And then along with sort of more pleasant feelings comes another sense of self. It's called the intersubjective self, or intersubjective attunement. And this is truly special. This, for an infant's experience and a mother's experience, is total bliss. Being one with the other. This, sometimes, I have the idea that what we really want to do oftentimes in our adult life is to recover this kind of blissful relationship where the mother and the child are one, or have a sense of unity. And they're, I mean look at that picture, I mean it's so beautiful, it's so cute. They're sharing each other's experience just through the feeling, intersubjective sense of unity. It doesn't always have to be like that. There's an intersubjective attunement in a whole bunch of different ways in different situations. If you watch a mother sometime changing the baby's diaper, and let's say the baby starts kicking its feet. And if the mother is attuned to the infant, you'll see the mother's shoulders going with the same rhythm, the same beat. That's an expression of attunement. Say, the mother goes like the [SOUND], like the stomach [SOUND]. And the baby gets a real kick out of that and giggles. And then, the mother does it again and the baby kind of giggles. And they, then the mother comes in, and the baby might initiate it by giggling. It's like, it's called the goo goo game. And that is an experience of intersubjective attunement. Yeah. >> Does attunement happen also with like a father [INAUDIBLE]? >> Does attunement happen with other people? Fathers are irrelevant. No. Of course it does. I mean, it would most likely happen with the caregiver. The caregiver can be the father, can be a brother and sister. But it's a wonderful experience for both of them just to be there with each other. And there's this notion that at this stage of development, a very, close relationship. One of these authors argues, and it's probably Stern. The child doesn't have any sense of self outside of a relationship. It's like they are the carriers of each other's self. I mean the mother will have a sense of self outside of the relationship but at this very interesting and probably critical age of development, the infant does not have any sense of a self, a subjectivity outside of the relationship. So, that sense of self continues on in life. These don't just happen and they go away. We have a sense of self with mom and several sense of self with, a sense of self with mom when she's in a good mood, and another sense of self with mom when she's not in a particularly good mood. And we have images of ourself. Me with other people. And we have expectations about what it's going to be like next time we meet up with Joe or Mary. Mental representations of what that's going to be like. And when our mental representations are violated Then the process stops and we start looking what went wrong. What went wrong? What do I need to do to reestablish or complete the mental representation of our having this relationship? This all develops early on, and then there's the onset of attachment. You all know what attachment looks like. It's when a young lad or lass can't stand not being attached with the mother there. Particularly when they're out together and the kids, you've probably seen this, a kid hides behind the mother. And mother is there to protect. And it's argued and I think there's good evidence for it, that we're born with an attachment system. Attachment system. And the reason why we have this attachment system, is in the distant days when, and I hate to allude to this one, we were in the jungle and things were dangerous. The child needed to call out to make sure that there was somebody there to take care of them, otherwise, they would be in great danger of predators. And the infants that didn't have that system of crying or letting out squeals to letting an adult know that they were, they would probably not have survived so we pass on this attachment system. And that becomes prevalent in the intersubjective stage of self development. Now, I noticed that none of you brought your mother or parent with you. All right, and that's good. That's mean you're beyond this attachment system, but there comes a time when the mother or the caretaker is not always available. And that can be very painful. It can be where's mommy. But then gradually, something takes it's place, the mother's place. And that is, you can imagine the mother being there. You can imagine that mommy's not going to be gone forever. You can imagine that she will come back, maybe not as soon as I would like to, but she always does come back and you have that working model of the mother going to be there. At some point, it may not look exactly, it may not come about exactly as you would like it or as timely as you would like it, but you have this mental representation that even though mommy's not right there visually, she still exists. That's very comforting. Because something isn't there, it still exists, and many people have studied that as a cognitive development. Side note of the importance of working models in daily life. I already mentioned that. We have, working models for major relationships we have in life. You have by this point a working model not just of relationships but of how to get to this classroom where early in the semester you had no working model. Where the hell is Beck, whatever the hell it is, 138. But you finally found it, and you now don't even think about it, but you have a working model of what bus to catch, what steps to go up, and et cetera. Working models save energy. They're shortcuts. You don't have to be constantly figuring it out. You don't constantly have to be figuring out what to do in this relationship or that relationship because you already know, because you have a working model to use as a guide. Now it's very likely that the emergence of the core self and the intersubjective self are related to the maturation of this guy, the limbic system, the emotions. So that when you're looking, when your core self is looking out. Everything's fine and then all of the sudden everything is not fine. And how you know that is, because there's a relationship between what you see and what you feel. And so that continues to evolve as the mid brain. And this is the sort of the half eaten bagel. Part continues to develop and mature. An important part of that is really in the hippocampus. And that is very much involved in memory. So in human training and particularly in animal training. Animals can remember when things were, when it was fed. What it had to do to be fed. You're trying to train it to do little tricks and learn what to expect. When somebody holds up a newspaper like that because they're being punished, and they know what to do with that visual stimulus. Okay. All that, all that, all that. It's very good. Each one of those elements are worth an entire lecture. And in of their own. Then comes a really interesting development. It's the development of objective sense of self. Objective sense of self. Happens at 18 months. Almost to the day. Recognition of an objective sense of self. Now I'd read about this before and it's a classic study of probably let's say a child of 13 months. You put some roof on the end of it's nose. All right? And then you put it in front of a mirror. The child doesn't know you're doing this. They think, I don't know what they're thinking, but they didn't notice that. >> [COUGH] >> And they look in the mirror, what will they do? They'll try to rub it off the mirror. Pretty interesting. They think it's in the mirror. About 18 months you put the roof on there, looks in the mirror, immediately goes like this, take it off. An objective sense of self. You know, they don't realize it they've got a body. And prior to that, you know I talked about the difference between psychological survival and physical survival. It's almost like the psychology comes first. You know, they are aware that they react in certain ways, some things attractive, somethings repulsive based on their experiences. And history of reinforcement, but all of a sudden they notice something quite profound. Now one of the most impressive experiences of my life. Is when we rented a house in Cape May, and my son was 18 months almost to the day. He was standing on a couch. And behind the couch was a mirror. He was facing the wall and the mirror. And he looked down, and he looked up. And I was, I mean I wasn't always observing my kids. I looked up. And he looked up in great surprise, like this oh my God. He said, that is Sam. His named Sam, that's Sam. I said that's Sam. I mean it was, he was astonished. It was a great realization, a whole new level of self development. That he was a physically bounded. He knew his name. You know, Sam, come here, or, Sam, be careful. But this was okay, Here I am, here's Sam, and things I think, forever changed after that. So this isn't just a trivial happening, in a persons life, it has a profound importance. But maybe I am over exaggerating that because it's shared by other species. Elephants will recognize themselves. So will, some other creatures. Then comes the onset of something called Theory of mind. Okay, so Sam recognized that he had a physical body. In a way that he really hadn't experienced before. There's also something that's fairly unique to us, and it's that we recognize that other people have minds. At 18 months, it's not clear, but all of this is a hot area of research. It's not clear that people like Sam, who knew they had a body. It's not clear that they, I don't know if they know they have a mind, but whatever they see, whatever is psychologically true for them has got to be the same for other people. And then gradually we begin to realize that other people have minds. They have different perspectives. They have different goals than we have. So, we have to revisit Pythagoras. Remember Pythagoras? He said that there are two sorts of laws. One set of laws pertain to physical objects, and I mentioned that there's a chair just like this one over there, and I couldn't bring that other chair here and put it in the same space. Just can't do it. Physically, that doesn't happen. But minds, Pythagoras thought, or psyches, they can move about in their own accord. I can't tell that chair to come over here. It wouldn't pay any attention to me. It can't move. It has no volition of its own, but minds do. Minds can go other places, but it takes some time. Now the ages vary on this Let's say, a three year old, or maybe a little less, maybe a little older, three and one month, like that. Pretend. You know, you can pretend. Bring your mind here. You can move your mind and pretend. Imagine, there's a kid here. I say, what do you think is in here? They say, fishy, fishy, fishy. [LAUGH] Okay, okay. [SOUND] Chalk. Chalk. [SOUND] Listen, your friend is coming over. What do you think she's going to say is in here? Chalk. Chalk. They have no theory of mind yet. They have no theory of mind. Whatever I know is in there, anybody else would know is in there. And so, they can't put their mind into the mind of somebody else who's coming, who will say the same thing that the original person said, because they look at all the visual cues. They'll say, there's fishies in there. Okay? Then, in a month or so, or maybe a year, they will, they'll get the trick. They'll say that this, an older person, an older child will say, well, when their friend comes in they will think that there's fishes in here. Okay? So, you get how the mind then can take the perspective, well, an individual can take the perspective of another. Okay. There's a famous test, the Sally-Anne Test. We have somebody on the faculty here, who was on the ground floor of this several years ago, Alan Lesley, who does a lot of this theory of mind stuff. There's a number of variations of this demonstration. I hate to sit down. Okay, we have a mouse. All right, and this is, say, Sally's favorite toy. And, we're going to put it in here. Sally's here, and Anne is too. And, put it there. And then, this is the [INAUDIBLE] right there. Sally has to go somewhere and Anne puts it over here. And then, the person who administers this says, where do you think Sally is going to look for it when she returns. And prior to the onset of theory of mind, you're going to say, well, she'll look at it here, because that's where it is. But once I've got a theory in mind, they say, well, let's see. Sally, this is last where she thought it was, when she comes back she'll look for it there. Okay? All right. So, that is a significant development in a sense of self, in a sense of relating to the world. This is a very difficult task for autistic children to pass. Autistic children have a deficit in theory of mind, and there's a good deal of research that is being conducted on that. And we have another phenomenon that comes up, that you need to insert it here, because it comes up at the end of the lecture. I wasn't quite sure where to put this, but here's the mouse again. Children, surely young children, two years old, two and a half. The mouse is out playing in a field. Whatever mice do, and an alligator comes by. And the alligator is really, really hungry. And the alligator, without the mouse seeing it coming. [SOUND] Chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp. Chomp. [SOUND] Kids are asked, is the mouse dead? Yeah. Are you sure? Yeah, it's all chewed up. Crunch, crunch, crunch, I heard it. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Does the mouse miss its mother? Yes. Does the mouse miss its mother? Does it miss its friends? Yes. Does it get hungry? [SOUND] For no reason. I think maybe I was standing on that. Does it get hungry? Yes. When I was about four years old, I recall lying in bed, wondering what it would be like to be dead. I was that kind of fun kid, you know? And what I recall quite vividly is in the ground, it was cold and I was very, very lonely. So this is not a surprise, these findings, that something exists. Something continues on after death. It's called natural dualism. Bloom, remember Bloom, you should be reading Bloom. Bloom is assigned for one of these lectures, maybe its his lecture. So hold onto this idea that children are natural dualists, that they naturally think that something survives death. Feelings, and emotions, and sensations. Nobody tells them that, I don't think. But it comes about naturally, the way they think about things. Now, why is the theory of mind useful to us. It's important for us to be able to quote, read other people minds. Particularly early on when there was, you couldn't trust this tribe or that tribe or this person within the tribe, it was important to read their minds. What are their intention? We think we know we're good at it, and sometimes we really are, but other times we attribute our own thoughts to them and that's it. But to get onto to life at the point where we are now in civilization. It's important to be able, or think that we're able to be able to read other people's minds. Why? We can't see their minds. And there is another distinction between the mind and body dualism, that it's played such an important part of this course. Professor Hamilton, I normally would talk about mirror neurons. They were discovered not too long ago. With monkeys, there is an area of the brain that controls the muscles. And when a monkey moves in this direction, these neurons that are in control, they fire. [SOUND] You can hear them clicking. But what happens also is when the monkey observes another monkey. Or an experiment, reaching for like a peanut. They're not reaching at all. but those mirror neurons click away. It's so they're doing it. So this is a wonderful, like a mechanism of how we can learn by observation. By just observing other people, our brains are kind like clicking away. Like if I was doing that this is the movements I would be making, but you're not making any movements. They're also involved in empathy. With theory of mind, and these neurons, if I were doing that I would be feeling this way. And that leads it, to empathy for other people. And then we are characterized by the capability of being empathizing with other people.
