Why do some children outperform others in the classroom? Because, say psychology experts Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker in their new book, “The First Idea,” they have learned better how to think for themselves. Dr. Greenspan was invited on the “Today” show to discuss the book and its theories. Here is an excerpt.
What was the first idea? Was it formed by an early human-like figure, poised with stone in hand, calculating how to fell his prey? Certainly, an intriguing question, but there is an even more important one. How and when did the capacity to create an idea come about in the first place? This question has perplexed ancient and modern philosophers, scientists in the fields of human development and evolution, and most of the rest of us. How do human beings develop their highest mental abilities, the abilities to symbolize and think? And how did these distinctly human abilities arise during the course of evolution? In short, how did we become human beings and how do we maintain our humanness?
We have developed a new hypothesis to address these questions. The key to the evolutionary hypothesis we will present in this book comes from our observations of babies at the beginning of their developmental journey. We have found that the capacity to create symbols and to think stems from what was often thought of by philosophers as the “enemy” of reason and logic: our passions or emotions. While there is mounting evidence that emotions influence the content of our thoughts (see Chapter 11), we have discovered a far more important role for our emotions. We will show how emotions actually give birth to our very ability to create symbols and to think.
However, a very special characteristic of our emotions paves the path to symbols. This characteristic is relatively different in human beings than in other animals. We have observed that it is the capacity to transform basic emotions into a series of successively more complex interactive emotional signals. We will show how emotional signaling enables a child to separate perceptions from fixed predictable actions and, in so doing, free up these perceptions to acquire emotional meaning and become symbols. Something as profound as mastering the word “mommy,” or something as basic as the word “apple” or the number “4,” comes into being through six initial levels of emotional interaction and signaling in the early years of life. Sensory and subjective experiences, seemingly the enemy of reason and logic, through progressive transformations, therefore, actually become the basis for both creative and logical reflective thought.
These uniquely human abilities are not hardwired into our brains. They must be developed through learning interactions. Humans intensify these types of critical learning processes in the second half of the first year of life and during most of the second year and then continue it throughout their lifetimes. These learning interactions are not instructional, where an adult lectures, shows, or otherwise directly teaches a child. They are natural interactions that result in new learning, such as playful back-and-forth smiles or vocalizations between an infant and caregiver from which the infant learns about relating and interacting. When we use the term “learning,” we will be using it in this way, even though at times this type of learning will also involve interactions where a child imitates or copies the adult or another child.
Through our studies of nonhuman primates and a review of the fossil record, we will also demonstrate that what takes a human baby two years to learn took our human ancestors millions of years. Remarkably, however, we can trace the same steps in both.
Based on these studies, we have formulated a hypothesis about the evolution of symbols, reflective thinking, and language skills that challenges the prevailing theory. The prevailing theory asserts that, during the course of evolution, change occurred predominately through changes in genetic structure — through the processes of natural selection, genetic mutation, and random genetic drift. Although modern evolutionary theorists will stress that this process of genetic change was ruled by chance and contingency due to unpredictable environmental events, the basic notion persists that evolutionary change came about predominantly through changes in our genes. The genetic changes that were associated with greater adaptation tended to persist.
We will show, however, that the prevailing theory is incorrect. The origins of symbolic thinking and speaking depend heavily on the social transmission of cultural practices that were not genetically determined but were passed down and thus learned anew by each generation in the evolutionary history of humans: a history that extends far back beyond the appearance of anatomically modern humans, to the early humans, the Australopithecines, and even beyond. These cultural practices are necessary for each generation to master the stages of emotional signaling that lead to symbol formation and reflective thinking. They, therefore, constitute an essential element in the growth of the human mind and human society, and, indeed, in the ongoing development of human minds and human societies.
Ever since the pioneering work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, evolutionary theorists have become increasingly interested in the role of cultural and social factors in human evolution. Indeed, there has been a growing interest in recent years in the so-called Baldwin Effect, according to which learned behaviors operate in much the same way as environmental challenges in classical evolutionary theory, insofar as those individuals who favor that learned behavior are selected (either through mutations or by tapping into pre-existing capacities). But in this theory, the learned behavior is ultimately passed on through the genes, not through new learning in each generation.
In the majority of cases where theorists have begun seriously to explore the role of culture and society in the evolution of the human mind, therefore, the primacy of the genetic perspective persists. For these arguments remain wedded to what Susan Oyama describes as a doctrine that assumes that the effects of the cultural and social environment are passed on to descendants through the genetic structure. The basic principle thus remains that human beings developed — and develop — the capacities to reason, speak, see one another as intentional agents, live in complex rule-governed societies, and so on, because specific genes for each of these abilities were naturally selected.
The strongest challenge to this determinist form of reasoning has come from behavioral scientists who tend to take into account an entire dynamic system rather than to isolate single factors. Because the multiple environments that genes interact with have endless degrees of variation, the developmental outcome of traits or behaviors can be influenced in a near infinite number of ways. According to this way of thinking, evolutionary change involves changes in the developmental system. Therefore, attempts to attribute this or that percent of influence to genetic or environmental factors when looking at intelligence or different types of temperament are not only fruitless, they’re inaccurate. Nature and nurture are constantly influencing one another, much like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers during one of their memorable dances.
Understanding the dance between nature and nurture (genes and environment) requires more than assertion and vivid metaphor, however compelling. It requires a careful analysis of how each partner actually interacts with or influences the other. For example, Gilbert Gottlieb showed that wood ducklings could only learn the calls of their species if they heard them from their parents or siblings as hatchlings before they were hatched. Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel showed how learning experiences influence regulatory genes, which in turn, influence biological processes involved in the formation of neural pathways that make long-term memory possible.
How does environmental variability interact with genetic variability in the development of a range of human capacities? For some capacities, the genetic structure may set the constraints and environmental experiences may operate more like a switch — turning on or off certain “regulator” genes, which in turn, influence gene expression and behavior. For other capacities, however, environmental variability and learning may play a far more complex role, be far more influential than thought, and be a necessary condition for these capacities to develop. We believe this is especially true for our highest level human capacities, such as symbolic thinking. For example, we have worked with infants who were born with motor and sensory differences, such as low muscle tone and underreactivity to touch and sound. With one type of environment, they have a high probability of becoming self-absorbed and evidencing severe language, social, and cognitive deficits. With another type of environment, one that is geared to their particular physical traits (i.e., we construct a “key” to fit and open their “lock”), we have been able to help many of them master the stages of emotional signaling and become engaged, interactive, and symbolic, with high levels of social, verbal, reflective, and empathetic capacities.
As indicated, in this model, basic biological capacities are a “necessary” but not a “sufficient condition” for an individual learning to construct symbols and to think. That is, our biological potential for learning from experience, which includes our rudimentary capacities to perceive, organize, and respond, is the critical substrate for the capacity to learn. The sufficient condition, however, involves a series of learning steps that are the basis for symbolic thinking. In human beings, however, even the tools of learning must be learned and relearned by each new generation. These include the ability to attend, interact with others, engage in emotional and social signaling, construct complex patterns, organize information symbolically, and use symbols to think. These “tools” enable us to develop knowledge, wisdom, and empathy. They are also the means for effective protection, security, and social and political organizations.
We were able to search for those stable learning processes that have been passed on throughout human evolution by making a critical distinction between two types of cultural and learning processes: There are those that originated millions of years ago and have been passed on through learning from one generation to the next over the evolutionary time period and are therefore quite permanent and near universal in human groups (i.e., the capacities to attend, relate, signal with emotions, etc.). There are also those that are determined by variations in each individual and time period, that is, they express the near infinite variations of human groups (i.e., the specific ways a person attends, relates, and signals with emotions, for example, signaling pleasure, but not anger). The former involve basic learning processes and the latter embrace individual content and behavior stemming from these processes.
Once we could identify these processes in our research on the development of human infants and nonhuman primates and the fossil record, we were able to see how the critical learning steps leading to symbolic thinking were embedded in our cultural learning processes and not in the structure of our genes (as important as these were and are as the necessary foundations for learning). In the chapters that follow we will identify and describe the critical and culturally mediated learning processes that have made us human and have the potential to continue our mental growth.
We will show that this theory can answer the three fundamental questions about the evolution of human beings that challenge current evolutionary theory:
- What are the factors that promoted the growth of the human mind?
- What is the relationship between these factors and the processes that enable a child to develop the higher-level reflective capacities that characterize our species?
- How do these factors relate to the origins of human society?
To be precise, we will show that the same processes we describe in Chapters 1 and 2 that lead to creative and reflective thinking in children were at work over millions of years during human and even prehuman evolution. In fact, we will show that the cultural diffusion of these processes of emotional interaction throughout our evolutionary history constituted the primary engine for the development of our highest mental capacities.
In particular, in what follows we will show how
- certain cultural practices are absolutely necessary for the development of higher-level symbolic and reflective skills, and that without these practices humans cannot develop the species-typical skills that distinguish our species;
- these cultural practices are a necessary factor in the evolution of symbolic and reflective thinking;
- the cultural practices we are discussing date back to prehistoric times and were likely shared at the outset with the nonhuman species that preceded us;
- certain basic practices are also present in nonhuman primates;
- these cultural practices are not self-sustaining nor inherited but passed on only through social learning in each new generation;
- this critical social learning progressed in a specific manner from one generation to the next over millions of years through different species until each of the stages of emotional and intellectual development (to be described in Chapter 2) was mastered; and
- the fossil record, as well as an examination of the behavior and interaction patterns of nonhuman primates, will be shown to support this new theory.
This type of culturally transmitted learning may have been especially important for the evolution of flexible problem solving that uses complex communicative and symbolic processes because these processes needed to be sensitive to changing environments and, therefore, could not be structured into fixed biological pathways as could simpler patterns.
Many evolutionary psychologists believe not only that human intelligence evolved through genetic changes but that the brains of modern humans have remained the same since the time modern humans first appeared. Others believe that human brains have remained the same for at least the last 30,000 to 50,000 years (since the time cave drawings and new tools emerged). Contrary to this assumption, we will consider evidence suggesting that during this time the very structure of the human brain has changed. For to the degree that new generations had access to culturally mediated early interactions that were more “enriched” than those of previous generations, there were opportunities for the brain to develop new pathways. For example, on brain imaging studies musicians have been shown to have more neuronal connections in the area of the brain that regulates the hand movements involved in their musical performance. In Chapter 10, we will present the mounting evidence for a relationship between experience-based learning, including the role of environmentally sensitive regulator genes that turn other genes on and off, and the growth of neuronal pathways in the brain. These enriched, or improved, formative learning interactions likely led to new neuronal pathways. In Chapters 1 and 2, we will discuss how our highest level mental capacities, such as reflective thinking, only develop fully when infants and children are engaged in certain types of nurturing learning interactions. Children who are deprived of critical early nurturing learning interactions tend to have a variety of problems in the development of their social, language, and thinking capacities. But, as indicated, the predominant way these pathways that require learning and development are transferred from one generation to another is through the continuation of culturally mediated learning interactions.
We will also show that a current view of the way in which the brain organizes emotions, advocated by neuroscientists such as Joseph LeDoux, is incorrect. This view, which sees emotions as states of mind that are somewhat separate from and compete with or influence logical thinking, is not consistent with our clinical observations of growing infants and children. In fact, we will show that this view is based on confusion over the difference between pathological and healthy emotional development. In pathological development, the systems that organize emotions and logical thinking may remain separate. In healthy development, these systems become fully integrated and catastrophic emotions, such as rage, become transformed. Emotional signaling will be seen to provide the missing link between the level of the brain that involves basic emotional circuitry (subsymbolic systems, such as the amygdala) and its highest cortical symbolic capacities.
Similarly, we will show, contrary to the views of Chomsky and Pinker on the genetic origins of language, that language and cognition are embedded in the emotional processes that, in our hypothesis, led to symbols.
We will also show that while Piaget and his followers made pioneering contributions in formulating the way a child acts on his world to learn to think, they were not able to figure out the mechanism through which symbol formation and thinking occurs. Piaget described stages involved in thinking and discussed emotionally meaningful behaviors, such as imaginative play. However, he viewed emotions as more of a secondary phenomenon, useful for motivation and, at times, guided by a child’s reasoning abilities. He and his followers, however, did not realize that emotions and their transformation into various levels of emotional signaling and mental representation were a critical mechanism in the development of thinking and that at each level of thinking, emotions lead the way to higher levels of thinking. For example, an infant learns causality through his experience of his smiles leading to his caregivers’ smiles months before he learns to pull a string to ring a bell (which Piaget believed was the beginning of causal thinking).
Our work with children with autism (discussed in Chapter 11) and other developmental and emotional challenges provides supportive evidence for our developmental, evolutionary model of how symbols are formed. In general, we observe problems when critical emotional interactions are not available, because of either biological or environmental challenges. This is seen in autism (biological) or deprivation of nurturing care in orphanages and multiproblem families, and in experiments with nonhuman primates (environmental), where there are often severe limitations in emotional development, and, in humans, in the capacity for symbolic thinking. In children with autism, biological factors, which vary in pattern and degree from child to child, undermine their capacity to master the stages of emotional signaling that we believe are important for symbol formation. If our theory is correct, helping some of these children find another pathway to master the stages of emotional signaling should enable them to create symbols and think. We have found that a subgroup of these children (where the biological limitations afforded more flexibility) verified this prediction. In fact, their symbolic thinking capacities were proportional to the degree to which they mastered the different stages of emotional signaling. As we will show, children in this subgroup developed the capacity to engage, read, and respond to affect signals, empathize with the feelings of others, form symbols, and think reflectively to a degree formerly thought unattainable in children with autistic spectrum disorders.
Another part of the evolutionary puzzle is how early humans learned to live and work in families and groups and build complex cultures and societies. The concept of natural selection and survival of the fittest has tended to emphasize competition among individuals for the survival of their genes. Unfortunately, since Hobbes, it’s been widely accepted that the basis of social and political discourse and organization is language, which is assumed, for the most part, to be genetically mediated.
In contrast, we will show that the growth of complex cultures and societies and human survival itself depends on the capacities for intimacy, empathy, reflective thinking, and a shared sense of humanity and reality. These are derived from the same formative emotional processes that lead to symbol formation. They enable human beings to work together in larger and larger groups. Ironically, even successful competition, beyond the brute force level, depends on cooperative group functioning with a high degree of mutual empathy and trust.
We will trace the growth of these social capacities through nonhuman primates and early human cultures. Then we will show that understanding the types of early emotional processes that lead to symbols can contribute to understanding the developmental levels of different cultural and social groups. This understanding provides a new “lens” to observe both the near-infinite cultural variations and the remarkably stable patterns that have characterized social groups since their inception. The affective processes that orchestrate individual intelligence connect the individual to the social group and characterize the way in which the group functions. The levels of functioning of the social group, therefore, will be seen to be an extension of the intelligence of individuals and a continuation of the evolution of intelligence.
Although most students of human behavior now focus on the interaction between nature and nurture, nonetheless, as indicated earlier, there is an overemphasis on the role of genes and an underemphasis on the role of culture (except as made possible by genes) in the formation of high-level thinking and social capacities. Perhaps there is comfort in assuming that biology, rather than families, communities, and culture, is responsible for and protects our highest mental abilities. Do we somehow feel that biology can preserve our humanity better than learned, culturally mediated processes? Perhaps so! If we believe in “fixed biology” over “experience,” we can falsely believe that only these severe mental illnesses, which are characterized by biological aberrations that affect a small percent of the population, can derail these processes and ignore far more common changes in family structure, international relationships, culture, and the environment that threaten the foundations of our humanity and intelligence.
The evolutionary forces that equipped the human baby with the potential to learn made that same baby dependent on a learning environment of emotional, social, and cultural experiences for subsequent development. Remarkably, over millions of years, these basic, learned, culturally transferred processes keep improving and building on one another (at least until now). In Part II, as we trace the “line” of human evolution from prehuman ancestors and many species of nonhuman primates to modern humans, we will show how each new species and group reached higher levels of these core basic processes.
What are these vital learning processes that carry the building blocks of culture and intelligence from one generation to the next? In Chapters 1 and 2, we will identify these stages. They are more basic than the commonly assumed building blocks, such as language, new tools, or symbol use in its own right, and underlie the mechanisms of observing, imitating, and practicing that are commonly assumed to be hardwired. We will show that rather than being hardwired, basic tools, such as social imitation, are themselves learned through earlier emotional interactions.
One reason we assume that our highest human capacities are biological is that, when we look around, many people appear to have at least some degree of them. Most people relate, interact, think, and solve problems. Yet, as we will show, the reason these processes can be found in so many peoples, cultures, and geographical areas across long stretches of human history is that similar culturally mediated learning practices began in our prehistory and, therefore, characterize many cultures, settings, and historical periods.
Similarly, the ability of individuals from across the globe to arrive at an implicit consensus on certain basic elements of reality, in spite of near-infinite cultural variations, emerges in part from these basic shared interactive processes and experiences that originated millions of years ago.
Therefore, although our common DNA creates a potential for learning in helpless newborns and the potential for progression, it is our common ancestor’s behavior and cultural patterns that set in motion the development of practices that influence the way newborns of nonhuman primates and human primates are nurtured and master the fundamental emotional learning processes leading to symbolic thinking.
Before we conclude this introduction, we should like to provide a glimpse of the evidence for our hypothesis that a common set of cultural ancestors and interactive emotional patterns led to symbol formation.
Consider two babies engaging with adults. Nathan, a one-year-old, is sitting on the floor, playing idly with his toes, when Sue walks in. The moment Nathan sees her his face lights up, to which Sue responds with a broad smile. Nathan giggles and waves his arms slightly as if beckoning Sue to join him. She sits down on the floor and, laughing, asks, “What are you doing with your toes?” When she tickles his toes, Nathan pulls his feet away sharply, laughing as he does so, his big smile extending from the corners of his mouth all the way up to his eyes. Her eyes sparkling, Sue asks in a gentle voice: “Can I please see your toes? I promise not to tickle them.” With a wary look on his face, Nathan slowly extends his right foot, and, just as Sue starts to lean forward, he pulls his foot away and breaks out into a full-bellied laugh. Sue reacts with a crestfallen look on her face and hangs her head slightly, to which Nathan responds by edging closer and slowly extending his foot again. Sue keeps her eyes on the ground and then suddenly darts forward and starts tickling Nathan’s toes, laughing loudly. For an instant Nathan looks frightened, but then he starts to smile and begins laughing in perfect unison with Sue while making faint attempts to brush her hands away. After about a minute of this, they both begin to quiet down and their faces and bodies relax; Sue says, “I’m going to go get your dinner ready.” As she starts to stand up Nathan suddenly indicates that he wants to be chased and starts to move purposefully across the room, looking back with nodding glances as Sue is in hot pursuit. Nathan then smiles broadly and shrieks in delight as Sue, laughing loudly, shouts, “I’m going to catch you.”
Sasha, a one-year-old, is lying on the floor hugging Eeyore, his favorite stuffed animal, when Ginny walks in. When she sees him hugging Eeyore, she smiles warmly and says in a high voice, “Isn’t that nice: You’re hugging Eeyore.” Sasha quickly looks up and struggles to his feet while clutching Eeyore. As soon as he is standing, he holds Eeyore up to Ginny with a look of utter seriousness on his face. Ginny bends over and gently takes Eeyore from his hands, saying as she does so: “Are you giving me Eeyore? Isn’t that wonderful. Hello, Eeyore. Would you like a big hug?” As she is saying this, she is giving Eeyore a warm hug, burying her face in his belly. Sasha watches intently and, while she is cuddling Eeyore, he reaches up with his right hand and points. Smiling broadly, Ginny responds by handing him Eeyore. Sasha takes Eeyore and hugs him in exactly the same way that Ginny has just done, burying his head in the toy’s belly. While he does this, he makes a sort of babbling sound that has the same rhythmic contours as the words Ginny has just spoken. The cuddle lasts for a few seconds and then Sasha looks up at Ginny and, his eyes shining, he holds Eeyore up to her again. Ginny, her eyes shining with the same intensity, responds, “Oh boy, can I hug Eeyore again?” As she starts to take Eeyore from him, Sasha gives a huge smile and breaks into a happy laugh and starts to wave his hands, almost as if he were trying to clap. Now laughing herself, Ginny hands Eeyore back and, her mind on something else, turns and begins to walk towards the kitchen. As soon as she has taken her first step, Sasha makes some distinct sounds that have a yearning quality. Hearing this, Ginny immediately turns back to him and, now laughing loudly, asks, “Does Eeyore need another hug?” This time, she bends over and hugs the two of them while Sasha chuckles softly.
These babies are both developing their ability to engage in back-and-forth emotional signaling. As we said earlier, this ability, a critical step in forming symbols, is not genetically mediated, but took millions of years to be learned and was then passed on from nonhuman primate cultures to human cultures. It is not mastered by every baby; these subtle emotional interactions in which Nathan and Sasha are engaging with their caregivers are delicate learned processes that require skillful caregiving. Yet they are not new or even uniquely human.
In fact, one of these two babies is a bonobo chimpanzee interacting with his mom. Which one is it? The answer is in the endnote.
These interactive emotional processes that we share with nonhuman primates and many other mammals reach higher levels of organization in humans. As children transform emotions, through learning interactions with caregivers, from primitive fixed actions, the emotions become part of and orchestrate intelligent problem-solving interactions with the world. For example, we show in Chapter 2 how complex advanced emotions, such as empathy, compassion, respect, and pride, become necessary ingredients in high levels of reflective thinking.
Just as the discoveries of the wheel and fire set in motion enormous technological advances, the learned ability to signal with emotions and progress through various stages of emotional transformation enabled the development of symbols, language, and thinking, including reflective reasoning and self-awareness. In the twenty-first century, however, these culturally mediated learning processes that took millions of years to evolve may be at risk. Because the critical changes in the mind and brain that support reflective thinking depend on the way in which humans interact emotionally with and learn from each other, these patterns are vulnerable. Misunderstanding regarding what’s essential about human beings could easily increase this vulnerability.
For example, the human mind is being thought of more and more as a series of neuronal circuits under genetic control. These circuits are viewed as accessible to biological manipulation with everything from “nano robots” to polypharmacy, without sufficient appreciation of the emotional and social contexts within which the mind and brain grow and maintain their subtle equilibrium. There is also insufficient appreciation of the boundary between curing disease on the one hand and tampering with our humanity under the guise of artificially increasing our potential on the other. Events or changes in family or group structure that alter the nature of early interactions between caregivers and their infants and children could alter an evolutionary line that dates back to prehuman and primate cultures.
The first section of “The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved” will focus on the formation of symbols and reflective thinking. In Part II, we will then show how these insights have helped us know what to look for in human evolution, and present a new model of evolution.
In Part III, we will show how this hypothesis challenges and revises current thinking about the human mind. We will explore its implications for a new view of language, cognition, autism, and the development and functioning of the brain.
In Part IV, we will explore the implications of this model for understanding groups, cultures, and societies. We will show how “groups” evolved through a series of stages and can be characterized according to their developmental needs and functioning. Our developmental model of groups will reveal the new challenges of a world now connected not only by shared communication and economies but by shared technological and environmental dangers as well. It will inform a new psychology of global interdependency that can help us understand emerging social and political forces.
Although the authors speak as one voice in this book, we bring very different training and experience to bear on the questions discussed. One of us (Greenspan) is a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who brings years of clinical work with infants, children, and their families, as well as research in early development and mental health. The other (Shanker), philosopher and psychologist, brings intense study of language, both in humans and nonhuman primates, as well as research into Artificial Intelligence and the philosophy of psychology. Although readers may be aware of our individual contributions, the authors have worked together for many years to uncover the developmental pathways leading to language, intelligence, and mental health.
Excerpted from "The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, And Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors To Modern Humans,” by Stuart Shanker and Stanley I. Greenspan. Copyright ©2004. Used by permission of Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt can be used without the expressed permission of the publisher.