The Cradle of Thought

"Yes. Hobson tries to make sense of how an infant becomes transformed from an instinctive being at birth into a social, conscious being and how this really powerful ability to learn from each other emerges in infants. He looks at a lot of experimental studies and explores all the exchanges that happen before language emerges. He shows that even in really early infancy, children have the capacity to react to the emotions of others. There are many developmental psychologists that have studied this innate desire to engage with fellow human beings: it’s an innate desire to engage, but it’s not a conscious desire, it’s just at the level of emotions. These early emotional engagements were first investigated by Jerome Bruner and Michael Scaife in the 1970s. What they looked at is that towards the end of the first year of life children suddenly start following the gaze of their adult care-givers and they monitor the emotional responses of adults in terms of deciding whether they’ll approach something or not. Jerome Bruner and Michael Scaife called them ‘joint attention episodes’. They monitor how adults in their midst are responding emotionally to something, and also at this time we see what is called proto-declarative pointing. This, basically, is pointing at things just out of interest rather than merely as a request for something. So you will see a nine-month-old pointing at an airplane in the sky. They’re not pointing because they want you to give them the airplane – they’re pointing because they’re interested, and they want to share, to engender that interest in you. And we’re the only species that do that. Hobson says you have to be very careful in terms of looking at these early engagements, and not assume that they are conscious thought. The infants aren’t consciously thinking, ‘Oh, I’m looking at that airplane, isn’t that interesting? I think I can get my mother interested in this by pointing.’ It’s just a very emotional response from them. But at some point these innate desires and engagements become transformed into something qualitatively different. By the middle of the second year of life, these early emotional engagements are transformed into more conscious exchanges of feelings and desires and views and beliefs. Hobson says this is the beginning of the revolution in a child’s thinking, the beginning of the revolution in their development. And it’s interesting because it’s very shortly after that that you see for the first time that children are actually able to learn through imitation. It fits in in that it’s trying to look at how our unique human abilities emerge in the lifespan of the individual. We have an ability to understand other human beings as intentional beings like ourselves, which is something that is very powerful, and it is why we’re able to learn from each other. But we can’t be born with that consciousness. There must be something simpler there, and that’s that innate desire to engage emotionally with somebody. That’s what becomes transformed into something more conscious and much more powerful. Out of the cradle of emotional engagement, the ability to have thoughts emerges. There’s a really nice quote in Hobson’s book: ‘Empowered by language and other forms of symbolic functioning, [the child] takes off into the realms of culture. The infant has been lifted out of the cradle of thought. Engagement with others has taught this soul to fly.’ The Cradle of Thought really brings together all the work has been done within developmental psychology and presents the arguments beautifully."