Amazing article in a recent New York Review of Books: “What Babies Know and We Don’t”. Written by Michael Greenberg, the focus of the article is a new book “The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life,” by Alison Gopnik. Here is an excerpt of the NYRB article:

The most elusive period of our lives occurs from birth to about the age of five. Mysterious and otherworldly, infancy and early childhood are surrounded later in life by a curious amnesia, broken by flashes of memory that come upon us unbidden, for the most part, with no coherent or reliable context. With their sensorial, almost cellular evocations, these memories seem to reside more in the body than the mind; yet they are central to our sense of who we are to ourselves.

Part of the appeal of psychoanalysis may be that, in its quest to locate the faded child in the adult, it turns the adult into a kind of child at a play date with his analyst. The date is structured along the lines of imaginary play, complete with free association and open-ended conversation [emphasis added] that can wind up anywhere; but like imaginary play, the date with the analyst follows a series of strict rules. The aim is to articulate what has been repressed, to fill in a blank in the narrative about ourselves. But as Alison Gopnik and her fellow cognitive psychologists have discovered, those years are so difficult to recapture not because of repression but because the states of consciousness and memory in early childhood are so different from those we experience later on.

“Children and adults are different forms of Homo sapiens,” writes Gopnik in The Philosophical Baby, a tour through the recent findings of cognitive science about the minds of young children. For one thing, the prefrontal lobe, which has a major part in blocking out stimuli from other parts of the brain and fostering internally driven attention, is undeveloped in young children, and doesn’t fully form in most people until they are in their twenties. Internally driven attention, cognitive research suggests, isn’t a capacity that children fully acquire until at least the age of five. What arouses them is what is in front of their eyes, the first burst of information about cause and effect in the physical world.

Lots to think about here. First, this data, it seems to me, should be mandatory information for any writer delving into a story that has children as some of its primary characters. “Children and adults are different forms of Homo sapiens.” Consider that. As writers, we are well advised not to approach our children characters as little adults, rather we should look at them as entirely distinct from the adult experience. Even just this one fact mentioned above — about a child not developing “internally driven attention” until age 5 — is a powerful insight into a child’s mindset, behavior, world view, and all the rest.

But that’s not all that came to mind as I read the article: “Part of the appeal of psychoanalysis may be that, in its quest to locate the faded child in the adult, it turns the adult into a kind of child at a play date with his analyst. The date is structured along the lines of imaginary play, complete with free association and open-ended conversation that can wind up anywhere; but like imaginary play, the date with the analyst follows a series of strict rules. The aim is to articulate what has been repressed, to fill in a blank in the narrative about ourselves.”

I wonder if that is one dynamic that drives people to write stories; for in the writing of stories, are we attempting to “fill in a blank in the narrative about ourselves?”

Moreover the “adult at play” image resonated with me in terms of the brainstorming process which is all about “free association” and the character development process which involves “open-ended conversations” per a writer’s ‘dialogue’ with their characters.

And then there’s this:

Highly active in the brains of infants are the occipital cortex, in the rear of the brain, which guides attention to the visual world, and the parietal cortex, which helps one adjust to new events. It’s not surprising to learn that magnetic imaging shows both these cortices light up in adults while they are engrossed in watching a movie [emphasis added] (at the same time, the prefrontal lobe goes dormant). The suspension of disbelief and the swift orientation to a passively received bombardment of unexpected visual stimuli may approximate aspects of the infant’s state of being.

Does the movie-watching experience somehow replicate that of processing the world as infants, the occipital cortex connected to a movie’s “visual world” and the parietal cortex dialed into the movie’s plot, moving from one “new event” to another?

I love music. I love art. I love books. I love poetry. But nothing moves me as deeply as movies. Nothing transports me out of this world into that world like a movie.

As much as I talk about the psychological relationship between the viewer and the movie, I prefer to mythologize the movie-going experience, that in a way and at its best, it really is magical. But perhaps that magic is grounded in the physiological nature of our brains.

“Tell me a story.” I doubt there’s a person alive who didn’t utter some variation of those words as a child to a parent or adult — and probably often. Maybe there’s more to it than simply a child’s affection for stories. Maybe we, as writers, can do our best work when we connect with our inner child — through free association, make believe, and play.

In other words, writing as child’s play?

For the rest of the NY Review of Books article, go here.