Nurturance
A Biological Imperative
Joseph Chilton Pearce | Shift | Shift Issue #03: Integral Health and Healing |(3 ratings)In the early 1950s, Harvard University's medical school profiled 200 medical students (all male in that day) to determine, as best they could, the emotional quality of infancy and childhood these students had experienced. Did they have happy or unhappy early memories? Had they felt secure, loved, wanted, accepted, supported by their parents, or had they experienced some degree of psychological abandonment, neglect, lack of love and support. They were grouped into these simple positive-negative categories.
Forty-two years later, the surviving 160 of these men, now in their late sixties or early seventies, were given rigorous physical examinations to determine their overall health. Of those originally reporting a positive early experience, 25 percent had the "usual" diseases associated with age: heart trouble, arthritis, and cancer being the big three. Of those reporting a negative infancy and childhood, 89 percent bore this conventional rostrum of afflictions. 1
In the 1990s, Lynda Russek, formerly of Harvard's medical school, and Gary Schwartz, at the University of Arizona medical school, provided a postscript. Here is the briefest of brief summaries: Schwartz and Russek, using electrocardiogram and brain-wave biofeedback procedures, ran a further test with a representative number of those surviving medical men. Their research indicated that those with positive early experience, upon being interviewed at a close, personal level by an emotionally positive interviewer, showed clear physical-neurological and neurocardiological (heart) responses, with their heart-brain frequencies going into a matched coherent "entrainment"--synchronizing with the heart-brain frequencies of their interviewer--without their awareness. Such receptivity was not the case with those from a neglected childhood. They had fewer, weaker, and slower-forming signs of entrainment, and were apparently unresponsive to close positive relations, that possibly implied a life-long state of the isolation and emotional poverty with which they had begun. 2
Recent research in neurology and neurocardiology (the new field of research into the neural components or "brain" of the heart) clearly shows that emotional deprivation in the early formative period results in specific and apparently immutable compromises in neural structure and function, affecting health and all forms of relationship, personal and social, as well as forming subtle barriers that limit intellectual-rational growth, learning, and memory. In this negative case, the various neural systems (for thought, feeling, action, relationship, emotional control, etc. ) fail to entrain into a single unified response. Each function "struggles for dominance" over the other, resulting in functional fragmentation, a conflict within that will express internally as disease and unhappiness, or externally as insensitivity toward and/or calloused disregard of the welfare of others even to the point of violence and harm. 3
Strange Loops
Genetic system and environment are a reciprocal cause-effect loop. Each gives rise to the other. DNA is responsive to experience to an indeterminable extent. Without feedback from its environment, a genetic system couldn't build an organism adapted to that environment, and every new creature that appears among us reflects, by default, the environment for, from, and by which that development takes place. This is simple adaptability as selected-for over the ages. Thus a social environment of anxiety or violence will tend to give rise to a generation genetically built for and predisposed toward anxiety and/or violence. By their very presence, such persons produce or contribute to a corresponding social environment tinged with, or giving grounds for, expression of their own predispositions. Violence breeds violence. Anxiety breeds anxiety.
Research published in 1998 revealed that any mammal's emotional state during the conception and gestation of her offspring enters into and influences, to an indeterminable extent, the quality and characteristics of the brain of the infant to which she gives birth. 4 This is critically so with humans. A mother exposed to an external environment of anxiety, violence, or negativity in general, or a mother producing such an environment within herself through her own predispositions and personal history, will give birth to an infant with an enlarged "hindbrain" and smaller "forebrain, "terms that will be explained shortly. A mother in a secure, supportive, positive environment, or able to produce and maintain a tranquil inner state regardless of externals, will give birth to the opposite: an infant with an enlarged forebrain and smaller hindbrain.
The heart is a major endocrine gland in our body, and from the moment of conception on, it releases specific hormones (neurotransmitters) designed to keep the mother in a tranquil state, as nature moves to form--or selects for--an infant predisposed toward higher forms of intelligences. A negative cultural environment can, however, overwhelm nature's primary concern and defeat such fail-safe measures.
Transcendent Brain
The brain that unfolds in the fetus and in the uterine infant follows the same pattern of neural development observed in evolutionary history: "Ontongeny recapitulates phylogeny. " The first to form is the ancient and instinctually powerful "reptilian"hind-brain. This is the foundation of all subsequent formations, providing for our lifelong sensory-motor experience, physical awareness of body and its world, and a corresponding defensive "survival" system to maintain and protect, through ancient, non-negotiable instincts, both body and "self-system" that emerge.
The second and next-oldest brain to form is the old mammalian or emotional brain, shared with all mammals, that provides us with an objective stance from which we can make a qualitative evaluation of our world-experience: an evaluation founded on the simple response of pleasure-pain, feeling safe or threatened, loved and nurtured or not. These responses are in turn determined solely by the infant's experience with the mother both before and after birth. Learning and memory, immunities, all forms of relationships and emotional capacities center in this old mammalian complex, which clearly imprints to the mother's emotional state as her infant forms.
The third and final neural structure to form in utero is the neocortical or new brain, providing the capacity for thought, language, primary reasoning, and so on. The "forebrain" is the old mammalian and neocortical structures combined. The "hindbrain" is the defensive "reptilian" sensory-motor system. 5
Full neural development of a child depends on the emotional well-being of the mother during pregnancy and birth, and on continuing emotional well-being within the child's family.
Even a cursory examination of the history of these evolutionary neural structures shows that each has evolved to overcome the limitations and constraints impinging on the former systems on which each new brain is based. Overcoming limitation and constraint is the dictionary definition of transcendence, so we can consider each evolutionary addition to our brain a means of transcending the limitations of the former, and acknowledge that our biological system is itself a transcendent procedure. The unfolding development of the infant-child will follow precisely this same transcendent progression, to the extent that the biological imperative of appropriate environment and nurturing is met.
The mother's emotional state during pregnancy determines the quality, nature, character, capacity, and even size of her infant's neural system. A mother experiencing anxiety, insecurity, or emotional isolation during pregnancy will give birth to an infant with an enlarged hindbrain and sharply reduced forebrain, because nature finds, in effect, that she can't invest energy in her higher evolutionary capacities, but must shift her focus into a successful defense system. Species-survival takes precedence in all evolutionary progressions.
A state of emotional security and love, however, produces an infant with an enlarged "forebrain" and reduced-sized "hindbrain" as nature assumes the environment is safe enough to invest her more advanced intelligences in this new life.
Now the very same selective process is involved after birth. The mother's emotional state in responding to her newborn's needs enters as the principal ingredient of the ongoing growth and development of these systems after birth as well. 6
The Virtuous Brain
Following birth, an even more advanced or transcendent (fourth) brain, the prefrontal cortex, unfolds for its growth and development. Added only recently in evolutionary history (only some 40 to 50 thousand years ago, in sharp contrast to the hundreds of millions of years behind the primary reptilian brain), this brain is designed to be the largest of all the brains, and crucial to civilized life. The prefrontals can develop only after birth, only to the extent the foundational "triune system" has formed successfully, and, just as critically, only to the extent the newborn is unconditionally nurtured by the mother in the ensuing weeks and months.
This fourth brain is even more critically dependent on, and subject to, appropriate environmental signals than any of its predecessors, and is far more susceptible to disruption in its growth and establishment, as well as more difficult to develop. 7 The higher up in evolutionary intelligence we move, the more fragile the neural systems involved, though the more powerful they will be on successful maturation. Just as it took nine months in utero to develop the basic triune brain, it takes the nine months following birth to grow and establish this fourth brain. And, just as the actual form and character of the uterine brain is determined to a great extent by the mother's emotional state, so too is the mother's emotional state the major environment and principal factor in the development of the infant's prefrontal cortex. Note that the prefrontals are considered the "governor" of the four-fold brain, and are designed to modulate or moderate the actions of the other three to entrain them into singular intent or attention. They are also the medium for translating all the higher human virtues, those that provide for, or give us, the highest dimensions of civilized life: creativity, love, empathy, social-ecological responsiveness and so on.
Today, a wealth of biological research makes the following even more self-evident: Full neural development of a child depends on the emotional well-being of the mother during pregnancy and birth, and on continuing emotional well-being within the child's family.
Endnotes
1. L. Z. Song, Gary E. Schwartz and Linda G. Russek, "Heart-focused Attention and Heart-Brain Synchronization:Energetic and Physiological Mechanisms, " Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, Vol. 4, No. 5 (September 1998).
2. Linda G. Russek and Gary E. Schwartz, "Interpersonal Heart-Brain Registration and the Perception of Parental Love: A 42-Year Follow-up of the Harvard Mastery-of-Stress Study, " Subtle Energies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1994).
Linda G. Russek and Gary E. Schwartz, "Energy Cardiology: A Dynamical Energy Systems Approach for Integrating Conventional and Alternative Medicine, " Advances:The Journal of Mind-Body Health. Vol. 12, No. 4 (Fall 1996).
3. Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood (Bombay, India: Orient-Long-man, 1978). James Prescott, "Body Pleasures and the Origin of Violence, " The Futurist (April, 1975). Ashley Montague, Touching:The Human Significance of the Skin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971). Mariana Caplan, Untouched--The Need for Genuine Affection in an ImpersonalWorld (Prescott, Arizona: Hohm Press, 1998).
4. Maria M. Colavito, The Myth of Oedipus and the Mind/Mind Split (Lon-don: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993). Leslie White, A Science of Culture:A Study of Man and Civilization (New York: Noonday Press, 1969).
5. Marc Cantin and Jacques Genet, "The Heart as an Endocrine Gland. " Scientific American (February 1986). Paul MacLean, ATriune Concept of the Brain and Behavior (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973).
6. Taken from the general work of Allan N. Schore of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine.
7. Allan N. Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origins of the Self:The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994).
JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE is the author of seven books, including four on child development. His first, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, has been in print for 28 years. He has spoken at more than 2,000 public programs and lectures throughout the world
