Shanker – evolution

So one of the questions that we wanted to understand from very early on, is why is the parent, why are the primary caregivers, so important to this whole process of early brain development? And to answer that we began to actually study evolution. We studied this very closely.  And there is a growing awareness in the neuro-scientific community that looks at the evolution of the human brain.  That nature was confronted with a very interesting dilemma when it was evolving the human brain. On the one hand, it discovered that bipedalism, the ability to walk on two legs, gave humans a wonderful advantage over all other species. On the other hand, it was discovering that a big brain gave us another wonderful advantage in terms of our ability to plan, to remember, to project. This created a dilemma, and the dilemma was how big a brain could nature evolve, while still enabling our females to walk on two legs. Because they had to give birth to this big brain thing. 

Nature came up with a very interesting solution. It had us give birth to our babies, in essence, prematurely. Our babies, to quote what Stephen J. Gould said, are “fetuses outside of the womb” for the first nine months of life.  So they are born with approximately ¼ the size of their adult brain. Now, nature had to ensure that these babies would receive the appropriate kinds of experience that are necessary for the developing architecture of this emerging brain. So, what nature did was, it gave us all sorts of mechanisms that ensured that the primary caregiver, usually the birth mother, would stay in close proximity with her infant.  

And so we have things like certain hormones that are actually released by the baby crawling up the mother’s ventrum immediately after birth to search for milk which it does by its olfactory sense. And when we study this we see that it releases oxytocin in the mother, the so-called cuddle hormone. It also stimulates GI hormones. It also does things to the baby’s brain. So we have these mechanisms, that are largely innate, that ensure that we will have this kind of close caregiver-infant relationship for the first couple of years, which is the period during which the child’s brain goes through this enormous burst of development.