Pieces Of Light

The pull of the story

2012-02-20T06:11:00.060-08:00

A few weeks ago I went to London to film the pitch for my novel, A Box of Birds. This will be my first novel for some time (my debut, The Auctioneer, was published way back in 1999), and so it was a big moment for me. I was meeting John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, to talk to him about the themes of the book. We met at Paramount, the restaurant at the top of Centre Point in Soho. The pitch was filmed (by the wonderful and multitalented Laura Kidd) against the extraordinary backdrop of London viewed from 33 floors up. You can see the results here.

It was a wide-ranging, enlivening conversation, as all my chats with John are. I got the chance to explain how A Box of Birds is my way of taking on a fundamental question: how we should live our lives, if we accept (as modern neuroscience asks us to) that we are no more than complex systems of connections. With Yvonne, I wanted to write the story of the first materialist in fiction. That statement probably seems over-bold and certainly needs some qualification, as there are plenty of other novels that touch on themes of neuroscientific materialism. But I don’t think novelists have gone far enough in exploring the implications of this philosophy for their fictional characters. I’ve written more about this debate here, and there’ll be lots more in the weeks to come. If the book is funded, it will be published in the autumn.

In a way, the most difficult question was the last one. ‘What makes you keep doing it?’ John asked me. At an emotional level, I have no doubt about the answer, but it’s hard to put it into words. I have always written fiction—I had a complete draft of a novel at the age of nine—and it’s not too melodramatic to say that I have dedicated my life to it. In one sense it’s the most natural thing in the world for me to do. I suspect that what John was really asking was: What makes you keep doing it, when you could be doing other things? I have a part-time career as an academic, after all: why isn’t that enough?

If I knew the answer to that, I would have solved a basic riddle about human creativity. What makes us want to tell stories? What do the counterfactuals of fiction give us that the realities of science don’t?

There is much to say on this topic, but here's one idea to start with. Looking for the commonalities between science and writing is not a new endeavour, and people before me have considered this relationship very fruitfully. (Here's one great example, and an equally interesting response.) When I'm doing science, I'm trying to go from the specificities of data to theories and principles that can apply more generally. Writers do that too. They look for the particular that can speak to the universal, the part that can stand for the whole.

In some ways, though, fiction has more to do with engineering. When you write a novel, you are building a model and then putting it in a wind tunnel. You're looking to see how the stresses of events impact upon your characters: how they deform them, and draw out their resiliences. You always start with a character, I think, a character in a situation... and then you put your model down on the bench and see how it runs. For me, with this book, that was about saying 'What if you put a materialist into a story? How would she behave when stuff started to happen? How would her view of the world, and of herself, change?' I honestly don't think we can understand the true meaning of neuroscience from within the discipline. We have to look at how it functions in the real world, how it changes our understanding.

So that's one reason why I do fiction alongside science. In the end, I'm not going to be able to give a definitive answer to the question that John asked me, except to the extent of knowing what these things mean to me personally. That’s the bit that’s hard to put into words, and it’s what I tried to explain to John. I’m less of a person when I’m not writing fiction. Without it, I just don't understand things so well.

Memory Week

2012-01-11T23:41:00.000-08:00

Happy 2012 to everyone. This week is Memory Week at the Guardian and Observer, and I've had great fun being involved.

The main event has been an online memory experiment designed by Jon Simons and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge. This is already looking like it could become the biggest memory experiment ever conducted, so please join in. You can hear me talking about the study on BBC Tees (at around 1:50 on this link). You can also read the press release here. Jon's latest blog post gives some more background to the study.

On Wednesday, I did a live Q&A on memory on the Guardian's website (1-2pm). Comments are now closed but I hope to keep the conversation going on Twitter.

Next Saturday, the Guardian will be publishing a free guide called 'Make the Most of Your Memory'. On Sunday, the Observer will be publishing another free guide incorporating memory tests and exercises. The supplements will also be available online.

A seven-year-old's Saturday

2011-11-05T02:12:00.000-07:00

A chapter in Pieces of Light is going to deal with the use of SenseCam as a memory aid for people with amnesia. SenseCam is a little camera worn around the neck which takes pictures of the world as you move through it. Various sensors embedded in the device detect movement and changes in light and temperature, and trigger the taking of a picture through its wide-angle lens. I borrowed one for a week from the memory researcher Chris Moulin at the University of Leeds, and used it to perform my own memory experiment, described in the book.

I also thought it would be fun to let my seven-year-old try it out. He took it with him on a shopping trip one Saturday afternoon, and I assembled the resulting images into a timelapse movie. I think it gives a lovely insight into what the world might look like to a seven-year-old.

Barnes, his memory

2011-10-19T02:19:00.000-07:00

Julian Barnes was announced last night as the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending. In beautifully concise (and, controversially, rather readable) prose, the novel recounts the efforts of a middle-aged man to make sense of past relationships and their unintended consequences. I thought it was a worthy winner, and it's nice to see Barnes (three times an also-ran) getting the acclaim he deserves.

I jumped on this book when it came out because of several comments I had seen about its theme of memory. All novels are about memory, of course, but this one seemed to be taking seriously a reconstructive view of how we remember: the various ways in which who we are now can change how we make sense of what happened then. On the very first page, the protagonist Tony questions the reliability of his own testimony: 'This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.'

And yet the well-documented unreliability of memory isn't quite as interesting to Barnes as its regular habits. When Tony hears about the existence of his late friend Adrian's diary, he wonders whether getting hold of it will dislodge his remembering from the ruts it has been stuck in. Reading Adrian's diary, he thinks, 'might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump-start something—though I had no idea what' (p. 77).

Tony is struggling to uncover a truth about the past, and the fact that he always remembers things in the same way is an obstacle to progress. Barnes recognises, even celebrates, the slippery truth of memory, and sees Tony's infuriating constancy of memory as stemming from the habitual nature of his storytelling about the past, rather than from any object-like permanence of his memory representations. Remembering happens in the present moment, and each act of remembering is shaped and constrained by what has gone before. We create memory fictions—the same fictions—so many times over that they come to have a special kind of constancy. It's not that we're laying them down in some permanent store and repeatedly accessing their immutable truths. Rather, we make memories in the present tense, according to the needs of the present. If they tell the same story each time, it's because they are more like habits than things.

The Sense of an Ending presents the most sophisticated view of memory I have seen in fiction for a while, and it offers a nice antidote to descriptions of remembering that liken it to the loading of a mental DVD containing a faithful representation of a past event. On another occasion, the old-fashioned view of memory creeps in, such as when Tony complains (about one episode of forgetting) that 'my brain must have erased it from the record' (p. 119). Memory is not a tape recorder: it has neither a playback head nor a record one, and the analogy is as misleading as it is entrenched.

One of the most interesting parts of the novel describes how a shift in Tony's feelings towards his former lover’s parents unlocks new memories of their relationship:

But what if, even at a late stage, your emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change? … I don’t know if there’s a scientific explanation for this… All I can say is that it happened, and that it astonished me.

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape, 2011), p. 120

I would be the last to want to apply a reductionist method to understanding fiction that's as good as this, but these kinds of circumstance crop up frequently in the modern science of memory. As is the case in memories for trauma, changing your current interpretation of a past event can change the way you remember it. You recall the emotionality of an event differently, for example, according to whether you are asked to recall it from a first-person point of view (where you are more likely to focus on emotions and feelings) or from a third-person perspective (where you are more likely to concentrate on the actual facts of the matter) [1].

More than just being about memory, though, I think this novel is a return to one of Barnes' favourite themes: that of the self in time. As Tony comments right at the outset, 'we live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I've never felt I understood it very well.' I recall (probably badly, through the dusty pane of memory) a passage from Barnes' first novel, Metroland, in which the narrator comments that everyone is born to fit best into a particular lifestage. Which means, he expands, that you can come across people in their teens who really would be more at home in their own lives if they were in their forties, so that when they eventually reach that age it's like a homecoming.

I'd love to back this up with a quotation, if anyone remembers it. Tony's problem is that he never quite works out where in his life he fits best. It was that sense of a self trying to find its place in time that struck me most about this memorable literary winner.

[1] Robinson, J. A., & Swanson, K. L. (1993). Field and observer modes of remembering. Memory, 1, 169-184.

A new kind of science writing

2011-09-29T02:02:00.000-07:00

I was moved last weekend by a new blog post from the eminent cognitive neuroscientist Uta Frith on the inspiration that Jorge Luis Borges offered her as a young researcher. Borges is well known among psychologists for one particular story, 'Funes the Memorious', in which the eponymous Funes is left (after a riding accident) unable to forget anything. ‘My memory,’ he complains, ‘is like a garbage heap.’ Condemned to store every irrelevant perceptual detail, Funes suffers from a crippling inability to abstract or generalize:

He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Río Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho.

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (Penguin, 1998), p. 135.

Frith makes the connection to another prodigious memorizer, A. R. Luria's neuropsychological case study known as S. As examples of 'systems with no information reduction', Funes and S. are considered by Frith to shed light on the mysterious syndrome of autism, which has sometimes been characterized as involving a difficulty in separating meaningful from irrelevant information.

I am always delighted to read more about Luria, whose writings to my mind have important and largely unacknowledged implications for cognitive neuroscience. Did Luria know of Borges' story, or the other way round? Frith is doubtful. Jonah Lehrer has considered this question, and also wonders whether a link can be proven. We know that real-life equivalents of Funes exist. So-called hyperthymestic syndrome is rare: so rare, in fact, that only about six cases have ever been described. Here's a lovely Radiolab piece, also from Lehrer, on the perils of remembering everything.

When setting Funes off against S., it's important to recognise some crucial differences between the scientific and the literary cases. Beyond his prodigious memory capacities, S. (real name: Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky) is probably even more famous for his synaesthesia, a capacity that Funes is not mentioned as having. Funes presumably suffered a brain injury after his fall from his blue roan horse; no such neurological insult is recorded for Shereshevsky. Funes is an unhappy mnemonist: insomniac, cognitively disabled, 'battered' by an 'inexhaustible reality'. Shereshevsky, for all his pecularities, was able to function in his world, although Luria describes him as 'a somewhat anchorless person, living with the expectation that at any moment something particularly fine was to come his way.'

Uta Frith's real interest in her blog post is in the way that fiction can inspire scientific writing. One observation that I would want to add to her analysis is to note what a brilliant writer Luria was. This is him on Shereshevsky's personality:

An individual whose conscious awareness is such that a sound becomes fused with a sense of colour and taste; for whom each fleeting impression engenders a vivid, inextinguishable image; for whom words have quite different meanings than they do for us—such a person cannot mature in the same way others do, nor will his inner world, his life history tend to be like others'.

A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist (Harvard, 1968), p. 151.

This is science writing that takes the human seriously, and which might belong in what Jonah Lehrer has called 'a fourth culture', one which 'will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and will focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience' (Proust was a Neuroscientist, Houghton Mifflin, 2007, p. 196). Plenty of fiction writers have travelled in Borges' direction, of course, incorporating science into their fictions. Lehrer has nominated Ian McEwan's Saturday, with its metaphysically anxious neurosurgeon protagonist, as the standard bearer of the new fourth culture. I myself am much less convinced about this example, for reasons I will explain at this talk in London on Saturday and in future posts on this blog.

I guess that Frith would be enthusiastic about the cultural shift that Lehrer describes. (For those who aren't used to seeing scientists of her stature showing such literary erudition, I should point out that she is the only psychologist I know who has managed to slip an allusion to Goethe into the title of a book chapter.) Here's how she gives voice to her dream:

Imagine writing fiction as if it were a scientific account, footnotes, references and all. Imagine writing up empirically based research as if it were a suspenseful narrative. I have been seeking this kind of cross-over, but have never achieved it myself.

It's important to set the limits of this kind of ambition. I for one will not be submitting any journal articles written as suspenseful narrative, not any time soon. The reporting of science in academic journals needs to hit certain targets of clarity, detail, interpretative balance, context, intellectual rigour and brevity. The scientific article has developed its own aesthetic, and to me it is an attractive one. A well-written paper can be a joy to read (as we scientists know when we referee manuscripts that fall far short of these standards). But reading journal articles does not press the same buttons for me that reading good fiction or non-fiction does. I don't think it should even try to do so.

For me, Frith's question bears more on the kind of writing we do to engage with and communicate science, rather than the scientific reports themselves. There, I would argue that the dominant genre is indeed suspenseful narrative. If that is true, I would argue that Frith already has her wish. Joshua Foer's recent book on 'mental athletes' (which also showcases S.'s story) is a good example of how effective science writing can be when it is shaped as a thriller, complete with clearly demarcated plot-drivers and end-of-chapter cliffhangers.

I think, though, that this kind of hang-onto-your-hats thrillerism is the least that science writing can learn from fiction. I don't read thrillers, on the whole: too often I find them formulaic, psychologically shallow and uncomfortably constrained by the rules of their genre. I hate to say it, but that's my feeling about much science writing as well. A genre has grown up that seems never to examine its own methods, where facts are told (often in a faintly patronising, gee-whiz tone) rather than being shown, or allowed to be felt. You could be forgiven for thinking that there was no other way of doing it.

I'm not happy with that orthodoxy, and will keep trying to find new ways of writing about science. When I embarked on The Baby in the Mirror (published in the US as A Thousand Days of Wonder), I wanted to write a science book that read like a novel. The story was about a person—my daughter—and so it had to take character seriously. But it had to be good on the science as well. The book that emerged didn't work for everyone, but I at least felt that I was on to something. It suggested a new direction, one which I am exploring further in my new book, which will also be preoccupied with bringing the 'subjective' into 'objective' science.

I think that science writing can take character seriously, and that it can care about subjective experience, emotion, and a self's relationship with the world. It can be about how people make sense of their reality, as well as about the reality itself. It can do all that while still being true to the science. This is particularly true of writing in the cognitive sciences, where people—their minds and their brains—are our focus. Suspenseful narratives don't have to be about things happening and goals being met; they can be about changing emotions, the dizzingly complicated to-and-fro of who knows what and who feels what about whom. There are examples out there already, such as some of the writing in the neuropsychological tradition of Oliver Sacks (which in turn owes a debt to Luria and others). An intriguing recent example is Paul Broks' Into the Silent Land, where the tone is elegiac, reflective, drunk with wonder at the miracle of the (even damaged) human brain. I hope to see more of this kind of writing about science, and dream (like Frith) of reading more books that go beyond the cliches of pop science and give us some of the emotive complexity and richness of literary fiction.

Rethinking 'thinking': Modernism and the mind

2011-09-27T04:37:00.000-07:00

A quick plug for a talk I'll be giving at the Institute of English Studies in London on Saturday, as part of their Modernism Research Seminar series. My Durham colleague Pat Waugh and I will be speaking on representations of mind in modernism and beyond, with a particular interest in how modernism has been portrayed as taking an 'inward turn', focusing on inner experience at the expense of the bodily, affective and social. For Pat, this is an incorrect reading of the riches of modernist fiction, and she will be using the writings of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and others to show how modernist writers portray mind and experience in ways that are much more emotional and embodied than the caricature of the 'inward turn' suggests.

I will then be offering a perspective on all this from modern psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I'll start by returning to a familiar theme, that of how we need to be more serious about how we define 'thinking'. If we get smarter about how we define this aspect of conscious experience, I will suggest, the modernist project will make more sense. I will argue that a focus on inner experience does not commit us to a kind of Cartesian separation of mind from body. Quite the opposite, in fact, given that 'thinking' (as semiotically mediated cognition) is fundamentally social and affective.

One person who takes a Cartesian view of things is Henry Perowne, the neurosurgeon protagonist of Ian McEwan's celebrated novel Saturday:

Just like the digital codes of replicating life held within DNA, the brain's fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre. Could it ever be explained, how matter became conscious?

Ian McEwan, Saturday (Jonathan Cape, 2005), pp. 254-5.

Here, the neurosurgeon's materialist philosophy founders on the hard problem of consciousness: the question of how the objective can give rise to the subjective, how mind can emerge from matter. This is a Cartesian framing of the problem, even though the answer, if it ever comes (Perowne is optimistic), may not look Cartesian.

Pat and I will both be talking about Saturday and how the novel critiques while also implicitly perpetuating the Cartesian myth of the 'inward turn'. I will also be considering the possibility of a new kind of fiction about mind and brain, which is sensitive to the science and the paradoxes of consciousness that it throws up. The talk is in Room G37, Ground Floor, Senate House; see here for directions. All are welcome.

Missing ICOM

2011-08-08T09:39:00.000-07:00

The big news in the memory world last week was the fifth International Conference on Memory (ICOM5). More than 800 delegates congregated in York to discuss recent developments in the science of the subject and hear keynotes from such greats as Alan Baddeley, Roberto Cabeza, Richard Morris and Mark Williams. Anyone with a scientific interest in memory would have wanted to be there. I, however, was in Portugal on holiday, and so missed everything except what I could catch up with on Twitter (use the #icom5 hashtag). My sole contribution was chipping in some memory haikus, which was the best I could manage from a thousand miles away (you can find all the entries by looking for the #icom5haiku hashtag).

The conference also attracted some well-deserved media attention. You can read co-organiser Tom Hartley's account of his Newsnight debut (and watch a clip from his appearance) here. You can also listen to a fascinating radio interview with Tom on BBC York.

How much do you understand about how memory works?

2011-05-22T05:14:00.000-07:00

Christian Jarrett at Research Digest has just posted a great piece on professional psychologists' understanding of how memory works. How well do you score? You can test yourself here.

The language of the past

2011-04-19T00:22:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of work on the book recently, and so not much time for blogging. But I have been writing about my interviews with my grandmother, Martha, about her earliest memories. In this article for the Guardian, I describe how I took a different tack with my interviewing, and arranged for her to be interviewed in Yiddish.

This blog post for Psychology Today follows up the Guardian piece with some more detail on the science behind the switch of language.

I'll be talking some more on this topic on Woman's Hour on Friday 22 April.

Event at The School of Life

2011-02-20T02:19:00.000-08:00

On Monday 14 March I am doing an event on memory at The School of Life. Here's the blurb:

We all rely on our memories to help us to make sense of who we are. But memory is a notorious trickster, prone to all kinds of distortions. Many of us, as we get older, complain that our memories let us down. In this event, author and psychologist Charles Fernyhough draws on the latest research into this endlessly fascinating topic to show how we can harness the slippery power of memory in our everyday lives. He asks whether we can trust childhood memories, and how we can boost our chances of remembering what we want to remember. Our pasts are precious to us, but they are also in some senses unknowable. A deeper understanding of why we remember and forget can give us a better chance of connecting to the truth about who we are.

You can book for the event by following this link. I hope to see some readers there!

The madeleine moment

2011-01-16T05:35:00.000-08:00

This week I've been working on what's become known as Proustian memory, after the famous scene in the first volume of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. Struggling to recapture details of his childhood and youth, the narrator Marcel tastes a piece of a 'petite madeleine' cake steeped in lime-blossom tea, and something very odd happens:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1 (p. 60 of the edition pictured)

What follows is one of the most famous examples of remembering in literature. I am re-reading this extraordinary passage, however, conscious that the reality of the Proust phenomenon may not match up with its popular conceptions. Proust is everywhere in the neuroscience of learning and memory (I myself heard him quoted in undergraduate lectures on the topic). But do these invocations of the great man get Proust right?

Although Marcel's moment with the madeleine ultimately leads to the recapturing of memories of his childhood village of Combray, it is not an instantaneous process. As Douwe Draaisma has pointed out, Marcel actually faces a struggle to make sense of his feelings at the moment of tasting the madeleine. Further tastings don't work, at least not initially. "It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself." (ibid., p. 61). The only way forward lies in deep, repeated plunges of introspection, after which, eventually, something starts to stir: "I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed." (p. 62).

Even this isn't quite enough, and Marcel has to repeat the examination of his own experience "ten times over" (p. 63). It is as though the gustatory memory needs to make contact with the visual one, and they don't quite speak the same language. Douwe Draaisma concludes that the typical conception of Proustian memory as launching us immediately back into the past isn't quite true to what Proust wrote:

In that sense, the scene with the madeleine is anything but a Proust phenomenon; it took the narrator a great deal of time to associate his spoonful of tea and the crumbs of the cake with remembered images. What emerged from one moment to the next was the association with a feeling, a feeling of delight; the remembered image was still a long way in coming.

Douwe Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older (CUP), p. 33

I did a quick survey on Twitter and Facebook and found that many of my online friends had had Proustian memory experiences. Many of these redolent sensory moments, as you would expect, centred around the smell and taste of food. I am interested to know more about whether people's Proustian memories are instantaneous, as the received wisdom has it, or more drawn-out and effortful.

It's important to remember that Proust has plenty more to say about memory over the seven volumes of the novel, and that some of Marcel's later sensory encounters with the past have a much more immediate effect. There is some fascinating research on the historical influences on Proust's thinking about memory, and there is also a ton of great new science unpicking whether Proust was right about the power of smell and taste as triggers of memory (more on these topics another time). There is no doubt that the author remained convinced of their power, though, and it is only fitting that Marcel should get the last word:

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1 (pp. 63-64 of the edition pictured)

Slippery memories and the tasks of fiction

2010-12-30T00:04:00.000-08:00

I recently had an opportunity to write a guest post for the online magazine OnFiction, whose focus is on psychological processes in the reading and writing of fiction. I chose to look at how novelists might benefit from embracing the reconstructive view of memory. You can read the piece here.

Changes

2010-12-23T03:08:00.001-08:00

If you have joined me from The Ladybird Papers, thanks for hopping over. As you'll have noticed, my focus has changed slightly over the last year, with more posts on autobiographical memory (reflecting the topic of my next book). I'll still be posting on developmental psychology topics, though, and anything else that takes my fancy.

Talking about the past

2010-12-20T08:05:00.000-08:00

In my latest Psychology Today blog post, I pick up on the theme of memory development to examine the role played by conversations about the past in the organization of children's memories. This includes a look at some new research which shows that mothers' style of talking about the past with their preschoolers shows its influence even into adolescence. You can read the new post here.

The shifting boundary of childhood amnesia

2010-12-03T06:06:00.000-08:00

Adults forget their early childhoods, but can children remember them? In my latest post on my Psychology Today blog, I look at some new research that addresses this question.

Voices in the head

2010-11-15T12:25:00.000-08:00

My latest post on Psychology Today picks up on the theme of inner speech, and looks at the the connection with voice-hearing. You can read the post here.

What do we mean by 'thinking'?

2010-08-17T23:23:00.000-07:00

Jad and the team at Radiolab have just released a new show, called Words. I talked to them about the role of language in the development of children's thinking. You can listen to the podcast here. And you really should check out the accompanying video as well.

Quite a few things came out of the discussion which I wanted to comment on some more. So I have written a post on my PT blog to explain in more detail how I see things working here. The post is called "What do we mean by 'thinking'?", and you can check it out here.

Free will in childhood

2010-08-03T04:51:00.000-07:00

The latest post in the Lego Stars Wars series is on the development of free will. You can read it over on Psychology Today. Meanwhile, over on the Facebook page, there are details of the summer giveaway - closing date coming up soon.

Picturing her dreams

2010-07-30T02:23:00.000-07:00

I've talked a fair bit about dreams on this blog, but I haven't come anywhere close to this: check it out.

Repetitive behaviours

2010-07-24T01:34:00.000-07:00

Over at Psychology Today I've got a new blog post on repetitive behaviours in toddlerhood. You can read the piece here.

Please come and say hello on Twitter. And check out the Facebook page for news of a summer giveaway!

Gita Vygodskaya

2010-07-19T09:49:00.000-07:00

I was saddened to hear the news from Moscow this week of the passing of Dr Gita L. Vygodskaya. Gita was Lev Vygotsky's eldest daughter and became an eminent psychologist in her own right. She had an important part to play in bringing Vygotsky's unpublished writings to publication, and she also wrote movingly about her memories of her father in an article entitled 'Remembering Father', which we included in our 1999 Critical Assessments of Vygotsky's work.

For me, one of the most memorable details of Gita's account was the description of life in the family's cramped Moscow flat. Vygotsky was already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him at age thirty-seven, and was hard at work on his masterpiece, Thinking and Speech. He nevertheless always found space for Gita to do her homework on the table beside him. It's a fact I always remember when my kids have their own work to do, and it's a wonderful reminder of a great genius and his pioneering, dedicated daughter.

Thanks to Marina Nelson for letting me know the sad news about Gita and for giving me permission to use the photograph.

Mind-minded parenting, moral babies

2010-05-11T23:45:00.000-07:00

A new post on my Psychology Today blog: I'm writing about our work on mind-mindedness and the possibility - as yet not fully tested - that certain interventions might increase parents' mind-mindedness.

Also this week, Paul Bloom's NYT piece on the moral lives of babies. Thanks to Rachel for pointing this one out.

The anti-parenting thing

2010-02-13T02:38:00.000-08:00

Last week on Psychology Today I posted a 'manifesto' for a new approach to parenting. The post has been tweeted about quite a lot, and I've had a couple of interesting comments on the post. See what you think - you can read the post here.

Also, just a reminder that tickets for the Royal Institution event are on sale now.

Do as I do

2010-01-30T00:37:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

I've been thinking a lot about imitation recently, in preparation for an interview on Radio 4's Woman's Hour. A few things intrigued me about the most recent research, and I didn't get a chance to talk about them all in the interview. So here's a brief supplement:

I knew about the classic work of Meltzoff and colleagues on neonatal imitation, but I'd struggled to see evidence of that kind of very early imitation in my own kids. Meltzoff's findings have not always been replicated, and when they are, they seem to require certain very specific experimental conditions to be in place. But it's also interesting that neonatal imitation has been suggested to be a kind of innate reflex that disappears quite soon after birth, only to re-emerge a couple of months later when more sophisticated, cortical brain systems take over responsibility. That's probably why parents don't usually see imitation until babies are a couple of months old. There were several times when I thought Athena was imitating a smile in the first few weeks, but I wasn't really convinced that it was happening until she was about seven weeks.

The starting point for the radio piece was the story I blogged about a few weeks ago, on newborns' ability to 'cry in' their own accent. I wanted to make the point in the interview that what's special about these findings is that they show that babies are capable not just of picking up information in the womb, but of using that knowledge to shape their own behaviour. They don't just learn the accent; they reproduce it for themselves. Imitation gets really clever when it works at a distance: when the mimicking is produced some time after the initial stimulus is perceived. We call this 'deferred imitation', and it really gets going in babies from after around six months.

A professional mimic is, of course, an expert in deferred imitation, and the comedienne Jan Ravens unsurprisingly stole the show with some very funny take-offs. But toddlers' imitation can be even more sophisticated. Babies and young children don't just imitation actions; they also imitate intentions. Some of the most interesting recent imitation research shows that children will copy what they thought an adult was trying to do, rather than what she actually did do. For example, a toddler watches a scenario where an adult is trying to drop a ping-pong ball into a cup. The adult misses the cup, and the ball bounces off the side of the cup and onto the table. What will the toddler do when given these materials? She will drop the ball straight into the cup. She will copy what she thought the grown-up was trying to do, rather than what she actually succeeded in doing.

There's also some great new research on over-imitation. This is where children don't just copy the actions that are essential to producing an effect; they will also copy extraneous additional actions which they seem to judge are important. For example, an adult shows a child how you can make a box make an interesting sound by pressing a button on the top. He then proceeds to press the button and elicit the sound, but not before tracing three completely pointless circles in the air above the box. The toddlers copy the button-pressing, but they also copy the irrelevant actions that precede it. Chimpanzees, in contrast, don't bother with all the fancy stuff; they just get on and press the button. It's as though the human children also want to imitate the adult's full set of intentions (the irrelevant actions as well as the relevant ones), rather than just the basic cause-and-effect.

There's plenty more that could be said about this complex and fascinating area of research, but for the moment here's the link to the show.

The one about agency and identity

2009-11-29T05:17:00.000-08:00

The second of my posts on the Lego Star Wars theme is now up. The theme: how babies come to establish a sense of their own identities through action. You can read the post here.

The science of parenting

2009-11-21T03:38:00.000-08:00

Image by 12 : 00 ♥ via Flickr

I've been thinking a lot about parenting this week. I've been helping to devise a new course on parenting for the School of Life, and that's involved reading lots of the research on how different parenting styles and practices are associated with different developmental outcomes. One impression that has been confirmed for me is that there is very little solid scientific evidence in this area. There are far more people out there willing to offer advice on parenting than there are people willing to test these ideas scientifically.

So I was pleased to rediscover a website called Parenting Science, which promises information on the science of parenting with full scientific back-up. The website is run by an anthropologist, Gwen Dewar, who cares about making sure that ideas about parenting are founded in properly referenced scientific findings. I'm sure that Gwen and I would disagree on a few things, but her site is a welcome antidote to the opinion dressed as science that parents are constantly being fed. Tear up your parenting books and get yourselves over there.

Lego Star Wars, Part I

2009-11-13T00:06:00.000-08:00

In case you missed this post on my Psychology Today blog, I was writing about my experiences of playing Lego Star Wars with Isaac on the Wii, and some recent research on how young children learn to collaborate. You can read the post in full here. Part II is coming soon... watch the skies.

'Accents' in the womb?

2009-11-07T01:47:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

BBC News ran a story yesterday on babies' ability to pick up certain aspects of their parents' accents in the womb. Before we get carried away by the image of neonates springing out into the world speaking broad Geordie or Brummie, we should look at the study (in press in the journal Current Biology) in a little more detail. The German researchers recorded and analysed the cries of some very young babies—between 2 and 5 days old—born into two language groups, French and German. There were 30 babies in each group. The analysis of the recordings involved examination of the cries' 'melody contours', which makes use of the fact that the cry of a baby follows a distinctive pattern: first rising in pitch, and then falling, in a single arc.

The results of the analyses showed clear differences between the language groups. The French babies' cries spent longer on the rising part of the arc, and the German cries were skewed towards the falling part. These patterns match up to the particular prosodic patterns of the French and German languages, as demonstrated in other studies (and fully evident to listeners to those spoken languages).

There's nothing particularly new about a finding that foetuses can pick up and learn about auditory information in the womb. In my book, I describe an experiment conducted by Peter Hepper two decades ago, in which babies who had been exposed to the theme tune of the soap Neighbours showed a preference for that tune after they had been born. Plenty of other convincing evidence for foetal learning has been published since the time of Hepper's study. What is striking about this new study is that babies aren't just learning patterns in the womb, but they are also showing an ability to mimic them—which must call for some very sophisticated control over the articulatory system (the system of muscles that allows us to produce speech). Previous findings had shown vocal imitation at 12 weeks, but no earlier. Rather than just making a noise that is constrained by the respiratory (breathing) cycle, newborn babies are actually shaping the sound they make, and doing it in response to sounds they have already heard in the womb. This is particularly true of the French babies, with their 'rising' intonation—not the sort of cry you would hear if babies were simply vocalising their breaths.

In her comments to BBC News, study author Kathleen Wermke speculates that 'crying with an accent' may play a part in attracting the mother's attention and thus forging a bond with her. I was also interested in the comment by Debbie Mills of Bangor University, who questions whether this neonatal capacity for imitation might fall away shortly after birth only to return later in a different form. This 'inverse-U' trajectory of development is commonly observed in the first few months of life, with newborns showing capacities that they then lose, only to recover them again a few months later as different neural systems take responsibility for them.

(Mampe et al., Newborns’ Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language, Current Biology (2009),
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.09.064)

Maps in the brain

2009-10-28T02:32:00.000-07:00

Image by kerim via Flickr

I'm fascinated by this new post on the Psychology Today blogs, which suggests that children's drawings of the human body might tell us something about how the body is represented in the brain. The idea is that kids' characteristic distortions of the human shape, when they pick up a pencil to draw, reflect the varying importance of different body parts in their perception of the world. Children overemphasise hands, face and mouth because that's where they sense the world most vividly, with the result that their pictures look oddly like the somatosensory maps that neurobiologists have described in the brain. What do readers think?

Life after death?

2009-10-27T04:10:00.000-07:00

Maybe.

Some more on memory

2009-10-21T01:27:00.000-07:00

I continued this theme yesterday with a post on my Psychology Today blog: you can read the post here. It includes some further details on the research I mentioned in the Guardian article but which didn't make it through to the final piece.

Memories of those who are gone

2009-10-08T03:18:00.000-07:00

I've had some really interesting feedback on my article on children's memory for lost family members, published in the Guardian last weekend. My starting point in the piece was the idea that autobiographical memory is fragile and very susceptible to manipulation, particularly in childhood. So parents who want to seed memories of departed grandparents find themselves in fertile territory. I don't know for sure whether it will work or not, long-term, but I hope that my kids will 'remember' their Grandad, through his stories and sayings, almost as vividly as I remember him.

I could have mentioned any number of studies to support the idea of the fallibility of memory. The study I mentioned (call it the 'hot-air balloon study') is a particularly striking demonstration of how our memories can be tricked. The experiment was conducted by Kimberley Wade, now at Warwick University, with colleagues from New Zealand and Canada. As I describe in the piece, adult participants were asked to look at some photographs from their childhood without being told that one of the pictures had been doctored (it depicted a hot-air balloon ride which, it could be verified, had never happened). When interviewed again after about two weeks, around half of the participants 'remembered' the event, and were surprised to hear that it had been invented.

A little while ago I quoted Hilary Mantel on the vividness of early memories, and her conviction that this vividness vouched for their authenticity. Earlier in the same passage, Mantel has this to say:

Sometimes psychologists fake photographs in which a picture of their subject, in his or her childhood, appears in an unfamiliar setting, in places or with people who, in real life they have never seen. The subjects are amazed at first but then—in proportion to their anxiety to please—they oblige by producing a 'memory' to cover the experience that they have never actually had. I don't know what this shows, except that some psychologists have persuasive personalities, that some subjects are imaginative, and that we are all told to trust the evidence of our senses, and we do it: we trust the objective fact of the photograph, not our subjective bewilderment. It's a trick, it isn't science; it's about our present, not about our past.

Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost (2003)

I don't know which research Mantel had in mind, but I'm sure that in the hot-air balloon study participants weren't swayed by persuasive personalities. Actually, Mantel unwittingly hits the nail on the head: memory is about the present, not the past. Memories are constructed to meet the needs of now (which, from an evolutionary point of view, is arguably all the brain is actually interested in).

But Mantel is right that there is something about the hot-air balloon study that lacks ecological validity. To address these concerns, Wade and colleagues followed up their study with another experiment, which I'll call the Slime study. In this experiment, adult participants heard some narratives, provided by their own parents, of events that had happened in the participant's school days. Two of these narratives were genuine, and one other was fake. Specifically, the subjects were 'told' that they had tricked their primary school teacher by putting some green slime in the teacher's desk. (Parents confirmed that this had never actually happened.) The narrative went on to say that the child been caught and subsequently punished. As you would expect, given what we know about the suggestibility of memory, nearly half of the subjects reported some 'memory' for this pseudoevent.

So far, all this does is remind us that memory is easily tricked. But the Slime experiment went further. A separate group of participants followed the same procedure, but these individuals also looked at a class photo taken at the time they were supposed to be recalling. In this group, the rate of false memories jumped from 45% to 78%. In contrast to the hot-air balloon study, the photos themselves were genuine, but they were integrated with other (false) bits of information to create a vivid, and unfounded, 'memory'.

In my own article, I am suggesting that children probably do the same kind of integration of visual images with other kinds of information in creating memories of events that could never actually have happened. The kids know what Grandad Philip looked like, and they can listen to my stories about him. The imaginative storyteller that is memory does the rest.

Thanks to the bloggers

2009-10-06T12:38:00.000-07:00

Thank you to the writers of the blogs that have supported the book over the last year or so: One Strangely Lush Mother, Hilery Williams, Sultanas under the carseat, The Briggle Blog, rabbitIng, Kickypants, Alpha Mummy, Mind Hacks, The Cedar Lounge Revolution, clearframe and Morning of Dystopia. And thanks to the readers in the books forums at Mumsnet and The Breast Way for mentioning the book. Sorry if I've missed anyone!

With a new novel pouring out of me, keeping up with Twitter is about all I've been able to manage for the last few weeks, but I promise there'll be something new in the next couple of days.

What tiny eyes see

2009-09-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

I've been talking quite a bit recently about how the world looks to a newborn baby (see my Radiolab and Groks podcasts). So I found Tiny Eyes to be a lot of fun. This is a website, run by a couple of psychologists and a graphic designer, which allows you to upload your own pics and see how a baby would perceive the images. You can alter a couple of variables: the age of the baby (from newborn to 6 months) and the viewing distance. You'll note that babies can see in colour, but their colours are not quite the same as ours. Try it out for yourself here.

(Thanks to Melissa for putting me on to this.)

Don't keep it to yourself

2009-09-15T03:50:00.000-07:00

Over at Psychology Today I have been blogging about the psychological significance of children's private speech, a topic that will be familiar to readers of this blog. You can read the post here.

Parents and experts

2009-09-10T12:27:00.000-07:00

I had been planning to blog on our recent article on children's trust in the testimony of their mothers (and others), but Dave Sobel at Psychology Today beat me to it. Dave's is a thorough, enjoyable account of what we and others have been up to, so I'll just point you to his article - you can read it in full here.

Radiolab podcast

2009-08-28T05:03:00.000-07:00

Jad Abumrad from WNYC's brilliant Radiolab got in touch to say that the book had inspired some musings on the consciousness of his baby son, Amil. We had a fascinating conversation down an ISDN line, and you can listen to the resulting podcast here.

The developing storyteller

2009-08-19T07:58:00.000-07:00

This is the title of a new post in the wonderful OnFiction blog, describing some new research linking imaginary companions to children's narrative abilities. You can read the post here.

Astonishing, but not in a good way

2009-08-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

Cover of Mother's Milk

I enjoyed Jenny Turner's essay review on mummylit and dadlit in last week's Guardian Review, and I would support her call for a bit less niceness in our writing and thinking about babies. I would part company from her on a couple of points, though. Firstly, I personally found little in the writings of the "post-Freudian baby theorists" (such as Winnicott) that took babies seriously on their own terms, rather than being a mouthpiece for a particular, adult-oriented theoretical perspective. Secondly, I think Turner picks a bad example of the supposed richness of a baby's experience. Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk is a delightful book in many ways, and many of its finest qualities relate to its treatment of children. But five-year-old Robert's memory of his own birth is incoherent, and pays no attention to the picture of infant consciousness that researchers have painstakingly drawn over recent decades.

Why had they pretended to kill him when he was born? Keeping him awake for days, banging his head again and again against a closed cervix; twisting the cord around his throat and throttling him; chomping through his mother's abdomen with cold shears; clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side; dragging him out of his home and hitting him; shining lights in his eyes and doing experiments; taking him away from his mother while she lay on the table, half-dead ...

To the best of our knowledge, babies do not feel these events or form a conscious understanding of them in these ways. As I've noted elsewhere on this blog, it is highly unlikely that a five-year-old child would remember the events of his birth at all. This is a grown-up writer imagining what it would be like, as an adult, to go through the process of birth. It is not even true to a five-year-old child's understanding—which is the astonishing bit, given how carefully and sensitively Robert's consciousness is rendered elsewhere in the novel.

May I have your attention, please?

2009-07-27T03:28:00.000-07:00

Image by BreckenPool via Flickr

Over at Psychology Today, I've been writing about how young children learn some of the conventions of conversation. You can read the post here.

Also new this week: my review of Alison Gopnik's new book The Philosophical Baby appeared in this weekend's FT. You can read the piece here.

Who writes about children?

2009-07-20T09:39:00.000-07:00

I was pleased to see the book mentioned in Sally Emerson's piece in the Sunday Times. She has given me a lot to ponder, particularly with regard to the differing motivations and opportunities for male and female writers on this topic. Do readers agree with Emerson's conclusions?

3 of 3 on children's consciousness

2009-07-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

The last of my three-part series of posts on this topic is now up at Psychology Today. The book has been reviewed this week in the Sarasota magazine SRQ, the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero and the Dutch site Kennislink.nl. There was a mention in USA Today and in the Montreal newspaper La Presse. The blog Mind Hacks picked up on the issue of scientists conducting research with their own children.

Some good sense on attachment

2009-07-01T00:50:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Let's face it, an awful lot of nonsense is written about attachment. I shall save my concerns about the misuse of attachment ideas (particularly by the parenting industry) for another day, but for now I'm delighted to catch up with a study by Susan C. Johnson and colleagues, which demonstrates some rare right-minded thinking about this most important of topics.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, tackles a question that is close to my heart: the formation of internal working models (IWMs). According to the pioneering British psychiatrist John Bowlby, IWMs are psychological representations of how the social world functions, which work together with the instinctual attachment system to set the tone for the child's future social relationships. Nowadays psychologists use four attachment categories to describe the different attachment behaviours shown by infants: secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-resistant and disorganised. Broadly speaking, each of these attachment categories is thought to be the product of a different type of IWM.

Until quite recently, IWMs had an odd, semi-mythical status in developmental psychology. Everybody accepted that they were important, but no one had caught sight of them. They show evidence of their works in behaviour (in infants' responses to separation and reunion in the Strange Situation, for example), and in representations of attachment relationships later in life. But their status as social-cognitive entities, about which we can do proper science, was uncertain.

The point of IWMs is that they give infants a blueprint for predicting what people will do in certain situations. I'm going to speak generally, partly for simplicity and partly because the study I want to mention did not distinguish among the three different insecure categories. Secure infants have expectations that caregivers will respond to emotional distress, while insecure infants' IWMs will not predict the same degree of responsivity. (In our own research, we are busy trying to pin down the precise differences and similarities between insecure-avoidant, insecure-resistant and disorganised infants' IWMs, but more of that another time.)

Johnson and colleagues wanted to know whether IWMs could be seen in action in contexts other than the Strange Situation. They used a habituation paradigm to measure babies' responses to different attachment-related events. Babies saw a couple of animated blobs, one large (the 'mother') and one small (the 'infant'), appearing together and then being separated by the mother blob moving away. The infant blob then made a human infant cry and started pulsating and bouncing. The question was how the experimental participants would react to the virtual infant's distress. Specifically, the researchers wanted to know whether the babies would be more interested in a 'responsive' outcome, where the mother returned to the infant, or an 'unresponsive' outcome, where the mother continued to move away from the infant.

The results supported Johnson et al.'s predictions. Secure-group babies looked longer at the unresponsive outcome compared to the responsive one, while no such difference was seen in the insecure group. In the context of research with babies, longer looking times are generally taken to be a sign of interest or surprise on the baby's part. The secure babies seemed to have a model of how the social world worked, to which the unresponsive event was a bad fit. Their blueprints for social interaction predicted that a mother would return to a distressed infant, and so they showed interest when that event did not happen.

We have much more to learn about the psychological models that underlie attachment behaviour. The Johnson et al. study is a valuable attempt to apply the methods of infancy research in tracking those models back to the earliest days of the attachment relationship. When talking about attachment, it is best to stick to the facts—and here are some welcome new ones.

Over at Psychology Today...

2009-06-21T01:24:00.000-07:00

I've been continuing the theme of investigations of small children's inner experience... the latest installment can be read here.

Feeding ourselves

2009-06-19T00:30:00.000-07:00

Image by kingary via Flickr

Have you ever fed a baby? Put a mental camera on yourself while you do so. If you're anything like me, you'll find that you're instinctively making your own mouth do the things you want the infant to do. Open wide, that's it; wrap those lips around the morsel; close them up and swallow. In fact, I would defy you to keep your own mouth closed while meeting this abiding challenge of parenthood: getting some nosh down your little one's gullet.

What's the explanation? Some evolved mechanism for automatically modelling eating actions, to ensure that those who depend on us are well fed? Something to do with mirror neurons? In acting out the eating, I am configuring my own facial muscles in the way I want the toddler to do. That means that, at some level, I must be mapping the features and actions of my own body on to his. Generally I think mirror neurons are a little overrated (I do not see, for example, how they can be anything more than a useful platform for social cognition and theory of mind) but here's something they could be helping out with.

I've noticed that the reflective feeding effect generalises, too. When you are helping a toddler to brush her teeth, you will probably find that you are sometimes contorting your lips in the way you want the child to do. The problem with the 'modelling' theory is that it suggests that this behaviour is intentional; that we parents are doing this for a purpose, to show the child how the thing should be done. It could be something much more reflexive, unconscious and automatic: a by-product of evolution, psychological development, or both.

Then, the other day, I noticed Isaac doing the same thing. He was feeding me a bit of ice lolly and mouthing the grateful acceptance he wanted my mouth to show. He's five, but he too was unable to suppress this instinct to model the feeding process. It's not only parents who can't keep their own selves still. My hunch is that the effect is specific to actions that involve the face and mouth, but I could well be wrong about that. What do readers think?

Dutch edition

2009-06-03T13:01:00.000-07:00

The Dutch translation of the book is now available. The publisher is Contact and the translator is Rogier van Kappel. More information on the edition is available here. You can order the book here.

Chatty baby

2009-06-02T03:48:00.000-07:00

Thanks to @alphamummy and @DulwichDivorcee: I can't resist reposting this.

Children and digital technologies

2009-05-25T01:33:00.000-07:00

Image by Christine ™ via Flickr

As you might have guessed from the previous post, I have been writing about how exposure to digital recording technologies might affect children's developing memory and sense of self. This has also given me a chance to reflect on how Athena and Isaac might have been affected by the attention they've received. You can read the final piece (which appeared this weekend in the FT) here. As ever, I'd love to know your thoughts.

What about the other one?

2009-05-19T08:17:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

One question came up a few times at the readings last week, and it's not the familiar one about what Athena will make of all the attention. Is there a chance, some people asked me, that Isaac will be miffed that I didn't write a book about him? Am I guilty of parental favouritism, by omitting to give him the same treatment that I gave his big sis?

Readers of this blog will know that I have been writing about Isaac quite a bit, although admittedly there's not much about him in The Baby in the Mirror. I'll also admit to a certain bias in focus towards the first-born: although I've kept detailed notes on both children (Lord, how they differ), Athena undoubtedly got the lion's share of the attention. I'm not alone in this, however. I've just been reading David Buckingham, Rebekah Willett and Maria Pini's fascinating forthcoming book Home Truths: Video production and domestic life, which describes a detailed study of the use of the camcorder in the home. Their work, inspired in turn by Richard Chalfen's classic studies of home movies, describes several instances of preferential treatment for first-borns, at least as far as the video camera is concerned. One participant, Aiden, described what happened in the case of his eldest son, Zac: 'My father-in-law filmed Zac a lot but then lost interest. Yeah, the first one got filmed a lot.'

The best answer to this is to follow the example of Brian Hall, whose wonderful Madeleine's World showed me what was possible in this kind of writing. Hall's dedication page reads as follows:

FOR CORA,
with apologies for this book being about Madeleine

AND FOR MADELEINE,
with apologies for the same reason

After the tour

2009-05-16T02:10:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Thanks to everyone who came along to the events in London this week. I had some great conversations and had to deal with some searching questions, some of which I'll try to answer in more detail in future posts.

I recently spoke to Dr Alvin Jones for his radio show in Durham, NC. You can listen to our conversation by going to his website and scrolling down until you see the US jacket cover. Click on the image and you should hear the recording.

Toddlers welcome!

2009-05-08T03:28:00.000-07:00

If you're planning to come along to any of the events next week, please do feel free to bring the little ones along - I always think these events go better when there are some small people there to set me straight!

Someone must know

2009-05-07T00:06:00.000-07:00

Image by Brian Negus via Flickr

At bedtimes, we have been reading Michael Morpurgo's tale of blindness and Arthurian legends, The Sleeping Sword. Isaac is fascinated by my half-remembered recounting of the tales of King Arthur, but he is less impressed with my account of the legendary king's ontological status. He wants to know what Arthur looked like, where he lived and when.

'Well,' I say, 'if he was a real person then he probably lived about fifteen hundred years ago...'

'But was he a real person?'

'I don't know.'

'But you must know.'

'I don't. I don't know if there was such a person as King Arthur or not. Some people think there was, and some people think he was just a story.'

'But someone must know.'

'No. No one knows for sure.'

'Does God know?'

I dodge this. I could imagine us having the same conversation about Him Upstairs. What intrigues me is Isaac's conviction that, even if a particular individual doesn't have access to all the facts, someone out there must do. There is a fact of any matter, and at least one individual who holds the key. It's hard to imagine, but we might one day find incontrovertible proof of King Arthur's existence (or otherwise). Then Isaac's demand for definite knowledge will be met. Until then, there is Uncertainty: a great shifting intangible mass of it. It might frustrate his five-year-old mind, but it's the kind of thrilling sense of being out of step with the facts that might, one day, make a scientist.

More going on at PT

2009-04-30T12:31:00.000-07:00

Over at Psychology Today I've posted the first piece of a multi-parter on young children's inner experience. You can follow this new blog on Facebook here.

The wheels keep turning

2009-04-28T13:48:00.000-07:00

We spent last weekend building a board for Isaac's electric train set, and now we're practising running one train into the siding while the other loops around the main circuit. Isaac wants to run them both together and 'have a race'. Which engine will go faster? The bigger one, obviously. It's a battle between the Mallard (which any schoolchild knows was the fastest steam engine ever built) and a dumpy diesel-electric tank engine. No contest, then, in Isaac's view.

It reminds me of Piaget's Genevan studies on time, speed and distance. Claiming to have been put up to the challenge by Albert Einstein, with whom he had once shared an academic symposium, Piaget wanted to know whether children based their judgements of speed and distance on their reckoning about time, or whether their ideas about motion were more fundamental. Here's how I describe those experiments in the book:

Picking up on Einstein’s challenge, Piaget’s Genevan researchers presented children with various scenarios involving moving objects, such as clockwork snails crawling across a table, or two small dolls which were made to pass through tunnels of unequal length. Preoperational children would get hopelessly confused by questions about ‘how long’ and ‘how far’. Failing to take differences in speed, or starting and stopping points, into account, they might judge that something that had travelled further had also been travelling for more time. Slightly older children could use information about relative speed, such as the fact that one doll had overtaken another, but still tended to answer questions about temporal order in terms of spatial order: that is, interpreting questions about ‘before’ and ‘after’ in terms of distance rather than time.

Our own experiment is not a particularly accurate reprise of those classic Genevan studies. The relative speeds of our two engines actually seem to be changing constantly: one minute the Mallard is outstripping the tank engine, and the next the smaller loco is making all the running. Isaac is excited; I'm plain emotional. Much of what we've arranged here comes from my old boyhood train set, some of which in turn dates back to a train set from the 1950s. Thirty years ago I packed a handful of tiny black track pins into a Freightliner container, thinking 'They'll be useful again one day.' Today I'm sifting them in my clumsy, grown-up fingers, and reflecting on the foresight of that long-ago ten-year-old.

Old problems on young shoulders

2009-04-20T03:06:00.000-07:00

Image by Ed Yourdon via Flickr

How much are children attuned to the troubles of the world? Quite a lot, it seems. A report out today, based on 1000 face-to-face interviews with six- to twelve-year-olds, shows that concerns about the global recession are topping the lists of children's reported worries. Fears of violence to self and others also loom large in children's lives, with 30% of respondents saying that the bullying was a problem.

I wasn't surprised to read about these young people's attunement to economic and political realities. A paper due out soon in the journal Infant and Child Development reports some work done by my graduate student, Sarah Laing, on children's fears, worries and ritualistic behaviours in middle childhood and adolescence. For her study, Sarah devised an in-depth interview in which 142 children aged between seven and sixteen rated how intensely they felt fears and worries about a range of topics, as well as getting an opportunity to come up with their own items of concern. We found that worry, as opposed to fear, was particularly strongly related to children's performance of ritualistic behaviours, such as bedtime routines—suggesting that these sorts of behaviours may provide children with a way of coping with high anxiety. We also found that bullying and harm befalling a loved one were prominent on children's lists of worries, a pattern that was clear right across the age range.

Sarah's study also showed that the anxieties of the age were finding their way into children's emotional worlds. Sarah collected her data in December 2004, when the war in Iraq was raging. The war was the most intense of all sources of worry for the 11–12-year-old age group, ranking as highly as worry about harm befalling a loved one. The good news is that fear and worry become less intense as children get older, although we found a surge in intensity at the end of adolescence, as (presumably) the realities of adulthood press ever more strongly.

I'm happy to send readers a preprint of the paper if they'd like to see it.

Anti-parenting for dummies

2009-04-17T06:26:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Those who are following the book on Twitter will have noticed this new development. Why anti-parenting? I think I'm simply trying to underline the point about this not being a parenting book, but rather an exhortation to use science and imagination to reach a better understanding of where small children are coming from. I'm hoping the tweets will be daily(ish).

Twitter relaunch

2009-04-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

I'll be using Twitter again, but in a more focused way. Come and join us here.

Meanwhile, over at PT...

2009-04-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

I've just started blogging for the magazine Psychology Today. My first post is on the joys and pitfalls of writing about your own children; you can read it here.

Hazed and infused

2009-04-05T12:52:00.000-07:00

I'm in Denver, feeling slightly dazed at the end of the SRCD meeting. SRCD rolls around once every two years, and draws thousands of developmental psychologists to North America from all over the world. It's been an intense three days of symposia, posters and networking. I caught up with plenty of old friends and made some new ones, but also managed to get a feel for some new developments in the field, which I hope to write about here in the coming weeks. Right now, though, I need to catch up on some sleep and get over the effects of the altitude (Denver is the Mile High City) and the excellent Colorado beer.

US publication

2009-04-02T01:45:00.000-07:00

A Thousand Days of Wonder is now published in the US. The book was a Parade Pick this weekend.

A splash of colour

2009-03-25T08:50:00.000-07:00

Readers will know how fond we are of toddler art. I last reported on four-year-old Marla Olmstead's paintings, which formed the basis of a 2007 documentary. Now we hear that a two-year-old Australian girl's paintings have been exhibited in a Melbourne gallery. Aelita Andre, the artist in question, produced the works when she was 22 months. The gallery owner was surprised when he heard the truth, but decided to go on with the show anyway. Aelita even has her own website, and apparently a nifty touch with HTML. You can visit her, and see the works in close-up, here.

Sticky people

2009-03-24T04:45:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

The primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is interviewed in the New York Times about her new book on cooperative parenting. Babies call out social responses in us, and are themselves amazingly responsive to those reactions. Coupled with humans' neoteny, or extended period of immaturity, that means that human mothers rely on sharing out the work of parenting to conspecifics who are not family. In Hrdy's view, many features of our social cognition evolved in response to the pressures of being cooperative breeders. If you're going to hand your baby over to your neighbour, you need to be sure what she is thinking.

That's why babies are cute, the evolutionary psychologist would say. It's not enough for there to be trust on the part of the mother; there needs to be some inherent attraction in the idea of taking over someone else's childcare. The system wouldn't work unless babies called out the right social responses. Watch any social gathering in which a newborn is being handed around, and you'll see the frenzy for yourself. Many would have suspected it anyway, and here is a new scientific perspective on the phenomenon: infants are the glue that holds society together.

(Click on the carousel at the bottom right to see more about Hrdy's book.)

'Will you get up with me now?'

Readers will know that Isaac is quite the philosopher. Having reached the limits of my knowledge about death, God and whether a cheetah can run faster than a car, he is turning his thoughts to the cosmos. And I'm learning how little I know. In the International Year of Astronomy, that would seem to be timely problem to fix. I wouldn't mind starting with Christopher Potter's voyage around the cosmos, 'You are Here' (see the carousel, bottom right, for a link). You can read a Guardian interview with Potter here.

As with many who have mused on the stars, Potter's fascination began in childhood. As I describe in my own book, understanding where you fit in to the universe is just part of children's general project of making sense of where they are in time and space. But the research I describe in Chapter 13 ('The Young Doctor Who') also suggests that knowledge about cosmology might progress relatively independently of other kinds of knowledge, such as biology or physics. Turning to the heavens may not necessarily be a sign that a child is fully conversant with the rules of life on earth. Knowledgeable he may be about the moons of Jupiter and the death of stars, but Isaac still gets hopelessly confused about whether he can go round to play with his friend Elina in Australia. As Potter might agree, you can be a poet of the heavens while still treading clumsily on the earth.

Scary stories

2009-02-13T08:21:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I spoke to Laura Kelly from The Big Issue in Scotland about modernising influences on children's fairy tales. You can read the article here.

Children in the camcorder's eye

2009-02-03T05:59:00.000-08:00

I'll be at the British Library on Tuesday, talking about how digital technologies help in our understanding of children's minds, and what the costs and benefits are for children themselves. In an earlier post, I talked about how the selectivity of the video record might lead children to mistrust memories for which they don't have documentary evidence. If recent posts are anything to go by, they would be right to mistrust those memories. The point is that this is one respect in which adults have an obvious part to play in shaping children's autobiographical narratives, through those sometimes thought-through, sometimes haphazard decisions to record this and leave the camcorder switched off for that.

I'll also be talking about how digital technologies can bring us closer to the small child's point of view. Here, I'll be developing a theme from the 'Lightning Ridge is Falling Down' chapter, in which I describe Athena's early attempts at movie-making. In preparation, I have this afternoon been going through some of the video clips she took when she was two. Oh, that Aussie accent. I found the clip I mention in the book, in which she is videoing the courtesy light in the roof of our Toyota Camry. When she wants to check if the camcorder is switched on, she puts the whole thing down on her lap and inspects it all over. The machine keeps running, filming the weave of her orange trousers and the canvas of its own strap. Her fingers are all over the lens, and I'm sure the whole thing falls to the floor at one point. How offhand she is with her technological eye on the world, and how poignant the digital record.

Michael's memory

2009-01-24T01:52:00.000-08:00

It's clear enough that most adults do not have accurate memories for events from toddlerhood and infancy. But do small children recall their own earlier childhoods? If you ask the questions early enough, do you find evidence for remembering that would usually not survive the amnesia of the early years?

This question is at the heart of an intriguing case study just published in the journal Infant and Child Development. The author, the developmental psychologist and therapist Aletha Solter, had been working with the family of a little boy, Michael, who at the age of five months had had a short stay in hospital while he underwent cranial surgery. The therapy he was receiving was aimed at relieving the behavioural symptoms of traumatization. Michael had had no further experience of hospitals since his stay as a baby. Solter took advantage of this fact in planning a study of Michael's memory for his time in hospital. Crucially, she also asked Michael's family not to discuss his hospital stay with him.

Solter then conducted two follow-up interviews in which she asked Michael about his memory for the event. The first interview, which took place when Michael was 29 months old, showed him to have some strikingly detailed memories of his stay in hospital two years before. He recalled that his eyes had been closed for a time (as a result of the surgery), that the nurse had been wearing a red blouse and scarf, and that his grandfather had sung the carol 'Silent Night'.

At the second interview, conducted when Michael was 40 months, the picture was very different. This time, the little boy appeared to have no memory of his time as an in-patient. When Solter prompted him about the details he had recalled a year before, he had entirely forgotten them. As a two-year-old, Michael had limited but detailed and accurate memories of this event from his infancy. At three, those memories had vanished.

These findings are intriguing for a number of reasons, but not least because they demonstrate that 29-month-old Michael was able to use language to describe events for which he would not have had the relevant language at the time. Although he is noted to be a verbally precocious child, at the age of five months he would presumably have had no language at all. Solter notes some other studies that have shown that children can later apply verbal labels to preverbal experiences. For example, the researchers Gwynn Morris and Lynne Baker-Ward showed two-year-old children an event (the activation of an interesting bubble-making machine) that was critically related to colour (only a particular colour of bubble soap activated the machine). Children who did not have colour words at the time of the event were then, over a period of two months, given instruction in using colour words. When they were tested for recall of the original event, a significant percentage of children who did not have colour words at the time of the event nevertheless used their new colour labels in recalling what had happened.

The weight of the evidence, though, points to very limited verbal access to preverbal memories. A major force behind childhood amnesia is undoubtedly that children are trying to relate in language events that happened before they had language. What Michael's case shows is that there might be a sensitive period for access to such memories. If your language is good enough in that period between about 2 and 3 years of age, you might be able to gain verbal access to traumatic memories for events in early infancy. Most children, though, are not as verbally precocious as Michael is reported to be. For them, the horrors (and joys) of infancy are lost for ever.

Running from the Spider-Baby

2009-01-01T05:05:00.000-08:00

I've talked a bit about children's ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. One much-loved child in the shape of an adult is Father Dougal McGuire, who was on our screens last night in a New Year Father Ted special. In the very first episode, entitled 'Good Luck, Father Ted', Dougal tells Ted about a funfair that is coming to Craggy Island. He tries to persuade him that one of the main attractions is a strange hybrid called the Spider-Baby. On cross-examination, it becomes clear that Dougal is confused about the provenance of this idea. You can watch what follows here.

Dougal is like a toddler in so many ways. But are toddlers' qualities (I would hate to call them failings or weaknesses) in this respect best described as a confusion between fantasy and reality? In an earlier post, I mentioned how we have tried to reformulate this question as involving a distinction between internally generated and externally generated events. Father Ted's instructional diagram illustrates this quite nicely. What Dougal has to do is distinguish between the products of his own mind—the dream he has had—and the workings of external reality. His mix-up gives life to the Spider-Baby, and made us laugh on a cold night as well.

Trusting early memories

2008-12-30T10:05:00.000-08:00

One group of people who need to know about children's minds are those who deal with them in a legal capacity. Among other things, lawyers, judges and law enforcers need to understand about young people's capacity to give consent, how they respond to the social context of questioning, and how they represent past events about which they might be asked to testify.

The British Psychological Society recently published a set of guidelines on the topic of the law and human memory. The report, authored by a working party chaired by Martin Conway, considers the legal implications of recent findings on memory and forgetting. When children are involved in the legal process, such as in situations involving abuse, cases can hang on the accuracy of a child's memory. And yet those in the legal professions rarely take research on memory into their reckoning, preferring instead to rely on expert witnesses to vouch for the reliability or otherwise of participants' recollections.

There are some thorny problems here, and the report demands to be read and weighed carefully. One point made by the authors stood out for me in particular. On the basis of a great deal of research, the authors explicitly caution against comparisons between human memory and mechanical recording media such as video tapes. But these are errors that are still widespread. The writer Hilary Mantel, for example, in her acclaimed memoir Giving Up The Ghost (Fourth Estate, 2003), puts it like this:

"Though my early memories are patchy, I think they are not, or not entirely a confabulation, and I believe this because of their overwhelming sensory power [...] As I say 'I tasted,' I taste, and as I say 'I heard,' I hear: I am not talking about a Proustian moment, but a Proustian cine-film. Anyone can run these ancient newsreels, with a bit of preparation..."

For Mantel, the vividness of her memories is the guarantee of their accuracy. Decades of research into autobiographical memory show that this is simply wrong. Indeed, the BPS report specifically warns against trusting memories just because they have vivid sensory properties. Memory is too much a tale of storytelling. The only true guide to the accuracy of memories is, ultimately, independent corroboration.

You can download the BPS report here.

Around the table

2008-12-27T14:22:00.000-08:00

Developmental psychologists like their laboratories and their experimental tasks, but they also recognise that many of the complexities of children's development only reveal themselves amid the noise of everyday life. In their search for naturalistic contexts for their observations, those who study children's minds have often seen the value of family mealtimes. Mealtimes follow pretty set scripts; they keep energetic toddlers in the same place for a few minutes at a time; and they involve all sorts of verbal and nonverbal communication. As well as using the family dining table as a context within which to observe children directly, psychologists have also studied the effects of exposure to these particularly important social routines.

The latest Social Policy Report Brief from the Society for Research in Child Development summarises some of these findings and calls for their wider dissemination. Eating together is linked to vocabulary growth and academic achievement in younger children, and is associated with lower rates of behaviour problems. There are benefits in terms of avoiding obesity and eating disorders. Teenagers who eat with the family five or more times a week are protected against the temptations of nicotine, marijuana and alcohol. Shared meals tend to be healthier, and teenagers who enjoy them get through more fruit and vegetables.

All this, when the average American family mealtime lasts about twenty minutes. For this important context for development, even a short exposure seems to make a big difference.

You can download the Brief here.

Is he nearly here yet?

2008-12-23T23:32:00.000-08:00

Isaac can't wait. Today is Christmas Eve, which means that tonight Santa Claus will come down the chimney and 'drink some of that special wine that he likes'.

'Single malt whisky,' I correct him.

'I'm so excited,' he says. 'I want him to come now.'

I wrote about children's perception of time in the book. In the chapter entitled 'The Young Doctor Who', I describe some experiments conducted by my colleague Teresa McCormack. Children were shown a picture of an owl called Barney and listened to the sound Barney made (a tone lasting half a second). They then heard some sounds (each of differing lengths) made by other owls, followed by some test trials in which they had to judge whether the sound they were hearing was Barney's sound (the half-second one):

Five-year-olds (the youngest children tested so far) tend to claim that sounds shorter than half a second are Barney’s sound: that is, children remember the tone as being shorter than it was in reality. It is as though their own internal clocks are running too fast, causing them to judge that time is passing more quickly than it really is. Those children who pester their parents with pleas of ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ may simply have speeded-up body clocks. Appealing to concrete intervals measured in conventional units of time (‘We’ll be there in half an hour’) is no solution, since a five-year-old’s half an hour is quite a bit shorter than that of the person behind the wheel.

The historian of psychology Douwe Draaisma also considers some distortions of time perception, but focusing on the other end of the life span. In his book Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older (see the books carousel at the bottom of this page), he considers how the pressures on time perception in old age might work in the opposite direction. The wheels that measure time turn more slowly (perhaps because of a reduced rate of metabolism), and so the years fly by.

Draaisma also quotes that other great psychologist of time, Marcel Proust. In The Guermantes Way, Marcel can think of nothing other than his forthcoming appointment with Mme de Stermaria:

For as a general rule, the shorter the interval is that separates us from our planned objective, the longer it seems to us, because we apply to it a more minute scale of measurement, or simply because it occurs to us to measure it at all.

So it is with Isaac and Santa. If he had other things to distract him, the hours might not drag so. If he were eighty years old, the day would fly by. But he is five, and in for a excitable, dragging wait. It is going to be a long day.

Happy Christmas to all. I hope you'll drop by again in the New Year.

The horror remembered

2008-12-17T00:25:00.000-08:00

To the Wellcome Collection for Shona Illingworth's moving and thoughtful installation, 'The Watch Man'. The piece, which forms part of the current exhibition on War and Medicine, recreates the experience of a war veteran who witnessed one of the most shocking events of the Second World War. I was particularly struck by the way that Illingworth used sound and film together, and sometimes working at cross-purposes, to create the sense of a past alive in the present. A feature of a traumatized mind is that its fragments of remembered horror lie close to the surface of consciousness, at least until such time as they can be ordered into coherent representations of what happened.

All of this fits well with the idea that memories are constructed out of fragments of sensory experience combined with more schematic knowledge about one's own life. This was one of the themes of our subsequent discussion yesterday at the Wellcome. I was part of a group of social scientists, artists, journalists and filmmakers who had been invited to discuss some key questions around war and memory. Another important factor in the making of the piece, Illingworth told us, was the idea that our capacity to suppress traumatic memories becomes weaker as we get older—hence the particularly vivid experiences of the old man at the centre of the piece.

All of which got me wondering again about how traumatic memories function in childhood. We were treated to a fascinating talk by my Durham colleague Catherine Panter-Brick, who has been running a research project with children affected by militarised violence in Afghanistan. We also had a compelling talk by the photo-journalist Tom Stoddart from Getty Images, who showed some of the photos he has taken in Kosovo, Sarajevo, Goma, in post 9/11 New York, and elsewhere. As children are rarely spared from such atrocities, many of these pictures show young faces.

There is a common understanding, probably stemming from psychoanalytic theory, that traumatic memories work differently to ordinary remembering. In their recent review of psychological research in the area, Ingrid Cordón and colleagues suggest that memories for traumatic events are forgotten and recalled in similar ways to memories for happier ones. In one study of children who had suffered a documented trauma such as sexual abuse or kidnapping, traumas that had happened before the age of around three were only sketchily recalled, if at all. Even with older children, there is little evidence that traumatic events are remembered in a fundamentally different way to everyday ones. Those that are recalled are often recalled for longer, but that may just be because traumatic events are distinctive, and distinctive events, good or bad, stick in one’s mind. This leads us to a paradox, because it is indisputable that traumas mess you up. Childhood sexual abuse, for example, is reported by a substantial majority of psychiatric patients troubled by hearing voices. However it is that traumatic events have their effects, it can’t be through anything that is accessible to consciousness. Whatever influences they have on our behaviour or future mental health, we don’t seem to recall them any differently to anything else.

Which brings it home to me how much more we need to learn and understand about memory following trauma. Young children's memory is fragmentary anyway, and even psychologically undamaged kids must strive to create coherence just as a traumatized mind must. I will be blogging more on these topics in the months to come; as ever, I would welcome any thoughts.

A Thousand Days of Wonder

2008-12-11T00:07:00.000-08:00

In April next year, Avery (a division of Penguin USA) will publish The Baby in the Mirror in its US edition. Here's what the jacket will look like. You can see the catalogue entry by clicking here and scrolling to p. 84. I'll be posting more details about the US edition in the New Year.

The book can be pre-ordered from Amazon.com by clicking in the box on the right. You can also order through Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Who is the baby in the mirror?

2008-12-09T07:09:00.000-08:00

Enough people have asked me this question to make me think it needs some kind of public answer. Is that Athena on the cover of the book? For some people who have asked this question, it has been a way of cautiously seeking confirmation of something that has already been assumed. Given that there is so much of us already in this book, why wouldn't I have gone the whole hog and put a picture of her on the cover?

It doesn't help that the book has occasionally been described as 'containing photographs of the author's daughter'. The book contains images, for sure, mostly still-frame captures from our home movies, many of which were actually shot by Athena. But she herself appears only fleetingly, unrecognisably. This has been intentional, of course. As father/author, I felt that she had had quite enough scrutiny in the pages of the book to need attention in any other medium. I wanted her to come alive through the words on the page, and let readers fill in the physical picture in their imaginations. Her name is known, but her face is not. We would all want it to stay that way.

So would I put her photograph on the cover? Of course not. The image is a stock photo, and I want to ask no more about it than that. The baby in the mirror is someone's little girl, deserving of her own privacy. As are all our babies.

The power of lullaby?

2008-12-04T23:33:00.000-08:00

News this week that mothers are lulling babies to sleep with pop songs rather than traditional lullabies. We know that even very young babies have a capacity to recognise melody, and that some of this learning takes place even before birth. Music provides a source of organised perceptual stimuli that probably helps to shape processes of synapse formation, neural pruning and cortical differentiation from pretty much as soon as hearing is established in the second trimester. That is not the same as saying that music makes you smarter. A parent can value music as an enriching force in their child's environment without being committed to believing in the Mozart Effect.

Mozart has become established as a leading entertainer of western children ever since researchers at the University of California, Irvine, reported that listening to his Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major improved college students’ spatial reasoning. In a perhaps reckless effort to dramatize their findings for a lay audience, the UCI researchers translated the improvement into notional IQ scores, leading to the inevitable tabloid headline that listening to Mozart adds eight or nine points to your IQ. Although the intelligence boost was short-lived, the idea took a grip. Most bizarrely, people took the IQ point literally, and assumed that it must apply to babies and children too. An industry grew up, relieving parents of their dollars in return for Mozart CDs and videos, and even stethoscopic devices delivering interuterine muzak: Amadeus piped in to the womb. In fact, the Mozart Effect has been almost entirely debunked by subsequent studies, and there is not a shred of evidence that listening to the stuff, either in the womb or in the nursery, makes children any brighter.

One interesting point here, though, is that the researchers responsible for the original Mozart Effect findings hypothesised that the effect would be specific to Mozart's music, or music very like it. Other kinds of music, such as pop, were not supposed to have the same magical powers. It seems that the parents in this survey disagree. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents thought that pop songs were better than traditional lullabies. The presence of Dizzee Rascal in the top 20 might be a surprise, but some of these tunes (stand up Whitney Houston and Bryan Adams) are already famous for their soporific properties. My own tune of choice, when the children were babies, was that old Mancini classic, Moon River. What do readers of this blog find works with their little ones? And what explanations do you have for the power of lullaby?

Santa Run

2008-12-03T03:55:00.000-08:00

Not a post on children's development today, but something much more important. This weekend Athena and I will be dressing up as Santa and running 4km in support of the Sunshine Fund and Zoe's Place Baby Hospice. You can support these good causes by clicking on the links. There are more details on the event here.

Nah nah ne nah nah

2008-11-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

I've been speaking this week to Isabel Berwick from the FT, who is interested in the particular phenomenon that is Horrid Henry. You can read her piece here. Like Isabel, I am intrigued by the apparent lack of moral structure in these stories, but I think it makes a bit more sense when we think about what young readers are having to do in terms of entering the storyworld of the books. This is one of those instances where, I think, parents have to make calls on the basis of knowledge of their children but also - if possible - knowledge of some of the relevant research. That's been my approach throughout this whole project. I would rather parents made decisions for themselves, based on good information, rather than swallow prescriptions from so-called experts. As ever, if you have thoughts on this or anything else that's covered here, I'd love to hear them.

Shh... quiet please

2008-11-18T02:28:00.000-08:00

Children and silence: surely two incompatible notions. As followers of this blog will know, I have spent much of my time recently arguing that young children's thought processes are all on the outside, at least initially. Children conduct their dialogues of thought externally, for all to hear. For this reason alone, being with a toddler is a noisy place to be.

But it somehow feels odd to be making that statement. Some of my most profoundly happy memories of parenthood are of moments when I have been with one or the other of my small children, saying nothing and hearing nothing said in return, nor expecting any such bids for verbal connection. It is possible to be peaceful and silent with a child, I think, in a way that other adults rarely let us be. Sara Maitland captures this in her wonderful new non-fiction work, A Book of Silence. She cites the claim of Donald Winnicott, the famous English psychoanalyst, that the capacity to enjoy silence stems from 'the child's experience of being alone in the presence of the mother'. These are moments when all bodily needs have been attended to, and there is nothing left but to enjoy the presence of the other. In Chapter 4 of The Baby in the Mirror, I describe a similar epiphany in a moment of profound peace I shared with Athena, when she was six weeks old. It was an early morning, and she had just been fed. She wanted human contact, and even as a very small baby she was an expert in obtaining it. We simply lay and looked at each other in the dawn light, saying nothing and wanting nothing except the presence of the other. This tiny human was an expert in the art of silence, and she was teaching me something.

Maitland's funny, humane and wide-ranging work makes us think about the developmental aspects of silence in other ways, too. In a fascinating section on silent reading, she explores the idea that the internalisation of reading—its transformation from overt speaking-aloud to the silent processing of text—marked a critical moment in the evolution of the modern self. 'The practice of silent reading led to individual, or independent thinking', as Maitland puts it. St Augustine was the key figure in this transition, although Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, seemed to have given Augustine the idea.

You can read reviews of A Book of Silence in the Times, the Guardian, the Independent and the Economist. An extract from the book is published in the Guardian. I will be in conversation with Sara Maitland at St. Chad's College, Durham, tomorrow night (Wednesday 19th November) from 7pm.

The Baby in the Mirror has been chosen by Marina Warner as a Book of the Year in the New Statesman. You can read the full article here.

Finally, all the books mentioned in this blog can be ordered through Amazon.co.uk: simply scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the icons in the carousel on the right.

Thinking about thinking

2008-11-05T04:30:00.000-08:00

I've been blogging away from home this week, on the topic of tonight's radio talk. You can see my post on the School of Life's blog by clicking here.

I'll be saying more on the topic at our IAS-sponsored Thinking with Feeling workshop in Durham on Saturday.

Talk on children's thinking

2008-10-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

The talk mentioned in the previous post will be broadcast on Radio 3 at 11pm on Wednesday 5th November. You can see a few more details here.

Off to Broadcasting House

2008-10-28T02:28:00.000-07:00

I write this on a train to London, where I'm due to record a talk for Radio 3 on children's thinking. I'll be talking about Vygotsky's theory of inner speech development and drawing some connections to the experience of voice-hearing. I'll post further details on the talk when I know them.

Writing the talk has made me think a lot about how we might get more reliable information about young children's experience. I see this as a big part of my fellowship at the IAS, and the book on thinking that I am working on. Watch out for some more ideas on this as I go on. As ever, I'd be fascinated to hear any ideas or suggestions!

Children's minds lead to big ideas

2008-10-19T00:21:00.000-07:00

Join me tomorrow (Monday 20 October) for a talk at Café Scientifique, Urban Café, Dance City, Newcastle upon Tyne. My title will be 'How Studying Children's Minds Leads to Big Ideas', and I will be focusing on some biggies like identity, rationality, love and God. The event is free and you can just show up; no need to book.

The Newcastle Journal ran a piece by me on Saturday, unfortunately not available online. I will also be talking on BBC Radio Newcastle's morning show at 11.15 tomorrow.

The adjectival truth

2008-10-17T00:14:00.000-07:00

'Daddy. I've got to tell you what I did last night when you were out.'

He has come into our bed for a cuddle. It is a dark early morning, and nobody really wants to get up.

'OK,' I yawn. 'What did you do?'

'I made something. It's to do with making.'

'What did you make?'

'I made a r... r... r...'

I know this game, because we play it with him all the time. We keep in mind the idea we want him to guess, repeat the initial phoneme, and see if he can fill in the rest.

'A rabbit?'

'No.'

'A racetrack?'

'No. A really...'

'Oh. I see. R for really. A really what?'

'A really g... g... g...'

'Good?'

'Uh huh. A really good c... c... c...'

'Complicated?'

'No, countryside. A really good countryside.'

Nouns and adjectives. Adjectives and adverbs. What makes a noun like countryside a better candidate for the 'missing ending' game than these other components of language? As words that stand for things, we tend to think of nouns as the support structures of our conversation. They are the pillars that the whole thing is built around. Words like adjectives and adverbs are just the decoration. But a four-year-old won't necessarily see it like that. For him, all words are created equal. They are all sounds that you have to labour to make, with your tongue, mouth and lips. They are all important in saying what you want to say.

'A really good countryside? That you can put animals in?'

'M... m... m...'

'Mountains? Mice?'

'Maybe,' he says.

God and the builders

2008-10-13T03:37:00.000-07:00

'Did God get the world started and the builders finished it?'

And so we have frequently, in recent months, come to debate the Big Fella's role in furnishing us with what there is. I am pretty convinced about evolution by natural selection, although I did spend much of my Cambridge interview trying to convince the indulgent don opposite that the universe had not been around long enough for us to have inched towards perfection by such careful degrees. So I find it hard to tell Isaac that anyone made anything, in the sense of setting out with an intention (that most human of mental quantities) and then assiduously seeing it through. I'm one of the group of people for whom Richard Dawkins reserves some of the largest doses of his prodigious contempt: those who would claim that religious belief gives human beings a rewarding, affirming narrative that helps them to make sense of their lives. (Read RD's preface to the revised edition of The God Delusion to see why he believes that this 'patronising' attitude won't do.) I can cope with the wrath of Dawkins, but not the disappointment of my own child. Isaac wants answers, and I'm the one who's supposed to be giving them.

How creationist should we be with our kids? Some recent research suggests that, by coming over all Dawkins with our little ones, we might be wasting our time. In his wonderful Descartes' Baby, Paul Bloom reviews some findings that children's belief in creation stems from a natural tendency to attribute intention where in fact there is none. As part of the process of acquiring a theory of mind, children's mind-reading sometimes hits the wrong targets, and sees, for example, a mountain range as having been put there on purpose, by some higher, invisible miglior fabbro.

Here's how I summarise Bloom's arguments in The Baby in the Mirror:

It’s easy to see why people believe in a Creator. So much is mysterious: why the sun rises, how gases fuse to make water, how blind natural selection could have launched birds into the air. Through the centuries, children have wanted answers to these questions, and adults have had to try to find ways of explaining them. If Bloom is right, those adults needn’t have bothered. The explanations were already at hand. Until children’s thinking is sufficiently developed to cope with the hard science, the belief that God or some other supernatural being is responsible for all these miracles comes to youngsters as naturally as language does.

So I have to manage Isaac's perfectly natural creationist leanings while still being honest to my own truth. It has the makings of a classic fudge. God made the world possible, I tell him, and then Nature did the rest. I'm starting to sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury:

Feedback welcome!

2008-10-05T05:46:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to all who have been following the blog. I'm constantly looking for ways to improve it, so if you have ideas about things to be included or changes to make then please let me know. You can find me on Facebook here, or you can send an email through my website by clicking here. Otherwise just leave a comment on this post.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Robot abuse

2008-09-30T12:13:00.000-07:00

Two BBC journalists have posted an intriguing video of an informal experiment carried out in what I guess is their journalistic HQ. The film shows them acting as mum and dad to a kind of robot dinosaur called a Pleo. I'm not sure what AI wizardry makes the Pleo's behaviour so lifelike, but it is certainly convincing. Of most interest to me, though, is the contrast the film draws between two parenting styles. The Pleo's manufacturers claim that the robot forms a personality on the basis of its early experiences, much as a human infant is thought to do. Under a loving, indulgent parental regime, the robot seems well-adjusted and contented. Under a harsh, abusive regime, it ends up lethargic and depressed.

Plenty of interesting things emerge from this piece. Firstly, I'm struck by how good these journalists—we're not told whether they are parents themselves—are at playing the part of good parents. Instinctively, it seems, they do exactly what good parents everywhere do. We see evidence of motherese in their conversational styles: higher-pitched voices with exaggerated intonation. The Pleo gets gentle tactile stimulation and plenty of mind-minded linguistic input, concerned with the robot's emotional and cognitive states of mind. The 'parents' are keen to take the Pleo outside to expand its experiences. There is even a suggestion that these positive strokings give the Pleo the 'confidence' to go out and explore its environment: a hallmark of secure attachment behaviour.

In the neglectful scenario, the parents play their roles in an equally, and scarily, convincing way. They try to pass the baby on to each other, making excuses for why they can't look after him. The poor robot baby is shunted around the office in the hope that someone will give him some time. 'He's a more reserved robot than in the parallel happy life,' the caption tells us. It might seem odd to attribute such human characteristics to something that we know to be a lump of electronic circuitry, but the emotional impression is powerful.

As with so much of developmental psychology, the adults' actions are of as much interest as the baby's. The Pleo, of course, has been cleverly designed to press all the emotional buttons that a human baby does, with cute squeaks and ET-like eye-blinks. It reminded me of the wonderful Kismet robot created by MIT engineers:

The point about is Kismet is that it calls out certain reactions in us, just by behaving in a human-like way. One puzzle that developmental psychologists have to contend with is how parenting can possibly make any difference when the object of parental love—the newborn baby—seems to have so little to make a difference to. Here's a creature that—very broadly speaking—cannot see clearly, process information effectively, remember past experiences, have consciousness of its own self and so on. How can it possibly be shaped by such sensitive and subtle parental behaviours? The robot work gives us a clue how. A creature that starts off as a blob of unconscious circuitry might become conscious, just because we take it as being so. If that is so, then the Pleo's parents' efforts might not have been wasted after all.

Doddy and Daddy

2008-09-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

Angelique Richardson has also responded to Alison Gopnik's TLS review, mentioned in a previous post. She draws our attention to 'one fine child psychologist', Charles Darwin, quoting from his 1873 work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin was indeed a pioneer of infant observation, which was most memorably documented in his short article 'A biographical sketch of an infant', published in 1877. The subject of the article was Darwin's infant son Doddy (properly William), who was born in 1839. The piece contains many rich observations, but of most interest to me were Darwin's comments on Doddy's reaction to his reflection in a looking glass. Doddy's mirror reactions were first observed at four and a half months, at which stage he seemed to take his own reflection as the image of another being, a Doddy double. Later, he began to make the connection between the reflection and the person who was being mirrored. In The Baby in the Mirror, I describe how Darwin's observations inspired some of my own:

Two months later, Doddy’s understanding of mirrors had taken a step forward. Facing the mirror in front of his father, he now seemed to realise that his father’s reflection was connected to the person standing behind him. When Darwin made a face in the mirror, Doddy turned to look at the man, not at his reflection. We saw Athena doing something similar at the same age. We would sit her on the bed and stand to one side, so that she could see us in the mirror but not herself. She would raise her arms and throw herself forward, reaching, as though in prayer. When we waved, she would give her characteristic double-handed wave in return, a cross between a communicative gesture and an exuberant attempt at taking flight, raising both hands high and then batting them down on the duvet on either side. Then she would turn to look at the figure reflected, confirming it against its image. She understood something about the mechanics of reflection, that what you see in the mirror is not just an extension of the world but a special version of it. She was far from having a full understanding of it, but the looking-glass world was becoming real.

You can read Angelique Richardson's letter here.

I'm just going to have to put you on hold

2008-09-20T00:10:00.000-07:00

The arrival of hard-disc recording has transformed our television habits. No matter how enthralling the programme—try dragging Athena away from an episode of the Australian kids-soap Mortified, for example—a press of the button will freeze it in time and unfreeze it when it is safe for the action to resume. Usually the hiatus lasts only as long as it takes to communicate essential orders about tidying bedrooms or getting ready for bed. Crucially, the kids understand that their precious viewing can be manipulated in this way. They might not appreciate the technicalities of digital recording, but they understand that their glimpse of TV-land will be frozen there, incorruptibly, on the screen until such time as they can pick it up from where they left off.

Isaac is on the phone to Granny. They are discussing some work he has done at school, and he wants to bring it to the phone. 'I'll just pause you for a second,' he says, putting the handset down and skipping off to retrieve his drawing. For a moment, Granny is just like any bit of digital reality that can be paused, or even rewound, for the user's convenience. Is he using the word metaphorically, in the sense of 'keeping someone hanging' or 'leaving someone to stew'? I'm not sure. I suspect there's a deeper confusion about the particular multimedia experience that's called interacting with a person. Or perhaps he thinks that pausing his phone conversation is about exerting control over the bit of technology he holds in his hands, rather than using his powers of persuasion on the flesh-and-blood person at the end of the line.

All of which reminds me of a cartoon I was sent a while ago. A stout boy is standing on his back step pointing a remote control at his garden and clicking furiously. Out of view behind him, the voice of Mom is calling: 'It's the outdoors! The remote doesn't work on it!! Go and play...' I don't think we're meant to conclude that the little telly addict depicted here does not understand the outside world as a reality that exists independently of him. He knows there's a real world out there; he's just a bit confused, like Isaac is, about the mechanisms through which it can be controlled.

Sticky mittens

2008-09-15T12:41:00.000-07:00

Avid readers of the TLS will have noticed that it recently carried a review of The Baby in the Mirror by Alison Gopnik. You can read Gopnik's review here. I responded to the review and the letter was published this week. You can read my response here.

Packed off to the brain gym

2008-09-05T03:30:00.000-07:00

'Is playing with my train set using my brain?' Isaac asks.

I blame the video games for this current obsession. His activities now divide neatly into those that involve using your brain and those that don't. Colouring and looking at storybooks are good because they employ your grey matter; playing Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games confers no such benefits. Ever since he discovered Athena's Nintendo DS (and refused to give it back), he has been a little too interested in things that beep, flash and emit electronic sighs of disappointment when you lose.

I haven't yet quizzed him on what he understands about the body's most complex organ. A landmark study by Carl Johnson used an innovative method to get at young children's understanding of how our identity as people is underpinned by our biology. He presented children with hypothetical situations involving transplants of different parts of the body. For example, children were asked to imagine that their own brain were removed and inserted into the body of a friendly pig, or that there were an exchange of brain, mouth or heart between themselves and a baby. Would children understand that removing a person's brain and putting it into the head of another would affect the identity of that person, while an equivalent transplant of another organ would not affect the consciousness of either party?

The results of this and other studies show that children's understanding of how mind is rooted in brain develops gradually over the early school years. Children of kindergarten age seem to understand that the brain is where thinking happens, and that without it consciousness would be impossible. It is a slightly different matter, and one that requires further developmental progress, to understand how the contents of our consciousness are 'contained' in the mental organ. Gail Gottfried and colleagues have argued that children's increasing acceptance of the 'brain-as-container' metaphor is at odds with their essentialism. This concept from philosophy, when applied to the development of children's knowledge, refers to the supposition that living creatures are what they are by virtue of some essential quality, such that a pig will remain fundamentally piggy no matter what modifications are made to its insides. Four-year-old Isaac might accept that his brain is what makes thinking possible, while insisting (because of his rampart essentialism) that he would stay the same person even if he were magically implanted with someone else's cortex.

The need to maintain the processing efficiency of the porridge between your ears is becoming more obviously acknowledged in children's culture. I've caught Athena watching a programme called Brain-Jitsu on CBBC, which sets its child contestants brain-training challenges based on elementary neuroscience. Some of the functional neuroanatomy is a bit simplistic—there is too much of that left-brain/right-brain twaddle that was so popular in the 1960s—but it surely can't be a bad thing that kids' interest in the science is getting this potential boost.

Anyway, they are now away at the brain gym to beat all others: school. Isaac was packed off to his first day at reception this week, with the promise that he would be doing lots of things that involved using his brain. Life at school will be like life at home when he's not using the Nintendo, only more so.

The end of the school holidays, and the prospect of weeks of undistracted work time, coincides with the news of two polls that show worrying levels of stress-related drinking among parents of young children, especially at the end of the school holidays. Now there's a news story that rings true.

Simulations that run on minds

2008-08-30T06:01:00.000-07:00

I talked in an earlier post about the idea that we come to understand other people's mental states through learning to project ourselves, through imagination, into the point of view of another person. In gaining a grasp of my mental states, Athena has to learn to novelise me, or run a mental simulation of my own beliefs, desires and intentions in order to predict and understand how I will act, think and feel. Simulation theory, as it is known, is seen as one of the main alternatives to the view that children develop a 'theory' of mind by framing hypotheses about how the mind works and then testing them out through action.

Proponents of simulation theory have frequently drawn parallels between the kind of biographical thinking involved in simulation and the creative processes through which novelists create characters. The psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley has been one of the most important advocates of the view that fiction itself is a kind of simulation—in his words, 'a simulation that runs on minds of readers'. In the blog OnFiction, which he co-authors with some other academics interested in the relation between psychology and fiction, he describes this position along with hinting at some of its implications. One such implication is that our reading of fiction can be expected to give our mind-reading abilities a thorough work-out. A similar view has been put forward by Lisa Zunshine, who has argued that one of the pleasures of fictional prose is the way it challenges our theory of mind. Working out who thinks what about whom is a mental challenge which constantly brings us, as expert readers and novices ones, back to storyworlds.

You can read Keith's post here.

The televisionlessness of it all

2008-08-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

We are not killjoy parents when it comes to life's small pleasures. Sweets are allowed in moderation, and fizzy drinks occasionally (I personally find Coke the perfect hangover cure, so couldn't exactly ban it without looking like the vilest hypocrite). Our kitchen/living-room often jitters to the sound of video games. The kids are allowed to watch TV, although we try to steer them away from the commercial channels and their endless adverts. The grown-ups have their fun too: there is usually some live cricket on in the background, even if no one is really watching it.

All that might be about to change, though. We are all familiar with the idea that too much TV rots children's brains, causes hyperactivity and attention deficits and is generally a Bad Thing. A new study suggests that having the TV on could be harmful for young children even if they are not paying any attention to it. A team from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst wanted to find out whether 'background TV' (defined as programming not designed specifically for children) affected young children's ability to 'sustain an activity in a focused and organized manner'. Given that the average American TV set is on for more than eight hours a day, that is potentially quite a lot of background TV.

The Amherst researchers set out to test their hypothesis with a simple experimental design. They observed a group of children (aged one, two and three) playing with toys for an hour. For half of that time, a TV game show was on in the background. As expected, the children paid little attention to this grown-up programme. But on two crucial measures of play sophistication—length of play episodes and length of bouts of focused attention—the toddlers scored significantly lower during the background TV phase compared to when they were playing in silence. The findings were not entirely clear-cut: the maturity of children's play, for example, such as the combining of two toys in a sophisticated manner, was affected in only a limited way by this kind of passive TV-watching. Overall, the authors describe the disruptive effects of background TV as 'real but small'.

What lies behind these effects? The sound of the TV must have served as some kind of distraction: for a toddler, even a brief glance at the screen might be enough to disrupt an ongoing play routine. Secondly, exposure to excessive noise has been shown to impair cognitive functioning in children as well as adults, and TVs are inherently noisy things. I suspect that the speech-heavy nature of a game show would have been a big factor as well. It's a well-replicated finding that unattended speech disrupts the brain's ability to store information about sounds and language. Simply having to listen to all that irrelevant talking could have had a very disruptive effect on children's working memory.

Anyway, it was evidence enough for me. Off went the cricket coverage and on went the soothing sounds of a classical radio station. No talking, therefore no unattended speech to damage Isaac's concentration while he was colouring. I went as far as pretending that this was special 'colouring music', as though it had been specially composed to stimulate the production of stripy sharks (his current favourite artistic theme). Reassured that he was spending some quality time engaged in a constructive activity, I went back to the study and the computer. A few minutes later, shouts were heard from the kitchen. The reason for the fight? Athena had come in and started dancing to the music, which any fool knew was 'colouring music', and definitely not for dancing.

The post's title comes from a phrase in David Wilson's novel Love and Nausea.

Redirected?

2008-08-16T01:10:00.000-07:00

Apologies if you were looking for my website or the Baby in the Mirror microsite. I am arranging new hosting for these and am hoping they'll be up and running in a week or so. You'll be able to read about the book on this blog in the meantime.

Soren Lorensen was here

2008-08-12T11:24:00.000-07:00

More adventures for precocious, adverbally-challenged Lola in Lauren Child's I am too absolutely small for school. In this story, Lola's big brother Charlie is trying to persuade her that she needs to join him in getting a school education. As usual, Lola has plenty of reasons why she doesn't need to bother with all that classroom rubbish. In desperation, Charlie suggests that going to school will give her a chance to make lots of new friends. 'But I have friends,' Lola says. 'I've got Soren Lorensen.'

Soren Lorensen is Lola's 'invisible friend' or imaginary companion. No one knows what he looks like, but he is well known to the family. If Lola is coming up for school age (making her four or five), she is just entering the peak period for engagement with imaginary friends. Cleverly, Charlie points out that Soren Lorensen will be going to school and so will need Lola to go along to keep him company. Lola admits that Soren will be nervous about starting school, and so she will need to do the honourable thing. Really, of course, she is just using Soren as a mouthpiece for her own anxieties.

In her preface to the book, Lauren Child explains how the Soren Lorensen character came to be. Soren was the name of the brother of a little girl called Sofie, who made up an imaginary friend of the same name when her real big brother didn't want to play with her. Calling your imaginary friend by the same name as your actual brother puts me in mind of the two sisters described by James Sully, who spent the afternoon wrapped in the elaborate pretence that they were... sisters. For young children, the real keeps intruding into the imaginary.

Lauren Child ends the preface with a note about this intriguing phenomenon. "The very nice thing about imaginary friends," she writes, "is that they will always do what you want to do, and they will always be there when you need them." It seems to stand to reason that the character we have invented for ourselves will be willing and compliant, but it's not actually true. The foremost expert on imaginary companions, Marjorie Taylor, has written of the 'illusion of independent agency' which comes into play in children's interactions with imaginary characters. Many children's invisible friends do not do what they are told. Some, indeed, can be a bit hostile or creepy. Reflecting on how children's imaginary friends can come to take on lives of their own, Taylor has drawn comparisons with a novelist's creation of fictional characters which, in that curious way, soon fail to do the author's bidding.

So if your child's imaginary friend shows awful table manners, sulks when it can't get its own way, or seems to have a social life of its own, you are just witnessing another aspect of a common developmental phenomenon. Who knows what social skills your child is learning as she tries to exert control over these intransigent mental creations?

Happy mother, clever baby?

2008-08-09T07:25:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to see that Roddy Woomble at the Sunday Herald has been enjoying the book as he prepares for fatherhood. His comments on the commercialisation of modern parenthood put me in mind of Pamela Paul's recent exposé of the 'billion-dollar baby business' in her book Parenting Inc. You can read a Guardian interview with Paul here.

I confess that I wasn't familiar with Woomble's current favourite bit of pre-parenthood reading, Grantly Dick-Read's Childbirth Without Fear. As people who benefited from the services of the NCT, though, we surely will have been influenced by Dick-Read's philosophy. We certainly shared his concerns about the medicalisation of childbirth, which was a big factor in our choosing a home birth for our second child. Living as we do in a sparsely populated area, we were lucky to have midwives who were very comfortable with the idea of delivering at home. For those further up the dale, who may be an hour away from the nearest maternity ward, delivering at home is a very realistic scenario. It may not suit everyone, but it was a happy and satisfying option for us.

Whatever our reasons for choosing a home delivery, I don't think we were ever really doing it in the hope that it would lead to a smarter, happier or more well-adjusted baby. Thinking about it from some distance, I have been wondering whether there is any research on the topic. The medical profession seems increasingly satisfied with home birth as an option (as evidenced by the latest NICE guidelines' advice that it should be offered routinely), but what do the psychologists say?

I cannot find any evidence specifically relating to planned home births (the NICE document admits that decent evidence is missing in several areas) but certain questions are obviously worth asking. According to NICE, planned home births seem to be associated with a greater likelihood of vaginal delivery, reduced perineal damage and greater maternal satisfaction. Breastfeeding may be more easily established as a result. The less frequent use of pain-reduction drugs like pethidine means that mothers and babies might be a bit more alert in the first few hours. I can't imagine, though, that greater wakefulness would have such a big effect on babies' learning opportunities, to the extent that sleepier babies could not later catch up.

What about that element of maternal satisfaction? Does, for example, a mother who remembers her baby's birth more fondly (or at least without memories of pain and fear) have a better relationship with that baby? A woman's perception of that event may be more important, in some respects, than the medical facts of the matter. In one study, we found that mothers' tendency to rate their pregnancy as 'difficult' did not correlate with the obstetric record of actual complications. Some women who had 'objectively' had very difficult pregnancies nevertheless remembered them as having been undemanding. Others, who had no medical problems at all, paradoxically rated their experiences as arduous.

It also seems likely that mothers' perceptions of the birth itself will be as important, psychologically speaking, as the medical details. It is not whether the delivery is objectively normal or abnormal that matters, so much as how the mother feels about it now. If anything is likely to make a difference to the baby's subsequent development, it is not the presence or absence of forceps or pethidine. It is the mother's mental representation of that birth: the story she tells about it, the way she represents it for herself.

We have been looking at this issue in a recent study, in which we gathered both subjective and objective data about pregnancy and birth. Mothers who rated the birth more positively (in terms of their description of how they had felt when they were handed the baby for the first time) showed a special kind of sensitivity to their infants when playing with them in our child development laboratory. Specifically, those 'positive perception' mothers were more likely to treat their babies as individuals with minds, in the sense of making reference to their thoughts, wishes and desires when they were playing with them. We call this variable mind-mindedness, and have been exploring its associations with several other important aspects of development, such as attachment, theory of mind, language acquisition and play.

Quite rightly, the NICE document has a bit to say about the psychological effects on the mother of different delivery options. It would be nice to think that a future version of these guidelines could include something on psychological effects on the child. My hunch is that the two kinds of psychology will be strongly correlated, supporting the view that people should choose the delivery option that makes them happy. Let's not leave paternal psychology out of the picture, either. Having a birthing pool to fill, and cups of tea to make, helped me to feel that I was involved and useful, or, at the very least, prevented me from the getting in the way of the serious business.

I am currently arranging new hosting for the microsite, so it will be out of action for a while. This blog will forge on regardless. Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment.

Off to the School of Life

2008-08-01T01:39:00.000-07:00

I was pleased to see the School of Life's website and blog launched this week. Working from its amazing premises and shop in Bloomsbury, the School is offering courses, holidays, consultations with experts and much more, all aimed at helping people to explore ideas relevant to their lives.

I co-wrote the Family course, which will be running for the first time in November. One of the most interesting things was thinking about family life from the perspective of a child, using some of the ideas I explored in The Baby in the Mirror. What does our understanding of memory development mean for theories about how we are affected by our family backgrounds? How does a child's emerging sense of self protect him from, and make him vulnerable to, the forces at work within the family? Do we remember those family influences accurately from the viewpoint of adulthood? What can we learn from the study of children's development when we become parents ourselves?

The course will also look at how concepts of family, childhood and marriage have evolved over time, and consider how our familiar family structures are changing, and will continue to change, into the future. We will explore how the family can be a force for good and ill in our lives, and what we can do to make life inside and outside the family more satisfying and fulfilling. Full details on the course will be appearing on the website soon. You can also join the School's Facebook group here.

Scissors, paper, stone

2008-07-31T01:53:00.000-07:00

Isaac learned a new game today. The interesting thing about Rock, Paper, Scissors* is that each of the three possible selections is equally powerful: it defeats one other and is also defeated by one. The hand configurations are pretty transparent—'Paper' is flat like a sheet of paper, for example—making them easy for a four-year-old to pick up. The only other requirement is understanding the need to present your choice at exactly the same time as your opponent, so that neither of you gets an unfair preview. Simple rules and no props: the recipe for a popular game.

I wrote a little in the book about the toddler Athena's developing understanding of rules:

Armed with a rule, a little person can exert awesome control over a bigger one. ‘You have to run holding hands,’ she barks at me, as we while away some moments in a playground. ‘You have to stand at the top of the steps and when I reach the tree you can come down.’ A rule is not just Mummy or Daddy telling you to do something; it comes from somewhere transcendental, like God. Under the democracy of a rule, everyone is an equal.

As well as being a way of exerting control over others, rules provide a vital means of organising our own experience. They let you know where you are in the game. Rules are conditionals: if this, then that. Paradoxically, submitting yourself to their yoke is a profound liberation. By understanding what the rules are, Isaac knows when he has won—and lost.

It's one thing to have a rule, but quite another to have a strategy. Athena has quickly worked out that Isaac will base his next play on whatever gesture was successful next time round. If he wins it with Rock, he will choose Rock himself next time. If Athena wins it with Paper, then he will copy her for the next bout. His big sister has sussed this, and is representing her opponent's strategy as a way of guiding her own selection. Although Isaac has sophisticated theory of mind abilities, he has not quite progressed as far as second-guessing his opponent's intentions, or trying to instigate double-bluffs.

For him, a better strategy at the game might be to pick a gesture at random, and so prevent his opponent from getting any handle on his intentions. But children find randomness hard to understand. In a classic study, Piaget and Inhelder presented children with an experimental set-up which modelled raindrops falling on paving stones, and asked children to predict where the next drops would fall. They found that the children gave responses that credited rainfall with too much organisation. They would assign the same number of raindrops to each paving stone, creating patterns where none would be seen in nature.

Adults struggle with randomness too. The Piaget and Inhelder study reminds me of the story of a friend of mine who asked a builder to arrange some red and black floor-tiles in a random pattern. The builder was at a loss: he spent his life trying to impose order, regularity and precision, and going against system in this way was too much for him. Misunderstanding the laws of chance is a failing we are all prone to, as the gambler's fallacy demonstrates. In fact, one way of producing cognitive load in psychological experiments is to ask participants to generate random numbers or letters, a task which puts great strain on people's minds. Producing a truly random sequence of actions, where the randomness of the sequence is assessed by mathematical analysis, is something that most people would score poorly on.

Perhaps it's the formalising power of rules, those recently acquired marshals of order, that makes Isaac prefer systematicity to blind chance. When he is allowed to cheat at dominoes, say by peeking at the pieces before choosing them, he goes for a pattern, such as taking all the doubles. That's actually a pretty bad hand for that game, and it's one example of his preference for order putting him at a disadvantage. Young children's actions may frequently seem haphazard, but removing all elements of order from their behaviour is something they won't achieve until later in life, if at all.

*For me, as a child, it was always Scissors, Paper, Stone—hence the title of this post.

The Haircut Trees

2008-07-26T10:42:00.000-07:00

Deep in the Alto Alentejo, we are finding new terminologies for unfamiliar bits of landscape. Portugal produces half of the world's cork, and this sunscorched region is covered with the squat, silvery trees from which it is taken. "The haircut trees" is Isaac's name for the trees that have recently produced a harvest, with their orange-red underbark exposed in an odd kind of nakedness. He is thinking metaphorically. He notes a new phenomenon and wants to connect it to something he understands: the shedding of an overgrown covering, as in a haircut. Our ancestors probably thought in a similar way when they first named a flame tree or a spider plant, or first employed any of the other common names that have a similarly metaphorical root.

Today he took the metaphorical connection to another level. Lacking a name for the eucalypts that give this part of Portugal a flavour of the Australian countryside, he extended his "haircut trees" label. The only connection that I can see between a stubby cork oak and a tall, skinny gum tree is that both are commonly short of bark. The name connects with the distinctive feature—the exposure of the tree's trunk—and brings both entities into his realm of comprehension. One connection leads to another, as he continues to loop together his conceptual network.

When he's not indulging his passion for botany, he's having a typical four-year-old's holiday: swimming in the pool and smearing himself with ice-cream. It hasn't all been hard work.

Find us on Facebook!

2008-07-11T02:49:00.000-07:00

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We're off for a few days, so the next post might be from somewhere hot...

An immortality of the flesh

2008-07-05T04:41:00.000-07:00

If the kids get back in time from their trip to the theatre with their grandparents, we will be sitting down together tonight to find out the fate of the Doctor and his companions. In her blog post on the trauma of seeing our favourite Time Lord regenerate, Jane Graham mentions the conversation we had when she was interviewing me about The Baby in the Mirror. She was interested in what I had said in the book about children's understanding of sadness that goes beyond their own immediate needs. I had argued that grief is, cognitively speaking, an almost uniquely complex emotion. (Actually, it's pipped at the last minute by regret, but for that you'll have to read the book.)

My kids certainly get the same emotional hit from Doctor Who as that observed by Jane in her little girl. When the Doctor's daughter appeared to die at the end of her eponymous episode, there wasn't a dry eye in the living room. However, there are moments, when you are paying attention to young children's feelings, when you wonder whether they are really grasping the full emotional story. For Isaac in particular, the stirring music that always accompanies a televisual trauma is a powerful cue to what the characters are feeling. Those swelling strings tell him that something is going on that is bigger than his understanding, but whose language he already knows.

What interests Jane in particular is the ethical question for us as parents. Mums and dads want to protect their children from trauma, so why let them watch things that will upset them? On balance, I agree with her that young children probably take more positives from these experiences than negatives. I argued in the book that children have the cognitive and emotional capacity to come to terms with death far earlier than Freud and others wanted us to believe. This may be in part because, as Paul Bloom has argued, they are dualists, wired up to see the body and spirit going different ways.

Which just leaves me wondering what we will be left with tonight, once the Doctor has stopped pulsating on the floor of the Tardis. With supernatural beings such as Time Lords and Santa Claus, the facts of life after death become more complicated. The Doctor will still be the Doctor (if we have read the clues correctly), but he won't be the David Tennant Doctor. We will all have to get our heads around a certain immortality of the flesh.

One thing we can be sure about, though, is that there will be more empathetic tears. I am as much of a blubberer as any of them, having once even been reduced to tears by an episode of Baywatch (it was those damned strings, I tell you). And we will probably have to rethink our ideas about the afterlife as well. A few months ago, Isaac was telling us that heaven is full of dragons, and how, when you get to heaven, you can't 'get died'. That sounds like a Doctor Who version of paradise.

Speaking up for babies

2008-06-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

How far should we go in using infants and children for the purposes of entertainment or instruction? As a scientist, thinking through the ethical implications of developmental research, I am conscious of this question all the time. We never want to ask children to do anything, enjoyable or otherwise, unless there is a demonstrable scientific point to it. If the proposed study does not have the potential to advance knowledge, then the ethics committee considering it will not let it go ahead.

The process of writing The Baby in the Mirror made me think about this question in a different way. Intruding on Athena's privacy might be reasonable if there were serious literary and scientific work to be done, but could it be justified in the cause of pure entertainment? I want the book to entertain, of course (the same ambition holds for this blog, in which I draw on both children's experience), but I also hope that readers will learn from it. Or is an enjoyable book its own justification? Is this an ethical question or an aesthetic one?

One step that I have not been willing to take has been to submit to the more obvious designs of the television industry. I'm suspicious about the medium for a few reasons; above all, I suspect that any concerns for an educational outcome would likely get drowned out by the demands of primetime. After experiencing the tremendously sensitive way the Guardian and Sunday Herald handled our story, for example, I doubt that TV could similarly ensure our privacy and right to have a say in the portrayal. At least, that's the feeling I get from watching reality shows such as Child Of Our Time, in which the privacy of the families involved rarely seems anyone's top priority.

The growth of reality TV has put more ordinary kids onto our screens than ever before. This week I got an alert on this topic from Zero To Three, the not-for-profit US-based organisation concerned with children in the first three years of life. The statement relates to a new NBC programme called "Baby Borrowers", in which five teenage couples will each briefly 'adopt' someone else's baby as part of a social experiment in fast-tracking adolescents into adulthood. In Zero To Three's view, the programme "exploits very young children in the pursuit of entertainment".

The exploitation charge is a serious one, and one that I might have to answer to as well. I can't get all superior about the ethical treatment of child participants when, to some people's minds, I might have gone too far myself in turning the camera onto Athena so closely. I am also uneasy about passing judgement on a TV series I have not watched for myself. But Zero To Three's alarm call shows that some people at least are putting the rights, privacy and needs of children above all other concerns, and backing up that respect for babies and toddlers with good science.

I was very touched by Paul Riddell's kind review in today's Scotsman. I hope there is a happy ending for him and his family as well.

Pieces Of Light

The pull of the story

Memory Week

A seven-year-old's Saturday

Barnes, his memory

A new kind of science writing

Rethinking 'thinking': Modernism and the mind

Missing ICOM

How much do you understand about how memory works?

The language of the past

Event at The School of Life

The madeleine moment

Slippery memories and the tasks of fiction

Changes

Talking about the past

The shifting boundary of childhood amnesia

Voices in the head

What do we mean by 'thinking'?

Free will in childhood

Picturing her dreams

Repetitive behaviours

Gita Vygodskaya

Mind-minded parenting, moral babies

The anti-parenting thing

Do as I do

The one about agency and identity

The science of parenting

Lego Star Wars, Part I

'Accents' in the womb?

Maps in the brain

Life after death?

Some more on memory

Memories of those who are gone

Thanks to the bloggers

What tiny eyes see

Don't keep it to yourself

Parents and experts

Radiolab podcast

The developing storyteller

Astonishing, but not in a good way

May I have your attention, please?

Who writes about children?

3 of 3 on children's consciousness

Some good sense on attachment

Over at Psychology Today...

Feeding ourselves

Dutch edition

Chatty baby

Children and digital technologies

What about the other one?

After the tour

Toddlers welcome!

Someone must know

More going on at PT

The wheels keep turning

Old problems on young shoulders

Anti-parenting for dummies

Twitter relaunch

Meanwhile, over at PT...

Hazed and infused

US publication

A splash of colour

Sticky people

You are here

Scary stories

Children in the camcorder's eye

Michael's memory

Running from the Spider-Baby

Trusting early memories

Around the table

Is he nearly here yet?

The horror remembered

A Thousand Days of Wonder

Who is the baby in the mirror?

The power of lullaby?

Santa Run

Nah nah ne nah nah

Shh... quiet please

Thinking about thinking

Talk on children's thinking