Saving Literacy - Excerpt - The Peek-a-Boo Principle

Female gorillas have been observed holding leaves up to their faces, then taking them away.⁷⁶ Infant gorillas do not, however, burst into laughter when their mothers do this. In fact, female gorillas do not hold leaves up to amuse their infants. They do it to hide. Presumably, they believe once the leaf is over their face, they cannot be seen because they cannot see. (This is akin to the Piagetian stage when the very little child believes that a toy, once hidden, is gone.)

The game of Peek-a-Boo springs, evidently, from primate behavior --- like pant-laughter, and vocal-gestural communication. In many instances, there is primate precedence for how we conduct ourselves as humans, for both good and bad.⁹⁹ Hominid mothers must have refined the leaf-in-front-of-the-face routine. Once infants started laughing at their mothers who were hiding behind leaves (pretending to hide?), the jig was up and the game of Peek-a-Boo was invented. It is probable that hominid mothers and infants invented the game of Peek-a-Boo for several reasons:

to re-establish closeness (since hairless Mom and helpless neonate could not cling together in undivided harmony as heretofore)
to mutually entrain, as psychologists say, or to get “in sync,” via Peek-a-Boo and hilarity. The timing of the Peek-a-Boo interaction was geared by the mother to mesh with the infant’s attention span, but the timing was also designed to extend that span slightly, each time, readying the little brain, ultimately, for exchanges of words at speeds and pitches designed to be both attractive and comprehensible. Try playing Peek-a-Boo with a baby. Observe your own behavior. Aren't you trying to extend the waiting time until you take your hands away a little bit later every time? You can call it suspense. I call it forcing an increase in the infant’s attention span.

“In the first weeks, a baby is learning to differentiate between important and unimportant sounds... By seven days of age, she will choose her mother’s voice from another female voice in a paired situation. By two weeks, she will choose her father’s voice... by three months, a baby will have learned an attention-inattention rhythm four times a minute. In the periodic attention, she will alert, vocalize and smile. When parents fit into this rhythm, she learns to imitate their vocalizations, facial movements and movements of their heads and bodies almost precisely.

“As adults fit into this pattern, they too will imitate the baby almost precisely. They will match her rhythms, inflection and motor behavior, as well as the attention-inattention rhythm. In the process, they are reinforcing her attempts at speech, as well as the rhythms that underlie later communication. As adults match the baby’s behavior, they add a little extra onto it. The baby tries to live up to the slight added difference - to match it and to imitate them.”⁸⁶

The familiar game of Peek-a-Boo provides a very powerful metaphor, or model, for describing a series of essential relationships: motion to growth, parent to child, drawing to writing and reading. All of these relationships demonstrate back-and-forth, call and response, dyadic interaction on biological, interpersonal, and inter-hemispheric levels, sharing the goal of incremental gains.

Mother and child are a dyad: a two-some. In this two-some game of Peek-a-Boo, mothers hide their faces with their hands, then, they remove their hands, calling out “Peek-a-Boo!” As the child loses sight of his mother, he searches for her, then, when the mother lowers her hands, the child catches sight of her face again. Finding mother’s face elicits the infant’s chortling bellylaugh. The baby is delighted/relieved! "Oh, thank goodness, Mom is still here!"

There are several reasons for this infant laughter:

One is surprise. Surprise means having something happen to you which you did not think would happen: the term used to describe this situation is negated prediction. The child predicted when the mother covered her face that the mother had gone away. To the child’s amazement, Mom is back!
Another reason for infant laughter in the game of Peek-a-Boo must be the neurochemical kick built into recognition, rewarding the child for her ability to extract the face of her mother from the chaos of her young visual experience. The child recognizes her mother’s face as a certain set of lines and shapes that “bind together” (the term used by people who study vision and consciousness). I call this "mom-binding".^5,7 The first belly laugh of the infant celebrates this binding experience with the mother’s face. That feeling of delight at recognition is repeated over and over again in the game of Peek-a-Boo, rewarding the infant’s visual cortex via its emotional system for making sense of the environment.
The child's laughter also enchants the mother, encouraging her to play the game again. The child is training the mother to help train its attentional system, using the eyes, or the visual cortex. The mother is tuning her hiding and self-revealing to the child's ability to pay attention. Instinctively, the mother lengthens the time it takes to remove her hands from her face, creating suspense, but, mainly, training the brain of the child to pay attention longer - in essence, to delay gratification. Learning to wait for a reward is one of the big lessons in life. Children are learning basic principles of human interaction from the game of Peek-a-Boo as call and response behavior; one person calls and the other responds to the call. This call and response-type behavior is the basis of conversation. It is also the basis for sympathy, and empathy.

Vision, attention, emotion, and dyadic exchanges are involved in the complex neurology of the game Peek-a-Boo. When the child starts to scribble, the child takes up self-training in all of these areas - vision, attention, emotion - with the new dyad being self and visible world, as well as self and the inner world of imagination and visualization. The child plays "Peek-a-Boo" with her brain; the bihemispheric brain plays Peek-a-Boo with its two lobes.

The dyadic interaction between parent and child trains the brain of the child for social life and mental life. The emotional tone established by the mother's response to the child in exchanges like Peek-a-Boo calibrates the emotional neurochemistry in the child's brain around future exchanges of meaning --- from conversations to interior dialogues --- in anticipation of positive, delightful responses, affecting the child's entire life as a social being, as well as a thinker. The child who plays Peek-a-Boo expects to be delighted by life.

Parenting and positive neuro-hormones

Bonding between mothers and babies occurs naturally. Neuro-hormones are responsible for this “natural” bonding. Ocytocin is involved. What about adoptive parents and other caregivers? Are there additional ways to bond via, say, dopaminergic/seratonic substitution? As caregivers,
each of us can use closeness and meaning to cement our commitment to parenting. When human beings are feeling safe and close, serotonin is released, one of the feel-good transmitters. When humans are seeking the fruits of the earth, dopamine is at work, another feel-good neurotransmitter. Since marks of meaning are extensions of our SEEKING mechanisms, scribbling and drawing with young children are excellent ways to feel wonderful about parenting and caregiving in two ways: by bonding, releasing ocytocin and by seeking, releasing serotonin, and dopamine. This complex neurochemical brain infusion should hold true for “house husbands,” too. Even though husbands and fathers do not reap the neurochemical rewards of pregnancy (increased spatial memory, as well as courage and flexibility under stress),¹⁰⁰ husbands and fathers will reap the rewards of bonding with small children, as well, as by scribbling, talking and drawing with them.

Given the neurochemical boosts provided by bonding and scribbling and drawing with children, it might also be true that the Scribbling/Drawing/Writing program would help alleviate post-partum depression. Research will provide answers.

Neurobeneficial parenting

If the learning environment is poor,the child ’s brain connections for learning will be poor. If the learning environment is rich,the child’s brain connections for learning will be rich. Animal research has taught us that the word “rich ”means the natural environment.The woods are a rich learning environment for a fawn.Affectionate caregivers,conversation,support for mark-making and exposure to the variety and complexity of the natural world provide a rich learning environment for the child.Some of the brain connections a little child makes last a lifetime.Some are modifiable.Does this make neurobeneficial parenting scary?Well, parenting in the context of brain science is,at least sobering.But using brain science to encourage infant and child development is important and,with books like this one, easily done!

The good news is that neurobeneficial parenting is mostly instinctive.The bad news is that there’s been a cultural train wreck.Culture maintains that art and artists exist in a special category,while biology shows us that art is part of life.

Book Three in this series,The Scribble Hypothesis, outlines the biological research which makes art the bedrock of early education.

Footnotes:

76 Falk, D., Braindance. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992/2003.
99 Sapolsky, Robert M. 2000. A Primate’s Memoir. Simon & Schuster: NY.
86 Brazelton, Barry T., 1992. Touchpoints. The Essential Reference. Our Child’s Emotional and Behavioral Development. pps. 400-401. Addison-Wesley Publishing House: Reading, MA.
5 Sheridan, S.R. "The Neurological Significance of Children's Drawings: The Scribble Hypothesis." Journal of Visual Literacy, 2002; 22(2): 107-128. Sheridan, S.R. 2002.
7 Sheridan, S.R.. 2005. “A Theory of Marks and Mind: the effect of notional systems on hominid brain evolution and child development with an emphasis on exchanges between mothers and children,” Medical Hypotheses Journal, V64(2):417-427. This article is downloadable in on-site version at www.drawingwriting.com by permission by Elsevier. Hypertext link to Medical Hypotheses ScienceDirect Page att:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ journal/03069877
100 Kinsley, C.H., Madonia L., Gifford G.W., Griffin G.R., Tereski K., Lowry C. et al. 1999. “Motherhood improves learning and memory.” Nature 1999;402(11):137-8.