Biology of Wonder by Andreas Weber

Author:Andreas Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781550925944
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2015-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

INTERBEING: WE FEEL INSIDE OTHERS

Developmental psychologists understand that small children’s talent for imitation is not mere play, but an activity that is crucial for their survival and healthy development. Meltzoff and Moore assume that the becoming self is imperatively dependent on those characters in the environment that are like itself. Only by relating to these characters — namely, subjects — is it able to develop its diverse sensory channels and its own identity. The infant not only needs an other as a scaffold for his own thinking and his own identity, but he must be in a constant mirroring relation in order to develop the diverse senses with their different possibilities of experience, their different ways of relating to the world. The case of children who are born blind or deaf shows that the senses have to be learned and are not hardwired in the brain. These children often grow up behaviorally normal, although their handicap makes it difficult for them to participate in the interplay of imitation and communication. For them, elastic development is possible because human sense functions easily can be taken over by one another. The brain stores the meanings of these substitutions in the same areas where the original experiences where meant to go. The shape of the surface of another person’s face is encoded in the visual cortex, even if the subject might be blind. The outlines of faces can be made out by touch; letters written in Braille can be read with the fingers. The normal function does not depend on the conventional use of the sensory channels but on the degree to which a child’s feeling of successfully coping with its own unfolding is being mirrored and confirmed.

“Imitation and the understanding of what goes on in the heads of the others are inextricably tied to one another,” Andrew Meltzoff suggests with his “Like Me” hypothesis.6 In order to empathize with others an infant must be like them — a body-as-feeling. Only if such empathetic behavior is granted to him in a sufficient manner can he become what he fundamentally already is. The fact that a newborn imitates others, therefore, means that from the beginning he is able to distinguish them from objects that are not alive. Only organisms (humans, animals and even plants) can be “like me.” But to unfold this identity, the infant depends on other human beings who are able to see that he is not an object but alive and who are able to confirm this feeling through a gentle gaze.

For cognition researcher and philosopher Evan Thompson, who teaches in Vancouver, the experiments done by Meltzoff and Moore show: “For newborns the experience to have a self is coupled to the presence of others.”7 The self-identity is formed in a ping-pong game of communication between the infant’s self and that of her caregivers. Human identity, therefore, always necessitates the presence of another individual. Identity should not be understood as solely subjective but rather as intersubjective, as Thompson believes. Every subject in reality is an “intersubject.

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