STANLEY I. GREENSPAN - The First Idea

W HAT WAS THE FIRST idea? Was it formed by an early human-like figure, poised with stone in hand, calculating how sto fell his prey? Certainly, an intriguing question, but there is an even more important one. How and when did the capacity to create an idea come about in the first place? This question has perplexed ancient and modern philosophers, scientists in the fields of human development and evolution, and most of the rest of us. How do human beings develop their highest mental abilities, the abilities to symbolize and think? And how did these distinctly human abilities arise during the course of evolution? In short, how did we become human beings and how do we maintain our humanness?

We have developed a new hypothesis to address these questions. The key to the evolutionary hypothesis we will present in this book comes from our observations of babies at the beginning of their developmental journey. We have found that the capacity to create symbols and to think stems from what was often thought of by philosophers as the enemy of reason and logic: our passions or emotions. While there is mounting evidence that emotions influence the content of our thoughts (see ), we have discovered a far more important role for our emotions. We will show how emotions actually give birth to our very ability to create symbols and to think.

However, a very special characteristic of our emotions paves the path to symbols. This characteristic is relatively different in human beings than in other animals. We have observed that it is the capacity to transform basic emotions into a series of successively more complex interactive emotional signals. We will show how emotional signaling enables a child to separate perceptions from fixed predictable actions and, in so doing, free up these perceptions to acquire emotional meaning and become symbols. Something as profound as mastering the word mommy, or something as basic as the word apple or the number 4, comes into being through six initial levels of emotional interaction and signaling in the early years of life. Sensory and subjective experiences, seemingly the enemy of reason and logic, through progressive transformations, therefore, actually become the basis for both creative and logical reflective thought.

These uniquely human abilities are not hardwired into our brains. They must be developed through learning interactions. Humans intensify these types of critical learning processes in the second half of the first year of life and during most of the second year and then continue it throughout their lifetimes. These learning interactions are not instructional, where an adult lectures, shows, or otherwise directly teaches a child. They are natural interactions that result in new learning, such as playful back-and-forth smiles or vocalizations between an infant and caregiver from which the infant learns about relating and interacting. When we use the term learning, we will be using it in this way, even though at times this type of learning will also involve interactions where a child imitates or copies the adult or another child.

Through our studies of nonhuman primates and a review of the fossil record, we will also demonstrate that what takes a human baby two years to learn took our human ancestors millions of years. Remarkably, however, we can trace the same steps in both.