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Development of the Brain Compiled by Richard Kieninger It is likely that only a
handful of people utilize the potential capacity built into their brains to perceive
the Universe in its fullness and to function wholly in the way intended by
our Angelic creators. To be Man is to think, and one's brain is a tool for
thinking. Anything that diminishes
one's brain power strikes at the core of one's intelligence and being Developmental Stages There is a misconception
that we are born with a given intelligence and are fixed in a narrow range
that is determined to he our IQ. Within all of us is the potential for
genius. It is there for us to develop, to explore, and to enjoy. But unless
we are taught how to use our brains, unless we understand how our brains work
and their relationship to intelligence, we may never even approach truly
intelligent functioning. Your physical brain and
intelligence both evolve through a series of stages from infancy to
adulthood. The psychologist Jean Piaget differentiates four major stages in
acquiring intelligence: the sensori-motor stage (1 to 11/2 years), the
pre-operational stage (11/2 to 7 years), the concrete operation stage (7 to
11 years), and the stage of formal operations (11 to 13 years). According to
Piaget, if a child does not have enough experience in any one of these
stages, his development in the following stages will be handicapped.
Insufficient experience in one of the stages of development might even
prevent a child from reaching an adult level of capabilities. On the other
hand, enriching a child's experience in one of the stages should aid his
development of the following stages. Piaget feels that key concepts should
not be taught to a child out of sequence. Instead, a child should learn these
concepts in their natural order from his own experience with the world around
him. Piaget fears that if a concept is learned out of its natural order,
other concepts will be more difficult to learn since they will then rest on
an artificial basis. Jerome Bruner's work
parallels Piaget's by showing how children learn concepts through feedback
from what gets results early in the child's interaction with his environment.
In Bruner's view, all the various stages of learning remain active and become
a part of adult thinking rather than being largely superseded by the later
stages. At the earliest stage, the infant tends to repeat an act because the
experiences associated with it feel good, or to avoid an act because the
experiences associated with it feel bad. Bruner suggests that a child's
awareness and intelligence can be increased by teaching him appropriate
concepts early in life. He asserts that a child can be taught any idea at any
age as long as he is taught in his own vocabulary. Jerome Kagan has made some
interesting observations about the relationship between perception and the
quality of the environment. He sees a need for developmental stimuli being
orderly and distinctive. If stimuli stand out sharply from a calm background,
as in many middle-class homes, perception of the stimuli is more likely. If,
however, stimuli are immersed in competing and disagreeably noisy stimuli,
which is frequently the case in many slum houses, perception and development
may be turned off. Bruner suggests teaching key concepts to a child very
early and reviewing them in gradually more sophisticated form as the child's
vocabulary increases. By the time a child enters school, his brain and
intelligence have almost finished growing, and his intelligence seems pretty
well set for life. Alfred Kuhn points out that
we react to a situation not only on the basis of current information, but on
the basis of the interaction between current information and prior
information stored in the brain, thus activating codes at any one level which
are required for operating at the next level. Therefore, the brain builds
conceptual models by sorting information into categories to which we can
assign and attach new information or decode and revise when one's present
arrangement of concepts is contradicted by new information. Developmental Enrichment Early enrichment of
developmental stages is a key element in the theories of Piaget, Bruner and
Kuhn. Piaget suggests that enrichment of the early developmental stages
should increase a child's ability to adapt to his environment. Bruner
suggests that a child's awareness can be increased by teaching him
appropriate concepts early in life. Kuhn points out the importance of a great
deal of experience at each level of development—the more experience we have
with the world around us, the more readily we can understand that world.
Burton White's experiments with infants demonstrated that we must provide
optimal environments at each stage of development. In short, a child should
be provided with the experiences that will stimulate his brain and nervous
system to work together most effectively so he can better relate to the
general environment. These methods increase what we call intelligence. There are children whose
intelligence now tests in the range of genius, some of whom are now in
schools for gifted children, who had been so heavily brain damaged, so
mentally retarded, that their IQ could not he measured. They had been
clinically regarded as human vegetables and pitied as mere lumps on the
floor. Through intensive, special treatment, these children have exhibited
great leaps in brain power spanning the difference in intelligence between
the brightest and slowest persons most of us will ever encounter To raise someone's
intelligence is to let him become a more complete human being; to give him
wider-ranging adaptability, heightened awareness and insight, more capacity
to respond and courage to explore. All facets of human life benefit from
higher intelligence, not just ability in school or job. Strength,
sensitivity, zest, and the power to feel keenly and deeply are as much a part
of intelligence as is the power to reason and symbolize. To raise a child's
intelligence is to enrich his ability to taste more fully and richly the
bittersweet, tragicomic, ugly-beautiful, enthralling, disappointing,
exalting, and always fascinating experience of being human. Nutritional and
Psychological Enrichment Every mode of behavior,
response, and ability is based on the physical state of the brain and its
physical processes. Researchers have determined that only those brain cells
which are near to ample capillary blood supply are developed. Brain cells
away from such source of supply remain undeveloped and useless. Albert
Einstein's genius turned out to result largely from extra circulatory
functioning in his brain. His brain, better nourished, worked better. A
child's diet has much to do with whether he will grow up with a properly
nourished brain which can function to optimum. Vitamins C and E improve
oxygenation and are essential in sufficient quantity on a daily basis for a
healthy brain. Vitamin B complex is essential for neuron growth and synaptic
formation, and Choline (a B vitamin found primarily in lecithin) in large
quantities on a daily basis facilitates the transmission of nerve signals and
is a critical dietary need in infants. Studies of children in orphanages
show pitiful retardation which results from lack of environmental stimulus.
Heredity can and does make key differences in one's potential intelligence,
but it is largely overrated as compared to environment. For intelligence to
grow, it must be given a psychologically nourishing environment. The
Milwaukee (WI) Program run about a decade ago took Negro infants whose
parents and siblings had IQs ranging in the 60's and provided them with a few
hours every day of enriched stimulation and one-to-one cuddling and play by a
trained adult. These same slum children continued in the program for a few
years and eventually attained IQs more than double all the rest of their
neglected siblings and deprived parents. The children who were the subjects
of this experiment later could not fit in with their families and had to be
removed to foster homes by the courts. All of us basically want to
perceive, to know, to be aware, to experience. We want to live, not just be
pleased: The more completely we experience, the fuller our lives become.
Society may have punished most of us into submerging our curiosity, our drive
to know things, our unashamed appreciation of beauty, our readiness to come
up with new ideas and new ways—but in almost none of us has society totally
extinguished the basic wish and built-in drive to be sentient The Tragedy of Brain
Damage Nearly all Americans are
significantly brain damaged. Even in the better metropolitan hospitals,
studies by Dr. Eugene Spita show that we are so badly damaged at birth that
the brains of 80 percent of us bleed for hours afterward. Too early culling
of the umbilical cord in hospital deliveries results in oxygen deprivation
and massive brain-cell death in most cases. Poor nutrition of pregnant
mothers plus poor nutrition through the life of the growing child prevent
proper neurological growth. Developmentally we are damaged as well. Lack of
neurological stimulation, inadequate emotional nourishment, and restriction
of physical activity prevent natural brain growth and psychomotor muscle
control. High intelligence opens
another world that is adventurous, fascinating, intricate, and incredibly
beautiful. The vast majority of people never visit that world let alone
function in it. Society needs more intelligent people. The world's average
intelligence must be raised soon to provide answers and insights to solve our
knotty problems. Your brain is the seat of everything you sense and
experience on the physical plane. To get your brain and intelligence into
high form and have sharpened comprehension is exhilarating. Moreover, the
keener your brain functions, the better your whole body's health is, and vice
versa. Each time a person gets
drunk, the alcohol usually kills many thousands of brain cells which cannot
be regenerated. Your brain is the product of two billion years of
sophisticated evolution on this planet Your brain determines what you are in
this lifetime. Every time a person becomes intoxicated on alcohol or other
dregs, he irretrievably wipes out a significant number of his brain cells.
The Brotherhoods point out that one's attainment of mystic awareness and
being able to function intelligently are dependent on especially healthy
brain tissues which are enriched to maximum operation by abundant nutrients
and oxygen. This is exactly the opposite from alkalinizing diets and other
oxygen-deprivation techniques which are designed to produce blissful.
floating, hallucinating states of consciousness. Semi-trance states may be
popular, but they are counterproductive to advancement There are millions of
Americans who rely on mind-dulling, anti-tension dregs and tranquilizers, and
millions more who suffer lassitude and chronic fatigue from too much white
sugar. Smoking tobacco creates a continuous level of carbon-monoxide in the
bloodstream, which gives the effect of chronic anemia and consequent shortage
of oxygen to the brain. Are we so dulled by these brain crippling habits that
we can't stop continuing to destroy ourselves and our youngsters? Creeping and Crawling
Into the Future Dr. Raymond Dart has
explored primitive and advanced cultures and has observed that tribes whose
infants crawl and creep around on floor or ground tend to have advanced
cultures and technology and some form of written language. Tribes which
restrict their infants from crawling and creeping remain very backward, have
no writing, learn reading when taught but only with the greatest
difficulties, and literally cannot see within arm's length even though there
is nothing physically wrong with their eyes. The creeping infant is training
his eyes to work together at arm's length—the distance at which he will later
read and write, perform arts and crafts, build and manipulate tools, and plan
and create civilization. Many Americans have not
received full stimulus for development of the vision circuits in the brain
because they were restricted to a playpen or crib or were not permitted to
crawl on the dirty floor or on the lawn. It turns out that children suffering
from Mongoloidism are not born with brain damage, but their extremely placid
nature keeps them from moving and therefore from developing their brain's
potential. Such infants placed on programs of intensive sensori-motor
exercise are growing up with average intelligence and respiratory health and
even lose the Mongoloid features associated with Down's Syndrome victims.
Some treated in the 1950's attended college. Infantile movement is vital
to vision and subsequent intelligence, for brain cells simply do not develop
without stimulus. Brain development is especially stimulated by feedback
through the child's senses of the effects produced by the child's own
activities. It is the feedback from the activities of infancy that, by far,
most develops the brain. To produce super-bright intelligence, investigators
have discovered that the most creative way to develop the brain is to provide
an infant with enriched stimulation and thus obtain more sensory feedback
from the infant's sensori-motor activities. A quick overview of the
construction and evolution of the brain will help to show why this works to
produce genius. The earliest vertebrates
were the fish, and all the brain they needed was the spinal cord and medulla.
That cord and medulla are all the baby has effectively working once he has come
out of his fishlike existence in the sea of the womb. All other levels of his
brain have yet to continue to grow more cells and to further differentiate;
and they will also have to be developed by experience step by step as the
child's physical and neurological growth sequentially come to the point of
readiness. Atop the medulla and cord
is the pons, that portion of our brain which was developed in the first land
animals. While the medulla registers sense impressions most primitively,
reacting to alternation only (changes in light and dark, in sound levels, in
tactile/touch impressions), the pons handles sense inputs at a much more
sophisticated level. The pons can perceive differences in light value within
the same visual field so that outlines can be seen. The pons can also
perceive some basic patterns in sound and touch and other senses. In the
earliest primitive mammals whose live-born young had to make it to the milk
line and hang on to survive, the pons took on a precocious motor function
which it retains to the human level—crawling stomach to ground at birth. If
not encouraged to crawl when most ready, the human infant may miss the
crawling stage altogether, going on much later to hands-and-knees creeping,
thus leaving his pons poorly developed and handicapping to some degree all
his later development. Adapting to the Third
Dimension Enclosing the medulla and
pons is the midbrain, first developed in the reptiles. Competition on land,
at that stage of evolution, had gotten a lot tougher, and to capture prey and
to escape being preyed on, the reptiles found it dangerously slow to continue
sliding around on their bellies. The reptiles mastered a third dimension—the
vertical—by getting up to move and run on all fours. Except for the much
later developments of simian swinging from branch to branch and of upright
walking on the hind legs (cortex functions), most physical coordination is
learned at the midbrain level. The evolution of mammals
through our arboreal progenitors up to man called for the evolution of the
human cortex, capable of adapting its creature to almost anything. The
demands placed on the cortex are so drastic and so varied that 90 percent of
all human brain cells are in the cortex. Although our Creators endowed our
cortex with fabulous potentials, and our environment is full of beneficial
stimuli, and our civilization has harnessed an incredible wealth of
information, our cortexes still are not developed to full functioning. That
is because full development of each of the lower stages is prerequisite for
development of the next, higher stages of the human brain, but our culture is
not attuned to the needs of infancy and has traditionally, but hopefully
unintentionally, subverted children's growth. Only by fully developing a
given stage of a child's brain growth is the next stage allowed to develop
richly and well; poor development of or injury to one stage means that the
next stage (and, consequently, all higher stages) can only develop poorly.
Cure of mal-development at higher stages depends on reaching the lower-level
deficiencies, feeding in enough experience at this lower level to bridge
those deficiencies, and then pouring in more experience at successively
higher levels to make up their deficiencies in turn. The reason that our information-rich
environment doesn't better develop our cortex is that our lower brain levels
are so poorly developed, and those deprived levels were essential to the
development of the next higher levels. The Sky Is the Limit Full development of the cortex
proceeds from enriched stimulation of all the lower levels starting in
infancy. If there is any limit to how far higher development of the cortex
can go, no one has yet discovered it. One of the requisites to Egoic
advancement and full perception of the Universe is a magnificently
functioning brain. Let us dedicate ourselves to producing a generation of
children in whom neurologically perfect brains, developed through proper
stimuli, are theirs to soar with. We know that an infant
benefits immensely from much body contact with his mother and that he is
stimulated in many necessary ways while nursing at his mother's breast and
focusing on her face. This contact fosters a sense of security, and mother
provides a source of interaction as well as oral satisfactions and
pleasurable filling of the hungry stomach. The child also needs to be
encouraged to experiment and explore his immediate environment other than his
mother's body. Being in an open-sided cradle, where baby can observe mother
in her household activities, and which will rock as a result of his own
kicking and arm movements, gives him feedback sensations due to actions baby
initiates. The cradle can be fitted with a mobile of brightly colored objects
which jiggle and tinkle when he moves. A string of randomly flashing
Christmas tree lights placed in different patterns around the child and
turned on for about an hour per evening while he is awake during his first
two weeks has a tremendously positive effect on later intelligence (a strobe
light is detrimental). Fortunate is the infant whose room is subtly lighted
by the sun shining through tree leaves blown by the breeze, or whose walls
are lit by shimmering reflections off of wavelets in a nearby pool or lake.
These; are growth experiences for the medulla, the pivotal foundation of the
brain; for the medulla senses alternation, light and dark, shifts in color,
primitive motion, warm and cool, pressures and release of pressures. All
these should be pleasurable sensations to the infant, and pleasure sensitizes
as well as encourages desire for even more experiences. Of course, loud
noises, bright lights, and rough handling are frightening to an infant and
should be avoided. An infant has an especially rich sensitivity to flavors,
and his first solid foods should not be bland but subtly flavored with mild
herbs and spices; but avoid putting salt and sugar in his food. Classical
music is enjoyable and growth engendering to infants. The special motor activity
controlled by the pons (the brain level next above the medulla) proves to be
crucial to further development of the medulla. Crawling stomach to the floor,
the head turning from side to side, provides alternation in the senses of
sight, sound, touch, and the kinesthetic sense of body position. More important,
crawling provides this alternation in the form of feedback from the total
sensori-motor patterns of movement, and this makes crawling a most powerful
brain developer. In turn, the medulla's experience of shifting impressions in
each of the senses teaches the pons to sense recognizable patterns in sound,
touch, taste, smell, position, and combinations of these. Among the
combinations of special import to human beings is the medulla's accumulation
of visual, touch, and position impressions that first enable the pons to
begin tracking both eyes together on the hands or on other moving objects.
Most deficiencies in the adult pons stem from being too constricted and
under-stimulated as an infant. Vision is highly important in the development
of the pons. Crawling, which links the left hand to the left eye and the
right hand to the right eye, is essential to the pons as well as to the
medulla. Therefore, crawling is an important activity for pons development Midbrain to the Rescue To the degree that a child
adds to his brain's capacity for handling things in fine detail, he extends
significantly the range, content, quantity, quality, subtlety, depth, value,
and import of the information which his brain can handle. The midbrain takes
the general commands and decisions made in the cortex and breaks these down
into millions of more specific commands to many separate muscles. Carrying
out the simplest actions entails an incredibly complex coordination of large
and fine motor activities of many muscles in precise timing. All this is done
by the midbrain without our being conscious of how it's accomplished, but
practice is required to carry it out effectively. Eye-hand coordination must
be developed in the child from the very earliest discovery of his own hands to
leaning how to walk and run. Then comes catching and throwing a ball plus
other childhood games requiring muscle skills, rhythms, and stratagems. In
order to refine eye-hand coordination in a small child, coloring books, doing
needlepoint, balancing towers of blocks, and using building sets with small
components all add attention to detail and add to micro-motor skills in arm
and hand muscles which contribute to writing ability about age 3 1/2 years.
Early refinement of such midbrain control gives the cortex a tremendous
resource to deal through as it develops. Dexterity is one of the best
indicators of the physical condition of the brain. The midbrain is employed
by an infant to discover the vertical dimension, and the midbrain is also
used to focus both eyes together to see in stereoptic depth. Of all of
nature's programs for developing hand-eye coordination and stereo vision
coordinated at arm's length, the most important one by far is hands-and-knees
creeping. Aside from creeping, a
noteworthy function of the midbrain, which thrusts the child's experience
into the vertical dimension, is that of balance. Swimming and gymnastics
develop these powers of balance while also bringing more oxygen to the whole
brain. Diving and swinging upside down are stimulating to a child's
cerebellum, which specializes in balancing. This is a very large structure
behind the midbrain, which has other interesting characteristics. Tissues in
the cerebellum have a talent no other brain cells have—magnetic coil
induction. In the rest of the brain, one brain cell can affect others or be
affected by others only by specific links called synapses. Cerebellar cells
not only relate through synaptic links but also wrap round other cells in
coils so that the surge of electric current in one cell's firing affects by
magnetic induction the electric state of other cells around which it is
coiled. This characteristic serves the mystic. As the child's cortex
begins to function, it takes him into the realm of the fourth dimension;
time. Man is the only animal who lives not only in the present but also
carries the experiences of the history of mankind as well as being able to
project past experiences into predictive patterns. Man can live in the past
and in the future. This ability involves memory and consciousness, but most
importantly language. Without language to describe what we encounter, we tend
not to perceive, notice, or think about it much at all. It cannot be
emphasized strongly enough that reading is good for you neurologically and in
terms of your mind's life. Nearly all the worthwhile experiences,
observations, ideas, feelings, and aspirations of the human race have been
recorded in print. Language and reading occupy
almost all the areas of the cortex. Another activity which involves much of
the cortex is brachiation—hanging suspended and swinging from overhead
handhold to overhead handhold. This ability uses complex cortex circuits
which intimately involves every sense and many kinds of awareness, peripheral
awareness, and coordination. It is hard to believe that brachiation can mean
as much to your brain as it does. Yet brachiation, involving vast complexes
throughout the cortex, was for millions of years the main method by which our
progenitors moved around. Brachiation provides a vast ocean of experiences
that human brains simply must undergo if they are to develop any reasonable
portion of their potential for seeing, thinking, feeling, and being aware. It
has been discovered that a person's ability to read is directly dependent on
his experience of brachiation. It turns on more of the cortex than does any
other activity. Walking and running serve as poor substitutes for
brachiation; but without them, most of us would hardly be able to read at
all. If schools were to include a vigorous regimen of brachiation, swimming,
and hands-and-knees games for creeping in their physical education programs,
they could drastically reduce reading problems among their students. An
adult's success in life and his enjoyment of life's experiences and
opportunities are dependent on his ability to read and become fully
intelligent Eaglets in the Making Our not doing everything
possible to enrich the lives of all human beings by malting them geniuses in
a world full of geniuses is almost criminal. We know what builds intelligence
and what undermines it. We can't envision a world of whole-functioning human
beings because it hasn't been seen since Lemurian times. Yet, shall we not
make giants and eagles of the next generation? |
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