Sprouting and Growing Intelligence
By Dr. S. H. Jacob
www.shjacob.io
Author, Your Baby’s Brain, Intellect, and You
Content Writer, SmartBabies App
How Do Newborns Know?
Newborns form knowledge by perceiving and acting on the objects they are trying to understand. The sprouting of intelligence begins with the primitive perceptions and reflex actions that a baby is born with. Surprisingly, newborns also know a thing or two about the world of objects and people!
The Five Senses. We all know that newborns are born with the five senses that enable them to perceive things around them. They can see, hear, smell, feel, and taste.
Reflex Actions. We also know that aside from the ability to perceive things, newborns are also born with several reflex actions, such as grasping, sucking, and swallowing, as well as various eye movements, such as blinking, focusing, and tracking. This is how newborns experience the world around them. These perceptions and reflex actions, which constitute their fundamental means of survival, form the basis for early cognitive development.
The Act of Coordination. Within a month or so, he learns to coordinate perceptions with reflex actions, such as when sees a toy rattle and grasps it. He can also coordinate one action with another, such as grasping the toy and bringing it to his mouth.
« When baby David learns to integrate seeing his rattle with a grasping motion, he can reach for it and grab it. As he coordinates grasping with sucking, he can bring the rattle to his mouth. A big step in growing his intellectual ability. So, while intelligence springs from perceptions and actions, it grows through the coordination of perceptions and actions!
Coordination enables babies to create new ways of knowing. With each new coordination, new and more sophisticated ways of knowing become possible. As the network of coordination expands, the child’s ability to understand grows, enabling her or him to be more flexible, adaptable, and faster. In short, it is the coordination of actions that is at the heart of intellectual development.
What Do Newborns Know About Things?
You might be surprised to learn that newborns can also do remarkable things right off the bat!
They know things about the world of objects as well as the people around them! Here are some examples:
First, let’s look at what a newborn knows about the world of objects. Are newborns sensitive to the pattern or form of things? By now, everyone knows that newborns are drawn to images with high contrasts, like the one shown in this image.
Newborns a few days are also sensitive to brightness, can detect movement, and track moving objects with their eyes. They can even anticipate an event. Let’s say you repeatedly show an infant a rolling ball hitting a door and stopping. Then, you show her the ball going through the door. What do you think happens? Incredibly, she shows surprise!
What Does a Newborn Know About People?
Well, here’s a start. They
- prefer mom’s voice
- prefer mom or dad’s face
- can imitate facial gestures
- can take turns, often referred to as “serve and return”
Psychologists have shown that some infants only 2-3 weeks old can imitate tongue protrusions and mouth movements. And infants only 2-3 days old imitate happy and sad faces!
This is remarkable as it tells us that they are intelligent enough to know that their faces are like ours. They can copy the expression and reproduce it! These observations should shatter the idea that infants are passive beings waiting to be “stimulated” before they can do something. Infants are not only active, capable learners, but they are also discoverers and inventors. To imitate, the infant must accommodate his face to correlate with what he is trying to imitate. In other words, he must invent a facial expression!
What Are Parents to Do?
The trouble is that we often don’t think of our babies as beings who are equipped to learn, discover, and invent. We generally think of them as empty receptacles waiting to be fed with information, hence the preoccupation with teaching them to memorize things, like the names of colors, shapes, animals, and letters in the alphabet!
We must realize that we cannot “teach” everything as if it were information, showing an object and repeating the name of something until the child repeats it. Yes, we can teach them this type of information. Unfortunately, this type of learning by rote memory does very little to a baby’s cognition at this point in the child’s development. At the heart of a baby’s intelligence lies the acts of discovery and invention. Knowledge of what an object is – what it looks like, what it tastes, smells, feels, and sounds like requires a process of discovery that happens through physical interaction with that object. And the best way to achieve that is through play. It turns out that not only does physical interaction with an object result in discovery, but it results in inventing as well! How? By manipulating an object, the child is abstracting ideas about what she can do with that object and ideas about her abilities. This knowledge is inventive in nature. It is essentially a reflective type of abstraction, which we call reflection or thinking!
Unfortunately, many parents and educators alike think that this is all. But there is another critical way of knowing that we too often haven’t thought about: and that is what we call invention. It is the act of doing something new with the information and objects that we encounter. It is one thing to know that we call an object a rattle; it is quite another to know what it feels like, tastes like, how heavy it is, and what to do with it. We can shake it or turn it to get unstuck in the slats of a crib or throw it to see how it lands! This is the world of invention. It stems from acting on things as well, just like discovery. However, there is one major difference: when we discover, we are learning the properties of the object itself. But when we invent, we are learning about the properties of our own abilities – what we can do. This is supremely important in cognitive development because it eventually leads to the child’s ability to reflect and think!
Children are born with a burning desire to make sense of their abilities and their circumstances. They are born with the biological tools to form and grow in knowledge and know-how. Parents are charged with the fascinating, fulfilling, and rewarding responsibility of educating and nurturing these abilities, not through rote memory of meaningless words but with games and activities that are appropriate for the child’s cognitive stages.
