Media Insights

The abstractions that we are presented with from early on, especially if there are belief systems, the images of what is justice, of what is right in human relationships between man and woman–that image is real. We take that as reality, as something that is solid and substantial, and it isn’t.

A Core Assumption

It is not difficult to trace from the earliest appearance of Microcosmos–bacteria and through multi-cell beings. Then it becomes much more concentrated when we enter the arena of brained life. It’s hard to speak of images existing in a clam or a mussel or a Microcosmos. Still in all, I believe that there are ways that we can see the chemistry in the chemical interactions and see that, in effect, those are images at that level of life. But, certainly when we come to a brained creature, it is not at all difficult, I think, to see that our sensory instruments, essentially construct images of the world at the surface and out there. Gradually, that nervous system develops inside and it begins to develop images of what’s going on inside.

So, it is absolutely essential to the survival triad of the first brain that the image is real. If it ain’t, you’re dead; you are now food for something else. So, this is a very deep—inbred, you could say—inbred in the development of our brains: The image is real.

MM: A core assumption.

KB: A core assumption. And that core assumption moves through the second brain. When I see affection or anger, it’s real, it’s not imaginary; I didn’t just make that up, it’s real. So, when the toddler and the early infant get exposed to that gamut of emotional explosiveness that may be there in the family, they have to believe that the image that they are exposed to is real. Then it is only one small step to see what happens with the third brain, that it is the same thing. The abstractions that we are presented with from early on, especially if there are belief systems, the images of what is justice, of what is right in human relationships between man and woman–that image is real. We take that as reality, as something that is solid and substantial, and it isn’t. As I take up endlessly and repetitiously, an image is a resonant representation of something out there in the world. What that something is, we may never know. We have no instruments for knowing what the hell is really, out there. What, really are you? I have a sensory, visual/auditory representation of you, and we deal with that, and we can deal with that because it is quite reliable. You don’t suddenly morph into a dwarf in front of my eyes; you remain the same. So, we build up over time a dependability of the reality of our images.

But, like you said, Jean Piaget was right when he said this process begins at eight to ten months before birth. There is one study with Chinese and Japanese children, which I thought was quite remarkable: They were able to record before birth that these kids were registering language from their mothers speaking. They were already sorting out the elements of the syllabic structure of words.

MM: The interesting thing with the study was that the window of hyper-suggestibility closed at a certain age. If they were exposed after that–I mean this was the really dramatic thing–because the brain could imprint all kinds of stuff here, but then that door closed, boy!

KB: Sure. In New York City they did a study some years ago with a whole bunch of kids from Mexican and South African and Irish descent. They get this mix of kids, 4, 5, 6 years old, and for a year and a half they brought all of them in once a week for two hours to different language proficient people. They found people who spoke Spanish and people who spoke Yiddish. At the most, they had six languages, and all these kids were exposed to them. At the end of that ten months, when they tested these kids, they found that the vast majority of them were all multilingual and there was no differentiation in terms of I.Q., or where they were in school, or were they in preschool, or whatever. They were just kids from a wide variety of neighborhoods, and so forth and so on.

I can remember that I had no trouble with French. When I walked into the classroom–I was in the second grade or something like that. It was strange to begin with, but I very quickly caught on. I began to pronounce words and so forth, I was complimented with, “My, your French is very good!” But, that was natural at that age. By the time I was 16-17, and I was beginning to study it formally in school, then it was totally different. It was a big struggle.