Tuning the infant brain – in our time

Evidence of a developing consistency in attitude among neuroscientists and those economists and children and families policy makers who have been won over by the case for early intervention was audible on BBC radio, last week.

One key connecting term is “regulation,” the importance of which was discussed in the latest BBC Radio 4 In Our Time broadcast and podcast on the infant brain and the psychology of early childhood.

“Emotional regulation” is a term increasingly familiar in the vocabulary of social and emotional learning programs. It has figured particularly prominently in the findings of psychologist Joseph Durlak and colleagues at Loyola University, Chicago.

Their systematic review of the territory in 2008 indicated that wherever social and emotional regulation was part of the school curriculum, children tended to be “happier and better behaved and to perform better academically”.

Self regulation figures similarly in US Prevention Research Center founder Mark Greenberg’s interest in mindfulness and in Tom Dishion’s studies of the ecology of childhood. "If we can influence the way the home, schools and neighborhood change children's behavior and health,” Dishion has argued, “then we can begin to have significant impacts on well-being". [See, for example: Bringing prevention services home to the family]

The BBC broadcast traced the evolution of ideas about development in infancy through the theories of the child psychologist Jean Piaget, and via the social linguist Noam Chomsky who argued that all humans are born in possession of an innate, universally applicable grammar.

Of the thinking since Chomsky, Usha Goswami, Director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at the University of Cambridge said: “I think what’s fascinating and which is really different from what constructivists like Piaget thought is how many of the ways that the infant and young child’s brain functions are actually very similar to what happens in adulthood.

“So, for example, it used to be thought that children didn’t reason logically - not very young children, not toddlers and not four-year-olds - but now it’s realized that children can be just as logical as adults, but they just have a lot less knowledge.

“So sometimes they’ll make inferences that are incorrect – and what seems to be so important developmentally is the overall regulation of your system. So it’s having enough experience, so that you learn all these extra contextual factors that help constrain reasoning, but it’s also being able to self regulate your emotions, being able to function effectively in the face of conflict or other hindrances to pure logic that are very important developmentally.

“So it’s not so much the content of the mind but how efficient you can be with the content of your own mind, given all the other things that you’ve got to do as well.”

Of the crucial relationship between the innate and the world “learned” in infancy, Denis Mareschal, Professor of Psychology at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck College, University of London said: ”The essential building blocks were understood 100 years ago. What we are reappraising is the real complexity of the vast networks that are present in the brain and how just from a few very simple building blocks we can get the range of complex behaviors that we observe in adults.

“There doesn’t seem to be a magic bullet. There isn’t some aspect of the human brain which is present only in humans and not in other animals. We don’t have the biggest brains; we don’t have the largest cortex. We don’t have the best brain metabolism and so forth.…

“So there must be something else – and that something else is a complex interaction between our neural abilities - and the fact that, compared to precocious animals, we have very extensive developmental periods. In infancy, our brains our being tuned to the environment.”

[See also: It’s time to sweat the early intervention asset]