That’s right-it appears that relationships came first, and self-reflection came next! Relationships first.Įlaborated by language and made intricate by socially-needed empathic skills to sense and comprehend the internal intentions and meanings of others, we now could examine in thought and feeling what an “I” might be, and reflect and think about what a “you” was not only in real here-and-now interactions but in concept, across time, and across contexts. As our brains took on the need to connect to others, we developed the neural real estate to examine our own sense of identity. Now comes another amazing twist to the story. The result for all of us is the centrality of relationships in human life. Moving beyond the important parent-child relationship of our mammalian history, this human feature of cooperation propelled our need for complex communication and complex brain architecture into fast forward. That’s likely how our relationships within groups allowed us to not only survive, but ultimately to thrive. If we could sense the inner state of others through verbal language and through the non-verbal signals of eye contact, facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, touch, posture, and the timing and intensity of responses, we could then link our minds, connecting the core of our inner worlds, and making a more integrated whole from the sum of many individuals. You can see how this essential collaborative nature of ours would be a natural backdrop to making communication amongst members of a group so vital for the group’s survival. Communication is what connects one person to another, or one person to many. And the very essence of a relationship is communication. These studies suggest that our experiences shape our neural architecture-and that our social relationships are one of the most important forms of experience that literally form who we are. In our Foundation for Psychocultural Research/UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development, over the past decade we have been examining how the relationships we have within cultures-the repeating patterns of communication we have that link us together in families, communities, and societies-actually shape the structure and function of the brain. As Robin Dunbar suggests, the more complex our social lives, the more complex our brains. Relationships are the defining feature of being human. Our youth grow into their adolescence, getting ready to push away from their parents and the solid home base from which they now can go out and explore the world. We give birth to our children, share their care through collaborative communication, and then build cooperative communities that extend this interconnected way of living. This cooperative child-rearing, Hrdy suggests, is the key to our adaptive nature. While the tadpoles do fine without their parents’ care, as mammals, our human family shares this need for an attachment bond.Īnd as a very special kind of primate, we have the unusual habit (actually more like a key feature) of our caregiving: we distribute the responsibility for the care of our young to more than just the mother.Īs Sarah Hrdy beautifully describes in Mothers and Others, we mammals have “alloparenting” or “other-parenting” in which we provide trusted others to care for our precious infants. The magic of attachment is that our children internalize our patterns of communication with them, shaping the very structure of their developing brains as they move from the safe haven of our love to set out into the world from the launching pad of home. We mammals share attachment, the need for a close relationship between parent and offspring to connect and protect, to soothe and attune. What makes us different as mammals from our amphibian and even reptilian cousins is something beyond just the hair on our bodies and the warmth of our blood. I wondered then, as I still do today as a physician and mental health educator, how our human lives entail our gathering together to voice our own thoughts and aspirations, intentions and emotions. Meanwhile, their tadpole offspring swam in the cool flowing water below, their parents seemingly oblivious to their offsprings’ experience. Perched on the rocks, they would find each other and croak out an exhilarating symphony of amphibious songs. When I was a child, I used to marvel at the sound of the frogs in our neighborhood creek.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |