Furthering the research already in existence on maternal speech and infants’ babbling, new research with scribbling and drawing should be conducted to determine whether a similar purpose for synchronizing and accelerating brain tissue and brain activity is served by early mark-making. It is likely that all these activities in infants and toddlers are necessary neural organizers for attention, connection, language and literacy.

An experiment could test whether spontaneous early speech (babbling) and spontaneous scribbling demonstrate bilateral excitation in both hand areas of the motor cortex. The same could be done with intentional speech and intentional scribbling in, say, three year-olds. Neuroconstructivist theory predicts stronger right sensory-motor cortex excitation by the age of three, especially in male children. Female brains are more balanced bilaterally, so should show stronger bilateral excitation in both hand areas of the sensory-motor cortex during early speech production, as well as during early mark-making, from the spontaneous to the more intentional.

“The Scribble Hypothesis” (Sheridan, 2002) provides support for the position that the handmade marks we call children’s scribbles and drawings create and generate patterns in the brain responsible for the stable networks from which symbolic thinking arises, that is, speech and literacy.

Can work with scribbling/drawing/writing help with hyperactivity, attention deficits, mood control (including childhood depression and anger), and learning disabilities? Aren’t these aspects of the mental/emotional life of the child connected?

Can work with scribbling/drawing/writing lessen the need for, or even make unnecessary, the use of drugs in childhood for impulsivity, inattention, mood disorders, and learning disabilities?

The importance of emotions to brain function and human thought,46,47,48 especially the work of Jaak Panksepp, 1998, who identifies a quartet of human emotions (PANIC, FEAR, RAGE, SEEKING), allows us to think about literacy in new ways as SEEKING behavior. SEEKING behavior receives the benefit of motivational neurotransmitters. If literacy, as a SEEKING behavior, is a refinement of an ancient, powerfully positive emotional drive, designed to encourage humans to discover and explore and use things in their environment of special usefulness or pleasure, then we’ve redefined literacy as a survival skill.

Longitudinal studies with children and adults using training in sustained visual attention in the context of marks of meaning via the Scribbling/Drawing/Talking/Writing program, should clarify the degree to which mark-making - as an extension of the Panksepp’s SEEKING system (from which emotional mode, as we recall from the diagram in the introduction to this book, there are no return mental/emotional/neurochemical paths to RAGE, PANIC or FEAR) is capable of moderating rage or even of repairing brain areas (amygdalas) shriveled by the caustic effect of too much cortisol, the stress brain chemical.

Does literacy serve the purpose of cooling down and calming down the stressed-out brain neurobiologically, while providing wide vistas of freedom, cognitively and emotionally?

Is literacy, in a sense, freedom for the child?

Can parents and children generate their own intervention strategies for panic, fear, and rage through the seeking and playing strategies provided by scribbling and drawing as important aspects and outreach systems for the emotional circuits in the brain?

Do scribbling and drawing help children control negative emotions, like anger? Can the simple activity of making marks on paper change frustration or worry or fear into a happy mental state? Only gently, non-invasive intervention with a pad of paper and a handful of bright markers will help us to understand the therapeutic value of mark-making for the child who needs to learn to self-distract, self-regulate, and self-organize his/her emotional brain waves.

Are communication and emotional control two sides of the same coin? Communication and emotional control may not be separable in humans. The frontal lobes, the limbic system, and the language areas, as well as the sensory motor areas for both hands and the tongue may have developed as densely integrated neural systems to provide the brain’s own regulation/intervention/correction strategies in situations where fear, panic or rage might occur and should be avoided for the sake of the health, safety and well-being of the individual and of the group.

That is, scribbling, speech, drawing, and writing and reading a range of symbols – along with social skills - may require an integrated circuit in the human brain for optimum, full and complete performance. Research could be designed to explore this integrated theory of human mental/emotional/social development, focusing on the relationship of attentive eye to the exploring hand, using marks to encourage the brain to figure out ways to represent meaning, including hidden, but nonetheless true meaning, like the legs of people in a canoe shown through the sides of the canoe in the child’s “x-ray” drawing or fear hidden behind bulwarks of bravado.

Are sustained attention and the ability to delay gratification connected? If so, Scribbling/Drawing/Writing - as an attention booster - should contribute to the ability to delay gratification because control over attention provides delaying tactics.49,50 This ability to delay gratification by refocusing attention has been shown to correlate with success in life - from relationships to academics to jobs. (Walter Mischel's famous Marshmallow Tests conducted in the 1960's and 1970's introduced the importance and the challenge of delaying gratification in the four year-old child.)49,50

Can work with scribbling/drawing/writing effect autism?

The importance of scribbling and drawing to child development is missing or under-represented as prevention and/or as intervention with very young children at risk for autism or with autism. A child’s eyes, mouth, hands and his/her attentional/visual/verbal brain development are intricately interrelated. How the young child uses his/her eyes, mouth, hands and attentional/visual/verbal brain in early childhood determines his/her emotional and linguistic development. The television and the computer and white noise machines and other environmental noise levels – including mesmerizing and pervasive visual/aural aspects of technology - may disrupt and/or retard normal brain visual/aural development in young children who are dependent upon shared gaze, face-to-face visual and verbal communication and exploratory body/brain interaction with people and the world organized by nature or by human intention as appropriate stimulation for very young sensory/emotional/motor systems.

How do the brain scans of children born with autism, as well as those who “acquire” autism, differ from the scans of children who are developing normally and who continue to develop normally? Normal brain scans of children babbling, scribbling, drawing, talking and writing can be compared with brain scans of children who are either born autistic or who present as autistic at a certain age (often between two and three years of age). Careful histories can be compiled of the day-to-day experience of both sets of children in terms of exposure to the television, the computer, and to meaningful visual and verbal human interaction, including shared maternal gaze and other aspects of mother/child interactions in infancy. Measurements of babbling levels, scribbling, drawing, talking, and writing levels, can be compared. Besides genetics and the putative influence of a range of toxins in the environment, how does technology effect the brain of the young child? But, also, how does human, invested interaction around words and mark-making influence the developing brain of the little child? Most especially, how critical are the connections between vision and attention for normal cognitive development? The six tenets of “The Scribble Hypothesis” (Sheridan, 2002) shown below underscore the importance of these connections for all children.

Vision and attention are connected operations.6,7,8 We propose that, in sighted infants and children, sustained visual attention is necessary for speaking, too, as well as for drawing, reading, writing, and other marks-based expression. Arguably, the work of the hands as marks extended (and still continue to extend) the attentional capabilities of the visual cortex for language. The first six tenets of "The Scribble Hypothesis" anchor this position:

• One: Very young children’s scribbling trains the brain to pay attention and to sustain attention, setting up self-organizing feedback loops between the eye/hand/ear/mouth and the inter-hemispheric brain.

• Two: Very young children’s scribbling stimulates individual cells and clusters of cells in the visual cortex for line and shape.

• Three: Very young children’s scribbles help them practice and organize the shapes or patterns of verbal and visual symbolic thought.

• Four: Very young children’s scribbling encourages an affinity, or love for, marks, preparing the mind for his/her determining behavior: literacy.

• Five: Marks of meaning operate like “super-radiant surfaces,” or mirrors, encouraging self-reflection, capable of producing consciousness states describable as self-induced transparency, or epiphanic consciousness (including understanding, wisdom, peace, transcendent at-oneness), rewarding the brain emotionally and neurochemically for its hard-won self-clarification3,51,52 while, at the same time, allowing the brain to settle into minimal, coherent energy states.53,54,55 This resolution across emotional/neural levels is energy-efficient, a highly desirable state in dynamic systems.

• Six: Marks of meaning including scribbling are not only critical to the neural development of visual, verbal, and emotional thinking in the child, but instrumental in the maintenance of healthy neurophysiology, including the visual, verbal, emotional, and memory/learning circuitry in the adult brain.

Research with brain scans of very young children babbling, scribbling, talking about scribbles, drawing, talking about drawings, pre-writing and doing early reading, may answer some of the questions about normal development, including the ability to sustain attention and to achieve emotional control as well as to acquire speech and literacy.

Neural abuse may be delivered by electronics and technology designed for adult brains because these kinds of technology probably mis-align and/or retard the immature body/brain sensory/motor/mind systems of very young children. It is conceivable that the infant/toddler’s brain experiences the rage of frustration when confined to a baby seat in front of a blaring TV. Their SEEKING is denied. He/she is trapped.

If the emotions required for interaction with computer games are hyper-alertness to danger and FEAR/RAGE, then these emotions will be selected for as biologically useful. Still, if the conservation of energy remains a cellular requirement and if the biological system is squandering energy emotionally by playing such games for long periods of time, while under-utilizing the rest of the body kinetically, then a neurobiological conflict should arise, resulting in biological break-down. This break down (perhaps signaled currently as a dramatic increase in autistic children) will eventually produce new neuro-bio-techno body/brain systems appropriate to life lived in virtual worlds. Then, the only enemies we kill will be imaginary, but, by then, we may be, for all intents and purposes, virtual, or imaginary, too.

Can work with Scribbling/Drawing/Writing make drugs for hyperactivity, impulsivity, attention deficits, childhood mood disorders, including rage and depression, and learning disabilities less necessary or even unnecessary if begun in early childhood and sustained as healthy mind/body practice at home and at school?

Humans are meaning-makers. They need to make meaning.

Clinical work with neurofeedback (Nora Gedguadas, CNS, CNT, Seigfried Othmer, Ph.D., www.eeginfo.com)56 shows that children can learn to self-regulate brain activity, using computer-assisted brain exercises.

If we compare brain waves of children receiving neurofeedback which facilitates or rewards the child’s ability to calm and regulate right hemisphere brain waves, with the brain waves of children whose brain activity is ineffectually regulated and patterned, lacking any level of intentional control, what signature wavelengths and patterns do we see? How do the brain waves of children receiving neurofeedback training via computer games and EEG’s compare with the brain scans of children scribbling and drawing in an intent, focused manner? How do the brain waves of children receiving neurofeedback for human interaction and emotional control via electronic game therapy compare with children making marks and talking about their marks with parents and other invested caregivers using the Scribbling/Drawing/Writing program?

Learning to control emotions and behavior is a life skill. Normal, interested interaction between adults and children around marks and speech may achieve, routinely, the kind of right brain organization which neurofeedback clinicians are looking for. Isn’t normal right and left hemisphere brain patterning achieved in most children in the context of everyday parenting and caregiving- if we make sure some of the critical if unsung components of early childhood receive opportunity and support, including visual and verbal exchanges with loving adults, scribbling and drawing, interested and supportive verbal exchanges around scribbling and drawing?

Only non-invasive longitudinal studies with the brains of very young children, following these brains through school and out into life, will show the effects of this marks-based training on emotion, reason and memory.

One thing is certain: by building a grace period into language acquisition programs both at home and at school through a combined scribbling/drawing/talking/writing process, children for whom speech and/or symbol-use is delayed or dysfunctional will find relief, remediation, and even preventative effects (Sheridan, 1989, 1990, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2003). For children without delays or dysfunctions, speech and literacy will unfold as it was designed to unfold incrementally - starting with babbling and scribbling in a context of affectionate support.

To model human intelligence, AI would need to build a robot (with eyes and hands) which scribbles and draws and reads its scribbles and drawings, creating internal “neural” models from these actions and shapes. The designers would have to take into consideration that the child’s scribbles and drawings are driven by neural shapes of thought which are already internal as the sensory motor patterns of a biological organism bent on movement, connection, perception and communication, using emotional SEEK and PLAY circuitry.

This, as I see it, is the conundrum. To model an intelligent system that uses languages and literacies as the human brain uses them, an AI device must be able to scribble and draw, but this device, this system, this robot can only scribble and draw if its computer/brain/body has already been programmed to do so - which would mean that the programmer had tapped into the algorithms responsible for the neural shapes of young children’s pre-verbal babbling, scribbling thought. The developmental compendia of children’s unfolding marks as collected by Kellogg and Fein and reproduced in the Sheridan books logically provides some of the mental/motor operations necessary to modeling the mental/motor pre-conditions of verbal, literate thought, including proto-intentional symbolic reasoning.

As scribbling matures and the stages of drawing unfold, these marks of meaning influence the brain via the hand and the eye and the sensory/motor cortex, deep within Dr. Walter Freeman’s koniocortex (Freeman’s term for brain tissue appropriate to the generation of symbolic reasoning as neural behavior, 2009), to organize and to generate the neural patterns necessary for symbolic thought. Rather than trying to model the neural conditions and operations necessary for symbolic thought using a computer/robot, we can look to the actual unfolding of the neural operations of the thinking child, as he/she babbles, scribbles, draws, speaks, reads and writes.

If humankind is becoming technological as a whole, then - since ontogeny both recapitulates and modifies phylogeny 57 - the pressure on the child’s brain to adapt will bring about changes in line with the requirements of technology for its kind of motility, its kind of adhesion, its kind of transduction. Clearly, technology requires quick eyes and quick fingers. It needs the rest of the body only as a support system for the hands/eyes/brain as these three entities interact with a keyboard, a mouse and a lighted screen projecting information via certain raster rates and certain colors and certain codes determined by hardware and software.

The closing research question targets mother/child interactions around attention. To what degree does the mother’s ability to pay attention to the infant and child determine the infant and child’s ability to pay attention? How does the quality of maternal gaze influence the infant’s ability to attend? Are there levels of attention, which the mother gives to the child and which the child learns to return to the mother and, thereafter, to use throughout life as necessary to the normal unfolding of emotional and mental skills?58,59 This research should shed light on which elements in one-on-one interaction between mothers (and/or maternal substitute caregivers) and infants contribute to normal emotional, social and cognitive development.

The ability to pay attention is fundamental to survival. An organism orients toward nutrients and away from toxins. To do so, the organism must recognize nutrients and toxins. Recognition requires attention.

The thoughts of a person in shock or suffering trauma or finding herself in the throes of mental illness are scattered. That person is distracted. She can not pay attention. Her thoughts go everywhere… or remain stuck on one disturbing theme. Attention is the brain mechanism by which we control and organize our thoughts and our brain waves. Without attention, our brain waves go helter skelter. Like gravity, attention is an illusive, pervasive, comprehensive force in the TOE, or Theory of Everything, of mental health. Attention is at the heart of “mom” binding,7 and “time” binding,60 the glue of social and time/space coherent experience. As mindfulness, attention is the portal to the experience of timeless unity, where everything is bound together, seamlessly. Both kinds of attentive consciousness - the time-full and the time-less - are necessary to effective, satisfying, illuminating thought and action over a lifetime.

The mother/child relationship, including shared gaze and directive, instructional attention, as well as mindful, non-directive attention, would not exist unless these qualities of attention were necessary to the mental/emotional well-being of mother and child. Shared gaze and shared attention are mutually therapeutic. Both mother and child thrive on shared attention. This “human” element in childcare is critical to the normal unfolding of the child. At the heart of this human experience is one-on-one attention - the giving, the sharing, the learning of attention.

Research has shown that the temperament of the child influences the mother’s ability to care for the child. Difficult children are harder to bond with and attend to.61 The importance of the child's potential contribution to parent/child interaction is considerable.62 Child temperament also determines how susceptible a child is to parenting,63 including responses to "maternal bids" for joint attention and communication. Autistic sons are often unaware of such bids.64 Maternal depression restricts the level of interaction between mother and child, too causing the child to expect less interaction from her during play sessions and to show less discomfort over this lack of engagement, even at two months of age, while demonstrating shorter attention spans for a larger number of objects because depressed mothers themselves initiate and terminate short attention spans to a range of objects.65,66 There is a direct relationship between the mother’s attentional, social and didactic influence on the child and the child’s ability to attend and to interact socially, as well to acquire and develop and express cognitive skills.58,59 If the mother’s ability to pay attention to the child sets the stage for the development of social and cognitive skills, then maternal attention is a fundamental issue.

Research with four month-olds shows that human infant brains – more than other creatures - specialize in recognizing gaze, frontally or even from the side. This ability to perceive face-to-face, directed gaze, including lifted eyebrows and smiles - as cues to communication - are “essential for infants’ interactions with, and learning from, others.” The human eye is unique in the size of its exposed sclera, or white areas, which surround a darker iris, creating the kind of light/dark pattern which provides a strong stimulus to the infant’s immature visual system. Infants not only prefer to look at faces with open eyes, but they have a strong tendency to “attend to faces that engage them in mutual gaze when compared with averted gaze… It has been argued that an early sensitivity to eye gaze serves as a major foundation for later social skills. Indeed, an impairment of the sensitivity to eye gaze in general, and mutual gaze in particular, might be one of the early signs of a typical social development manifested in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.67,68,69

Research with children with attention deficits and learning disabilities, including autistic children,68,69,70 underscores the importance of trained sustained (visual) attention, starting with a sensitivity to shared gaze. If the quality of the attention of the mother or other primary caregiver is critical to the normal development of this basic ability to attend and to recognize communication cues in the infant brain and if such attention and recognition is the neurological bedrock for social and cognitive development thereafter, including the development of expressive language,71 then we need to focus on, analyze, define and support the range of growth-promoting attentional cues provided by mothers and other primary caregivers.

An infant babbles, but he is taught/learns to speak. A toddler scribbles but he is taught/learns to write and read. An infant’s eyes are drawn to lights and darks and edges, to open eyes, and to faces which offer an attentive gaze, but a child learns to attend. If there is no face to offer shared gaze, what happens to the visual/emotional development of the child? Evidently, something in the brain wiring of the actually or potentially autistic infant fails to respond to the maternal gaze. In the cases of acquired autism, as opposed to genetic autism (if such a category as acquired autism exists), the gaze shared between mothers and infants becomes of critical importance as an influence and as a predictor in terms of normal infant and child development.

The lighted screen does not provide maternal gaze. Parents need to know what stimuli are appropriate in terms of encouraging an infant's "amazing" capacities for alertness and attention.61 If there is a supportive environment, the appropriate kinds and levels of attention will develop naturally between mother and child. Many mothers, for a host of reasons (often economic, and/or health-related), can not provide attentive gaze nor extended mother/child interaction. This absence or inability in the mother or primary caregiver to provide a loving gaze and other levels of instructional and/or directive and/or mindful attention has long-term consequences for the child in terms of the ability to attend as well as to expect attention.

In Dr. Sigmund Freud’s practice as it developed over time, as well as in contemporary psychoanalytic practice supported by Buddhist meditation, a quality of nonjudgemental, mindfulness in the therapist is important to the the patient’s ability to recover information and achieve understanding.72 This mindfulness model is provided by mothers, too, as a non-interfering, yet attentive presence.72 This quality of mindful attention - without franticness, without the distraction of multi-tasking, without any need for constant entertainment – is the kind of attention which the child needs, later, to flourish, from about the age of 4.59 It is enough to be together in the sunshine while the child plays. From birth until about 3.5 years of age, the child needs shared gaze and directive, instructional attention. This is the optimum stage for introducing Scribbling/Drawing/Writing as a strategy for encouraging maternal/caregiver interaction around visual and verbal attention on a one-to-one basis in a consistent manner. After age 4, the open-ended, non-directive aspects of Scribbling/Drawing/Writing have attentional value, too.

We can revisit Dr. Jaak Panksepp’s description of basic emotions, with a small change: PANIC, FEAR, RAGE, AND ATTENTIVE/SEEKING. Feeling the emotion, attending to it, but not reacting to it is an important tenet of Buddhist psychotherapy.72 The child who can recognize and identify her own PANIC, RAGE AND FEAR but also learn to meet strong emotion with a non-reactive attentiveness will be able to move into the positive mind/body benefits of the SEEKING mode more easily. Again, the Scribbling/Drawing/Writing program promotes a committed, patient attentiveness which can be transferred to experience, teaching the child how to hold herself apart from destructive emotions. This kind of emotional coaching in childhood has important benefits in adult life and in society in general. Society would benefit by being more astute and more capable emotionally.

The ability of the child to pay attention does not develop overnight. It grows from the moment the child is born. The mother reads the child’s level of attention, attunes to it and encourages it, helping the infant’s attention span to grow. The child learns to respond to different kinds of attention from the mother, from the less intense to the more intense, mirroring and matching these levels. Autistic brains experience mirror neuron dysfunction,72 which interferes with the childs ability to receive and reflect other's emotions.

One of the simplest games invented to match and mirror and encourage and extend attention between mother and child is the game of Peek-a-Boo. The following Peek-a-Boo Principle underscores the importance of this attentional, lovingly emotional, increasingly language-based, give-and-take, call-and-response relationship between the mother and the child.

PREDICTION: The mother’s/primary caregiver’s ability to pay attention, to interact via shared mutual gaze with the infant and to provide didactic and social instruction throughout early childhood, determine (in general, with the exception of the diagnosed autistic child) the child’s ability - from early infancy - to pay attention, to interact emotionally and to think. The social and mental abilities of the child as that child is influenced early in development by mothers and/or substitute caregivers in the context of the intuitive and intentional development of sustained attention, including the ability to delay gratification, provide important topics for longitudinal research.59

Walter J. Freeman’s paper “The Physiology of Perception,” 2001, makes it clear that the shapes of an animal’s brain patterns indicating recognition become increasingly organized as circling, spiraling layers. These non-symbolic patterns are very like children’s earliest circling scribbles. That observed similarity gave rise to my paper, “The Neurobiological Significance of Children’s Drawings: The Scribble Hypothesis,” 2002. Currently, Dr. Freeman’s 2009 paper, “The neurobiological infrastructure of natural computing: Intentionality,” provides further support and further possibilities for my theories and practice.

The taxonomy of scribbles and drawings laid out by Rhoda Kellogg and Sylvia Fein, and organized in the books Saving Literacy, and HandMade Marks (Sheridan, 2009), provide an observable, empirical set of body/brain behaviors which prepare the brain for symbolic thought. Literacy, or more precisely, multiple literacies (the reading and writing of images, words, mathematical and musical symbols) share one wellspring: the progression of universal, unambiguous, increasingly intentional, handmade marks enacted by the child. Brain scans (MRI’s and EEG’s) across biological systems, including other mammals and infant humans through literate young adults, should support this position. A child’s scribbles and drawings are different from other creatures’ trails or marks and a human child’s brain patterns change as his/her mark-making becomes more intentional.

From 1990 to the present, my research as a teacher and as a scholar, supports the idea that sustained attention using marks of meaning, including scribbling, drawing, writing and reading across symbol systems, receives positive emotional/chemical reinforcement because such thinking conserves energy by creating order, by allowing greater outputs than inputs, and by resolution, or the settling of the thinking brain into minimal energy states1,5,6,7,8 as a decision or a solution or a completed work of art, say, or music is achieved by the child or the adult.