moncrief

(i) Been thinking about trauma and pain and doing things. Been thinking about the mystery of being a child and also trying to be mindful. Been watching the way waves ripple through my nervous system. I couldn’t always do this. Been reverse-engineering what I can and trying to watch what I can’t. Have you ever focused so hard you had a headache, been so sad you feel sick?

(ii) Infants don’t know anything. In a very literal sense, they are helpless. Exiting blank quiet of the womb into sound and light. Who could have a chance? Mother feeds them. Much has been written on this. Read Freud. Personally, I think Winnicott did it a little better, but that’s a digression. Either way, we’ve built models, formally or casually, of how this goes. The models tell us that the infant knows nothing of symbols and the logic which directs them. Blob of ineffectual id. Then it learns somehow — movement, language, mastery. It becomes an adult; a neurotic adult, maybe, but a real adult who can talk and walk and chew gum all at the same time. This doesn’t really answer the biggest question: how?

(iii) Chomsky wrote about a ‘universal grammar’. We’re hardwired for something like language. There’s just no other way we could learn something like that so quickly, so robustly. Anyway, this piece isn’t really directly about that, but it’s a good staging ground — what does it mean to implement the universal grammar? That’s what I’m thinking about. Some kids learn mandarin and some kids learn english and some kids learn sign language. Sometimes, adults also learn new languages. It takes them a lot longer. Why can’t they do it the same way?

(iv) Some people have a little voice in their head. Some don’t. When I talk, or when I write, it’s usually an echo of what’s in my head, it’s a few moments behind this voice, the ever-present microphone of the ego. Where did it come from?

(v) So everyone can’t use language at first, then they learn it. During that quiet period, during a time none of us remember, there’s a process of trial and error, single words and broken sentences. The incentives for the child are immense. Every new word is mother’s delight, ever new sentence is a spell, the ability to speak will into existence. The world is still soft and malleable, without distinction between inner and outer. The child wants language, the child needs language. What tools do they have to work with?

(vi) Consider habits and conditioning. Wake up to the sound of an alarm clock every day, a pleasant chime from your phone. That pleasant chime, heard midday after four months of waking to it, will not sound pleasant. The body will react. Call it cortisol, call it bad energy, call it small-t trauma, you’ll know it when you feel it. The nervous system, the bodymind, the soma, the broader space of individual phenomenology — I will call it the nervous system, but I am not picky — has routines. Think about something you didn’t like as a kid. Why didn’t you like it?

(vii) Well, you probably thought it felt bad. Something happened, in/on the nervous system, which you would rather didn’t happen again. Taste of broccoli. Feeling of water on skin. But if the tradeoff was worthwhile enough, you’d do it anyway. You don’t want to take a bath, but your mom will let you have dessert after you take your bath. Maybe that’s worth it. Primitive economics of valence. What is the valence of language? You may protest: language doesn’t have a feeling. I ask: how would you even know if it does?

(viii) Assume language could hurt. Every time you employ the ability to use words, experience nausea in the stomach, mild. You’d still talk. Less, perhaps, but you’d still talk. The tradeoffs of being able to communicate are worth mild discomfort. But your life would be worse. Having to pay that price, small as it is, is worse than not having the upside for free. Consider again, the alarm clock nervous system routine. You have hijacked a part of behavior, the time of waking, at the cost of painful association. Pleasant chime is now stress-spike. You believe this is a good deal and chose to pay it. How are children supposed to make those choices?

(ix) Children are naive and do not know the price they’re paying. Again, the world is fluid to them. In this blind stage, they arrange the basic economics of phenomenology. What was once noise, gibberish, is shaped into an ineffable net of associations. It becomes language. As established, the incentive to learn to do this is strong. But the cost is unknown. You know, as an adult, that mild nausea is probably a fair price to pay for language. Alarm chime causing stress is an inconsequential price to pay for a regular waking time. A child has no idea how much language is supposed to hurt, but they will almost certainly pay that price for it. Soon after, they will not remember what existing felt like before that price was constantly being paid. How many times a day do you use language?

(x) If language does hurt, I don’t think you’d even notice. The pain would just be background noise. Life would be worse in a vague, ineffable way. Children don’t have the capability or foresight to intelligently assess tradeoffs. They have a blank-slate nervous system, a massive continuum of sensory experience to organize and package into symbols. They have countless things they need to learn, things that will become foundational long before conscious adult memory begins. I am talking about things like movement and language. Do you see where this is going?

(where it's going) I think that it’s very possible that variations in individual-to-individual hedonic baseline is connected to the pre-symbolic, pre-memory establishment of routines and skills. I have used language as a toy example because it’s obviously foundational to thought and experience, but it can still be intelligibly discussed. Movement would be a similar example. Children receive massive reward, both externally-granted and innate, for developing these sorts of skills. There are countless overlapping “foundational” skills like this; an intuition for passing time, acknowledgement of height as dangerous, ability to perform mental math. There are likely more that are impossible to speak of clearly. All of this will be learned, foundation established, before the individual can reflect on how they’re going about it, if the tradeoff is worth it or if it’s worth delaying this skill such that it can be learned in an alternative, less-painful fashion. Does adding in my head have to be this difficult, driven by an engine of stressful clenching and clinging? Am I coming to associate language with playful joy, or am I desperately trying to figure out how to communicate I don’t like that decoration I can see from the edge of my crib? These are not questions children can ask of themselves or of the world. The suffering inflicted by “painful implementation” becomes the lowest, most established grade of trauma. The adult never knows that these things are not supposed to feel this way; the dampening effect that painful implementation of foundational routines has on their psyche. The pain does not even register as pain, less alone pain from a specific, identifiable source. The pain is just a feature of the lens through which they experience phenomena, reality. They may be intelligent, effective. Painful implementations are not necessarily poor-performing. But they hurt, and I do not know how to save infants from them. How can you tell an infant to be careful when learning to speak? Does it hurt you to ask?