Brain Rules for Baby (16 page)

 

Gestures and speech used similar neural circuits as they developed in our evolutionary history. University of Chicago psycholinguist David McNeill was the first to suggest this. He thought nonverbal and verbal skills might retain their strong ties even though they’ve diverged into separate behavioral spheres. He was right. Studies confirmed it with a puzzling finding: People who could no longer move their limbs after a brain injury also increasingly lost their ability to communicate verbally. Studies of babies showed the same direct association. We now know that infants do not gain a more sophisticated vocabulary until their fine-motor finger control improves. That’s a remarkable finding. Gestures are “windows into thought processes,” McNeill says.

Could learning physical gestures improve other cognitive skills? One study hints that it could, though more work needs to be done.
Kids with normal hearing took an American Sign Language class for nine months, in the first grade, then were administered a series of cognitive tests. Their attentional focus, spatial abilities, memory, and visual discrimination scores improved dramatically—by as much as 50 percent—compared with controls who had no formal instruction.

 

An important subset of gestures, you might guess, are facial expressions. Babies love to gaze at human faces. Mom’s is best of all—but they prefer any human face over any monkey face, llama face, cat face, or dog face. What are they looking for in your face? Emotional information. Are you happy? Sad? Threatened?

We all spend a great deal of time reading faces. A person’s nonverbal communication can confirm his or her verbal communication, undermine it, or even contradict it. Our relationships depend on our ability to interpret it. So humans read faces reflexively, and you can observe this even in an infant’s earliest hour. The skill develops over time, with the most sophisticated behavior observable about five to seven months after birth. Some people are born better at it than others. But we sometimes get it wrong. Researchers call it Othello’s Error.

In Shakespeare’s tragic play, the Moor Othello believes his wife is fooling around on him. Othello is enraged as he confronts her in their bedroom. She is naturally scared out of her mind. Seeing her panicked face, he interprets this fear as guilt, all the evidence of infidelity that he needs. Before he smothers her in bed, out come these famous love-hate words:

Competently decoding another person’s face can take years of experience; like Othello, adults sometimes make mistakes. The only way to improve this accuracy is by interacting with other people. That’s why babies need human time in their earliest years. Not computer time. Not television time. Your baby’s brain needs interaction with you, in person, on a consistent basis.

Either that, or training by psychologist Paul Ekman.

 

Paul Ekman, professor emeritus from the University of California- San Francisco, seldom misinterprets people’s faces. He has cataloged more than 10,000 possible combinations of facial expressions, creating an inventory called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). This research instrument allows a trained observer to dissect an expression in terms of all the muscular actions that produced it.

Using these tools, Ekman has found several surprising things about human facial recognition. First, people all over the world express similar emotions using similar facial muscles. These universal basic emotions are happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, anger, and fear. (The finding was originally quite startling; research at the time chalked up facial expressions mostly to cultural mores.) Second, the conscious control we can exert over own facial features is limited, which means we give away a lot of free information. The muscles that surround our eyes, for example, are not under conscious management. This may be why we tend to believe them more.

One of Ekman’s research videotapes shows an interaction between a psychiatrist and “Jane”, his very troubled patient. Jane had been suffering from such severe depression that she was hospitalized and under suicide watch. When she began to show real signs of improvement, she begged her physician to let her go home for the weekend. The camera is on Jane’s face, full view, when the doctor gives her permission to leave. As Ekman puts the tape in slow motion, a sudden
flash of deep desperation arcs across Jane’s face. She doesn’t seem to be able to control it. It turns out Jane was planning to kill herself when she got home, which fortunately she admitted before she was discharged. Ekman uses the tape to train police officers and mental-health professionals. He stops the tape and asks the students if they can see the flash of desperation, about a fifth of a second long. Once they know what to look for, they can.

These flashes are called micro-expressions, facial gestures that last a fraction of a second but tend to reveal our truest feelings in response to rapid-fire questioning. Ekman found that some people could detect and interpret these micro-expressions better than others. People lie a lot, and those who could pick up these micro-expressions were terrific at detecting falsehoods. (The TV show
Lie to Me
is based on this premise.) Ekman found that he could train people to read these micro-expressions, improving their ability to pick up nonverbal cues.

 

How can we tell face-reading abilities are so important? In part because the brain devotes a tremendous amount of neural real estate, including an important region called the fusiform gyrus, to the single task of processing faces. Neural acreage of this size is expensive; the brain doesn’t fence off one area for such a restricted function unless it has a darn good reason.

We know the brain has face-specific regions because a person can damage them and lose the ability to recognize the people to whom the faces belong. The disorder is called prosopagnosia, or face-blindness. Parents of face-blind kids have to provide them with instructions like “Remember, Drew is the one with the orange T-shirt; Madison is wearing a red dress”. Otherwise they lose track of the kids they’re playing with. Nothing is wrong with the children’s eyes, just their brains.

 

Being able to correctly interpret gestures and facial expressions would have been highly prized in the merciless Serengeti. That’s because social coordination is a great survival skill, useful whether you are hunting animals bigger than you or just trying to get along with the neighbors. Among many other gifts, social coordination allows the concept of teamwork. Most researchers believe the ability to work as a team allowed us to pole-vault over our otherwise debilitating physical wimpiness.

How does interpreting faces help with teamwork? The ability to cooperate in a high-risk setting requires an intimate, moment-by-moment knowledge of another’s intentions and motivations. Knowing the forward progress of somebody’s psychological interior allows a more accurate prediction of his or her behavior (just ask any quarterback in the NFL). Reading the emotional information in someone’s face is one of the quickest ways to get these insights. And those who could do it accurately functioned better on Team Serengeti. Today, when people have a difficult time reading the emotional information embedded in faces, we call it autism. Teamwork is tough for these kids.

 

Could your child’s ability to read faces and gestures predict her success in our 21st-century workforce? The investigators who studied successful entrepreneurs think so. We’ve already explored three of the five characteristics in the Innovator’s DNA study. The last two are incredibly social in origin:

Want your baby to grow up to be a successful innovator? Make sure she has nonverbal skills down cold—and an inquisitiveness to match.

From exploration, self-control, and creativity to verbal and nonverbal ability, it is clear that the intelligence stew has many ingredients. Standard IQ tests are not capable of measuring most of these elements, even though they play a powerful role in the future success of your children. Given their uniqueness, that’s not surprising. Some are so unexpected as to defy belief (your kid’s chances of being a great entrepreneur are linked to her ability to decode
faces?
). So, you need not be discouraged if your kid isn’t in the 97th percentile on certain tests. She may have many other intellectual aspects in abundance that those tests are inherently incapable of detecting.

That’s not to say that everyone is a potential Einstein. These gifts are unevenly sprinkled on our children, and most have genetic components. Your autistic child may never have the warmth of a pastor, for example, no matter how hard you try. But as you know, there’s more to intelligence than just seeds. Time to get our hands a little dirty, tilling some truly remarkable findings about the soil that makes our kids as smart as their seeds will allow them to be.

Theodore Roosevelt was so sick as a child, his parents had to instruct him at home. That was probably the best thing that ever happened to him. Young Teddy’s illness put him in constant contact with arguably the most loving dad a future president could have; if there were ever a hall of fame for fathers of vulnerable children, Theodore Sr. should be its founding member. Writing in his diary, Teddy Roosevelt remembers as a child being regularly scooped up into his daddy’s big arms. Up and down the hallways the elder Roosevelt would pace, carrying his bright son upright for hours, ensuring the boy could breathe. They explored the great outdoors when weather permitted, libraries when it did not. Gradually, the son grew stronger. At every precious point, Dad would encourage Teddy to try hard. Then harder. Then hardest. Said the president in a diary decades later:

The senior Roosevelt could not know this, but he was exercising some pretty solid cognitive neuroscience in the nurturing of his famous child. Teddy was born smart and born into wealth, two factors not every parent is capable of providing. But Teddy was also born into love and attentive guidance, two things
every
parent is capable of providing. Indeed, there are plenty of behaviors over which you, like Roosevelt Sr., can exert enormous authority. Regardless of their genes, you can help your children mobilize their intelligence as fully as Theodore Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, or the most successful innovators working today. Just how do you grow a smart baby?