Human Cognitive Plasticity
Subject
Prenatal Influences as Information for the Fetus
The notion of prenatal influences may conjure up frivolous attempts to enrich the fetus, like playing Mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly. In reality, the nine-month-long process of shaping and molding that goes on in the womb is far more visceral and consequential than that. Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life—the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the…
Time Sequence
Object
The Affect of a Nurturing Environment on Babies
If survival is the brain’s most important priority, safety is the most important expression of that priority. This is the lesson Harlow’s iron maidens teach us. Babies are completely at the mercy of the people who brought them into the world. This understanding has a behavioral blast radius in infants that obscures every other behavioral priority they have. How do babies handle these concerns? By attempting to…
Why they relate
Infants in the womb are taking in information about the environment into which they will be born, and after they are born they continue to adapt to their environment. A nurturing environment produces good citizens, a harsh environment produces gang members.