If you have missed Part I, please drop down to the bottom of the page and click “older post”…Thank You!
Now that we are a real, living infant, our brains are being barraged with information every second of our lives, and from more sources than mom and dad. And all of that information is being processed and stored for future use. How we are responded to when we are crying, when we are wet, when we are hungry, when we are lonely, when we are cold, when we are warm, and so on. And we have no idea how it will impact things in the future.
But it had to impact things in the future. One thing that I came to realize was that each piece of information that our brain processes has an influence on how the next piece of information is processed. Where did this idea come from? Brain scientists are learning that our brains actually grow as we learn. They believe that as we learn new things, the brain is making space in which to store those things. Think of your brain growing as a vine grows. Where the vine grows in the future is determined by where it has been in the past. If it follows a crack, it will continue along that crack until it is forced to go elsewhere. Science is telling us that it is much the same process in our minds.
They have also discovered that each brain stores things, like images, differently from how another brain stores the exact same image. The texture goes in one location, the coloring in another, any shading, sound, etc. each going in its own location. When we are asked to retrieve that image, our brains can pull all of the elements together and reproduce the original sight of the image. No, our brain pulls the image together based on what it processed for us in the first place. And that processing was based on all of the information it processed before you saw that image. And since your experiences were different than mine, your brain processed it differently than did my brain. Hence, your recall will not be exactly the same as mine, or exactly the same as anybody else’s mental reproduction of the same image.
Now, let’s go back to thinking about of an infant’s life. The major parameters of importance would seem to be to stay happy and content, and to complain when not happy and content. Pretty simple stuff. So we can say that babies like to be in their comfort zone, and that comfort zone is defined by how people have taken care of them and how their brains have processed that caretaking. I believe that this comfort zone is something we carry with us for most of our lives. In the early days of my product development career I had occasion to be involved in discussions concerning the scents that should be used in air fresheners and cleaning products. In those categories of products, floral scents are very popular. I believe that one of the reasons why, particularly for those us who were babies before the mid-1980’s, is the use of Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder. That gentle floral fragrance has a special place in our minds, a place where we were comfortable and pampered. And even for those who prefer different fragrances, the light floral scent is not very offensive at all.
In Part III, the infant leaves the home from time to time, and the processing begins to get more interesting.
Until Next Time,
Julius
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