Richard Dawkins is right. Religions are spread by culture telling our children stories that have to be believed by faith alone. If we remove the church, religion may be stopped dead in its tracks, but we will still have supernatural thinking. If I am right, it will re-emerge in every newborn child as part of the natural processes of reasoning. It’s like the mythical Hydra beast. If you chop off one head it simply grows another. So let’s take a look at this monster of a child.
CHAPTER FOUR
BLOOMING, BUZZING BABIES
All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
– IMMANUEL KANT,
Critique of Pure Reason (1781), p. 569
WHERE DO BELIEFS come from? I’m with the German philosopher Immanuel Kant on this one. Knowledge generates beliefs, and that knowledge comes primarily from our intuitive reasoning. Let’s examine the evidence. Most adults are so familiar with storytelling from their childhood that we assume that what we know and believe comes from what we were told. However, the picture of the passive child simply absorbing knowledge and beliefs from others, like some sponge sucking up ideas, misses an important point. Children come up with their own ideas long before anyone has told them what to think. Only in the past fifty years have scientists really begun to appreciate how this thinking emerges in the growing child. Let me be clear here, because this is the main argument of the book: children generate knowledge through their own intuitive reasoning about the world around them, which leads them to both natural and supernatural beliefs. To understand this we have to look at the beginning again – not the beginning of culture this time, but the beginning of the developing mind before culture and storytelling have started to play a major role.
The birth of my eldest daughter was a blur for me. As is typical for a first child, the labour lasted a long time, for about twelve hours through the night, and by the time she made her debut the following day around noon, exhaustion, emotion, and sheer anxiety about what was a difficult delivery had ensured that most of my memory of the occasion would be obliterated. Of course, I wasn’t the one doing the hard work. My second daughter’s arrival was much easier. Well, for me at least. This time I was less anxious, knew what to expect, and frankly was more interested in what various professionals were up to and what the machines were for. Maybe I should have been more attentive to my wife’s hardship, but instead I took time to ponder how strange an experience birth must be. I tried to imagine what it must be like to be born – to leave the intimate, warm cocoon of the human womb and enter the sterile, bleached cacophony of a hospital delivery suite, a room flooded with bright light, tubes, cold metal objects, large moving bodies, agitated voices, and machines that go ping. What does the newborn make of all this fuss? It’s enough to make you want to cry.
In 1890 William James described the newborn’s world as a ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ of sensations.1 No organization or knowledge was thought to be present at birth. On entering the world, we were just a bundle of reflexes and dribbles. Reflexes are those behaviours that are automatically triggered. The pupils in your eyes narrow in bright sunshine because of a reflex. When the doctor taps your knee with a hammer and your leg jerks up, that’s another. No thinking is required. In fact, you can’t stop most reflexes because they are beyond any control or thought.
Babies come packaged with many weird and wonderful reflexes. For example, if you gently stroke the cheek of newborns, a rooting reflex makes them turn their head and mouth to the source of the stroking. They do not know to turn. They are simply wired to do so. There is a sucking reflex when any nipple-sized thing causes babies to pucker up their lips. Clearly these two responses are useful for breast-feeding. There’s a stepping reflex where, if you hold the newborn upright with both feet on a surface, it will alternate lifting and placing one leg and then the next in what looks like walking. This astounds parents, because true walking is at least one year off. Then there is the grip reflex.
FIG. 5: John Watson demonstrating the strength of the grasp reflex in an infant, dating from around 1919. © THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, BALTIMORE
Their tiny little fingers clamped onto an object placed in their palm are so powerful that you can lift infants off the ground clinging to that object. John Watson did just this, demonstrating something that no caring parent would dream of trying.2
In the ‘Moro’ reflex – sometimes referred to as the startle response – the baby will fling its arms outstretched, as if to hug you if you drop its supported head backwards or make a loud noise. No one is quite sure what that could be useful for. Some of these reflexes clearly support early adaptive functions, whereas others may be a legacy from evolution that we still carry today. Some argue that the Moro reflex was a mechanism by which the prehominid infant grasped onto the furry underbelly of the mother as she fled in dangerous situations.3 Most modern women with furry underbellies are unlikely to have babies today, but you can still see this primitive response when wild Rhesus monkeys scoop up their babies and scamper when threatened.
As we grow, we lose many of these reflexive behaviours and hold on to others. However, although many of these early infantile reflexes disappear, they are not truly lost, because they can re-emerge in adult patients with head injuries, especially if there is damage to the frontal parts of the brain. For example, in a coma many of the higher control centres of the brain temporarily shut down, allowing behaviours like the grasp reflex to reveal themselves.4 This is a fascinating feature of our brains, and it may not be limited to simple reflexes. Maybe as we develop we do not entirely abandon all of our initial behaviours and early thoughts. In this way, the brain may be like the hard drive on your computer. Files are never truly deleted, just overwritten but ultimately recoverable.
BRILLIANT BABIES
Apart from reflexes, it was thought that newborns did not have much in the way of what we would call intelligence or knowledge. However, when scientists started to look more closely, they found that newborns are much more aware of their surroundings than simple reflexes would dictate. More striking was the evidence for learning and memory. My own work (the youngest baby I tested was twenty-three minutes old, wrinkled, and covered in afterbirth, but as bright as a button) revealed that newborns can remember and distinguish between different black-and-white-stripe patterns.5 They also have a preference for faces, as we discuss in the next chapter. This memory for stripes and penchant for faces are something more than simple reflexes could achieve. More amazingly, learning does not begin at birth. For example, if you get pregnant mothers in their third trimester to read aloud passages from Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, their unborn babies can hear and remember this experience. When they are born, if you stick a rubber nipple in their mouth to measure their sucking, they will stop when they hear a tape-recording of their own mother reading the same passages. The only way they could have heard this was from inside the womb.6 Learning clearly takes place before birth. The unborn fetus is listening in on the world and can even remember the theme tune to the TV soap opera that Mum watched during the last months of pregnancy. In one study, the particularly irritating (sorry, memorable) theme tune for the Australian soap Neighbours got stuck in babies’ heads as much as it did in adults’ heads.7 So be careful what you say. When two pregnant women are talking, there are four individuals listening in on the conversation.