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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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At every stage of early development, human babies lag behind infants from other species. A kitten can amble across a room within moments of birth and catch its first mouse within weeks, while its wide-eyed human counterpart takes months to make her first step, and years to learn even simple tasks, such as how to tie a shoelace or skip a rope, let alone prepare a three-course meal. Yet, in the cognitive race, human babies turn out to be much like the tortoise in Aesop’s fable: emerging triumphant after a slow and steady climb to the finish. As adults, we drive fancy sports cars, leap nimbly across football fields and ballet stages, write lengthy dissertations on every conceivable subject, and launch rockets into space. We have a mastery over our selves and our environments that is peculiar to our species.
Yet, this victory seems puzzling. In the fable, the tortoise wins the race because the hare takes a nap. But, if anything, human infants nap even more than kittens! And unlike the noble tortoise, babies are helpless, and more to the point, hopeless. They could not learn the basic skills necessary to their independent survival even if they tried. How do human babies manage to turn things around in the end?
In a recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Sharon Thompson-Schill, Michael Ramscar and Evangelia Chrysikou make the case that this very helplessness is what allows human babies to advance far beyond other animals. They propose that our delayed cortical development is precisely what enables us to acquire the cultural building blocks, such as language, that make up the foundations of human achievement. Indeed, the trio makes clear that our early vulnerability is an evolutionary “engineering trade-off,” much like the human larynx—which, while it facilitates the intricate productions of human speech, is actually quite a precarious adaptation for anyone trying to swallow safely. In the same way, they suggest, our ability to learn language comes at the price of an extended period of cognitive immaturity.
This claim hinges on a peculiar and unique feature of our cognitive architecture: the stunningly slow development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). While other animals’ brain regions development in synchrony, in humans, the development of the PFC lags far behind that of other areas. The PFC is the swath of gray matter that makes up the anterior frontal lobes, and functionally, it appears to be heavily implicated in a wide-range of sophisticated planning and attention driven behaviors. Indeed, it is often referred to as the “control” center of the brain. One of its main functions appears to be that of selectively filtering information from the senses, allowing us to attend to specific actions, goals, or tasks. For this reason, “cognitive control” tasks are thought to be one of the best assessors of PFC function and maturity, and they are tests that young children reliably, and ignominiously, fail.
The Stroop task serves as a simple assessor of PFC function in adults. The task involves naming the ink color of a contrasting color word: for example, you might see the word “red” written in green ink, in which case you have to say “green.” The task is tricky since it demands that we override a well learned response (saying “red” in response to seeing the word red) with a new response specific to the task (naming the conflicting ink color). Tricky or not, healthy adults can successfully complete the task with only minor hesitation.
Children, with their immature PFC’s, are a different story. Typically, the younger children are, the worse they are at solving Stroop-like tasks, and under the age of four, they outright fail them. While young children are sensitive, apt learners, and often appear to fully understand what is being asked of them, they are unable to mediate the conflicting demands present in these sorts of tasks, and thus fail them, time and time again. Three-year olds simply cannot direct how they attend to or respond to the world.
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16 Comments
Add CommentIt takes human infants "years to learn even simple tasks, such as how to tie a shoelace or skip a rope"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow long does it take a kitten to tie a shoelace? Or even a monkey?
Sigh. Another "just so" story wrapped up in the paper of "scholarship" with a bow-tie of "science" stuck on top and delivered to the choir amid a thumping of self-congratulatory back slapping.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen compared to apes, humans are born up to 2 years premature (relatively) and stay immature for much longer. This has been reported for years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf chimps stayed in a immature stage for an extra year or so, who knows what they may be able to accomplish.
Interesting that liberals and progressives are so enamored of unconventional thinking and doing their own thing, even as it is demonstrated that the transmission of culture is through conventional means. Imagine how little organized religion we'd have if we didn't teach it to kids while they were gullible, the word Dawkins uses for this state. This accretion of normality is being, of course, seriously threatened as kids everywhere click their way all through the illogical and inconsistent Internet, and grow ever more resistant to acculturation. Perhaps someday the scientists will be studying the new "Pidgin Culture" that started expressing itself as 4chan and fusion music and world traveling Discovery Channel food and trekking shows on TV and the wonderful, glorious YouTube. I can hardly wait until a politician won't be able to tell lies because his audiences are so hip to his last viral YouTube goof-up.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe combination of billions of humans with the Internet must drive orthodox religious figures nuts. Or nutser.
@frgough, thanks again for another meaningless, acerbic comment. Regardless of what one thinks of the paper, the author has made a greater contribution to the world than you ever will. You're just a sour little nut job who's bitter that he can't figure this stuff out. I'd call you pathetic but that would imply I cared.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@ormondotvos, I don't know. The internet is full of B.S. So is religion. To me it looks like a match made in hell. The internet has given even the most radical religious nuts access to a greater audience. Remember, religious freaks, conspiracy theorist, political extremists, and other lunatics like frgough here don't believe what they believe because they lack access to the truth. They do so because of intellectual defects, poor socialization, substance abuse, etc. In the past they would mutter their crazy ideas to themselves, now they can go and find an entire website dedicated to proving them right and glad to give them a soapbox to stand on. Really, the last thing the world needed was yet another media without oversight. What will change the world for the better is not easier access to information; it is educating people to know the difference between truth and B.S.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut Robert, you KNOW that religion is taught by the kind of repetitive overpowering of logical thought that the article describes the child as learning from. As the signal (reason) to noise (faith) ratio improves, the kid reaches a state where they become skeptics earlier. Being religious isn't an indicator of stupidity, or irrationality (any more than our usual human portion) but merely an indication that child abuse of the mind occurred because the parents were passing on their training.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the modern world, we don't need religion for morality, or social cohesion, so I think the Internet is rapidly corroding the ability of parents to religiously abuse their children. It gives me hope, because the internet encourages just the kind of expression you find so abhorrent: kids shoveling it out, and getting vaccinated against organized thought control. Nice bite on @frgough, tho.
Fascinating subject, but I am inclined to agree with candide as to the inappropriateness of the comparisons in the beginning of the article. I think it would be better to compare the walking ability development of humans with something like 2-legged marsupials like kangaroos. Even better would be comparing the foraging and communicating development of humans versus something like elephants. Still some good insights here, especially the bit about the development of the prefrontal cortex.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Children’s inability to filter their learning". I may be having trouble with the symantics here. It seems that filtering is exactly what children are doing in removing "noise" from the "signal". It is well known that children can learn multiple languages quite easily, if they start early enough. In particular, they have no difficulty separating two different languages when both are presented, for example by different parents.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@robert schmidt: "In the past they would mutter their crazy ideas to themselves, now they can go and find an entire website dedicated to proving them right and glad to give them a soapbox to stand on. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, there's an entire 24-hour "news" station devoted to them. It's called Faux News, and it's full of completely paranoid nutjobs completely lacking in any sense of reality. :)
@ormondotvos: "In the modern world, we don't need religion for morality"
Actually, we never did. As has been demonstrated numerous times, the human animal, and a few other species, has a built-in moral compass telling them what is right and what is wrong. Religion formed as a result of some people believing THEIR moral compass was pointing in the only direction possible and anyone's who wasn't pointing in that direction needed to be set on fire. Religion is the antithesis of morality.
Since when can a kitten amble across the room within hours of birth? Kittens are born with their eyes not yet open. They don't see, have the neurological wiring to see, or move away from their mothers for two weeks or so. Does SCI-AM do the most elementary fact-checking?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@opisthion: As someone who's had a few litters of kittens over the years, not to mention two this year, amble might not have been the best term, but kittens can get around fairly well, fairly quickly. Even if they'd said a few weeks, the point is still valid: it takes humans a long time to learn basic skills that other species learn very quickly. You're quibbling over non-essential trivia that really doesn't even have anything to do with the main article. Get a life and move on.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article seems to confuse linguistic conventions with generalizations. To say that children conventionalize language is odd, and this oddity reflects a basic misunderstanding concerning linguistic conventions. Linguistic conventions are implicitly or explicitly agreed on regularities in behavior shared by a linguistic community. To say that children conventionalize seems to suggest that they are somehow creating conventions, and indeed the article suggests that children are partly responsible for stability of linguistic conventions. This is perhaps true, but if it is, the childs contribution is not by conventionalizing, but by generalizing from the speech of nearby adults. What seems likely is this: In order to break into the language game being played by adults, the child must first over-generalize from the often differing linguistic behavior of fallible adults. Only against the resulting background of strict rules can the child then begin to distinguish between correct usage, on the one hand, and idiosyncrasies and errors on the other.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisormondotvos, you should be careful about equivocating on terms, especially when one of the terms is that of a specialized discipline. I have in mind here your use of "unconventional thinking" and "conventional means", and the article's discussion of cultural and linguistic conventions. These phrases do not refer to the same things, even though they do all contain the word "convention." Take linguistic conventions. It is a convention of English speaking communities that the word "tree" refer to trees. This is not a convention shared by other linguistic communities. When a liberal suggests that perhaps unconventional thinking would be beneficial, they are not suggesting that we use words so as to break linguistic conventions--not suggesting that we should follow another linguistic community's conventions, or that we should create new ones. They are merely suggesting that we should think of something differently than we have been. You are using "convention" in its colloquial sense, while the author of this article is using it in a very narrow, specialized sense. As a result, what you say makes no sense.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIm sorry Sir, I fail to see the point you are making, or the cherished notion that this research challenges.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou have added nothing , gained nothing, and yet feel good about it. I humbly submit there is research needing done, and quickly, into this personality trait.
"We have a mastery over our selves " I would think otherwise. The mind has mastery over us, we do what our mind say's to do, whatever it might be(90% of the time) ex. Quiting smoking, going to gym, waking up on time. We do what our mind enjoys.
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