious awareness resides in the ability of the organism to indicate to itself the presence of that stuff. In this way, humans are able to control their responses rather than fall into reflexive actions. Vygotsky’s concern with consciousness as the organising feature of mind arose from his assault on Russian psychology’s focus on reflex and reaction and its inability to deal with will or intention except as mystical constructs. Mead and Vygotsky began an effort to draw behaviourism into a more complete formulation of the psychological self. But they were beaten…
The principal idea is that modes of thought and experience cannot be adequately understood as long as their social origins are obscured. All the ideas and sentiments which motivate an individual do not have their origin in him alone, and cannot be adequately explained solely on the basis of his individual life-experience. I imagine that is fairly obvious and uncontroversial when it is directed towards something like our attitudes towards terrorism or our contemplation of meaning but it is clearly more difficult and troublesome when it is directed towards something like the experience of pain. There is a major difficulty in translating across from what can be considered basic sentient experiences and the more complex reflection on those experiences.
![Allen and Smith argue that there is a “sheer predictability of children’s early years for their future outcomes… if a child is born into a home where they are nurtured, where conversation takes place, where someone reads to them then, quite simply, their brain develops properly… it is in that delicate and vulnerable period [0-3 years] that our lives can be made or not.”](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)