It is recommended that you read the intimacy and emotion topics first.
Below is the brief final summary from the intimacy topic.
The basic intimate model in all animals is defensive. It can only be overpowered by a basic intimacy model. There are two of these. The one that creates the social world develops from feeding and looking after the young; nurture. It depends on the beneficiary emotion. There is an older separate model that allows for sex.
In the case of humans; with echoes in other social animals; we show how the combination of the basic intimacy model, a movement model and shared attention create our social world.
Let us picture a human female and baby in Savannah one hundred and fifty thousand years ago. She has just given birth to her first baby in a thicket and is scrapping soil over the afterbirth before moving away. Some mammal females give birth and rear their young in isolation from other members of their species. What about her? Giving birth, particularly for the first time, is physically difficult for the human female due to the combination of the baby’s large brained head and her relatively small pelvis required for the upright posture. Without the remarkable collapsed skull of the baby, that only begins to seal after birth, it would be impossible.
When we examine what happens between our female and her baby, we see both the subtle and extensive nature of human intimacy and the early development of language.
In our broad family of species, the ‘baby’ feeds in a position that allows face to face contact. The human mother will be holding her baby skin to skin and talking to it. She will be smiling, cuddling, making ‘pleasant’ sounds and responding to every single expression, sound or movement of her baby. She will barely let go and only then to close relatives. The father and some related males will be part of this group. The mother and the baby are creating new intimacy modeling that goes beyond touch and beyond the basic intimacy model. It is the beginning of the remarkable shared attention life modeling demonstrated by human beings.
Its beginnings looks very strange and meaningless to observers. We can use its earliest form as a torch to reveal how fundamental it is to all human relationships; a world where our relationship activities are deeply meaningful but where those of others can seem meaningless. Write in your own examples.
These earliest shared attention life models are being built between the awake and calm baby and anyone who holds it. Within the baby the biological registers needed for language are also active. Indeed they began in the womb. After four days the baby can demonstrate by ‘experimental modeling’ that it can distinguish between its mother’s language being spoken by someone else and a different language. The baby has already set up complex speech sound models that identify features of its mother’s group language.
In order to understand this early and strange shared modeling, we need to look in detail at our young mother and her baby. We have so far described her as ‘smiling, cuddling, making ‘pleasant’ sounds and responding to every single expression, sound or movement of her baby’. This quickly develops, during feeding the baby will break off in anticipation of a ‘conversation’ with its mother. She is constantly talking to it softly, commenting on its movements and reflecting back its facial expression. She will arrange her own face for: a blowing action, raising her eyebrows, sticking out her tongue, displaying an exaggerated expression of excitement/surprise and in order to do a great deal of smiling. These expressions are designed to interest the baby and not cause distress. In her voice she naturally adopts a slower more exaggerated intonation and uses individual and repeated meaningless vocalisations as well as words. The emotional content of her voice is directly shaped by the ‘sounds’ that are part of the human modeling of the emotions of satisfied/happy and interest/excitement, the sounds of content. Any other emotion would make the baby distressed. The mother will let the baby hold her finger (a reflex) and she will play with its toes. The mother has to deal with the baby’s waste. She takes this opportunity to kiss, blow on and caress it. She also rocks and bounces the baby.
At one time it was thought that the mother, reflecting back the baby’s expression helped make it possible for the baby to link the expression that it was making with the expression that it saw on her face. We established earlier that these are connected together in the same biological model in the baby’s brain. The fact that the expression of emotion includes voice and muscle movements in the face and body that are felt by the person expressing them and at the same time recognised in others through vision, voice and touch shows to what extent such modeling is already anticipating the social world. Experience with the mother expands the detail and context of the model for the baby. The baby is a year old before the mother naturally addresses emotional display modeling by making ambiguous emotional expressions while hoping to resolve the distress with laughter. Suddenly, for example, she will put on a sad or annoyed expression.
The mother’s actions and those of her baby are biological models that grab the focused attention of the each other. It is common for mothers to be surprised by their own response. These biological models can only be fully expressed if there is another human providing the other half of the model.
Surely the baby is doing nothing and it is the mother making the model by her reactions. Well no. Experimental inquiry shows that the babies timing is superb. Indeed when these mother-baby encounters are studied in detail, there is a clear distinction between specific actions of the mother when she is trying to get the babies attention and when she is actually participating in the strange shared modeling.
The baby’s repertoire includes the movements of its arms, hands, legs and feet. It is very easy to show how these appear as elements in the baby’s contribution to the strange model. This is a deeply interesting point.
We look in the movement topic at how the baby gradually learns about its body and limbs and goes through a biological and experienced process of learning how to control its movements and actions. These models emerge over developmental time and include experience before they can be expressed. The only other bases for movement of the babies limbs are registers such as touch ‘reflexes’ and internal discomfort. But now we find that there is a model that can control them from virtually the beginning of its life. It is not a brain/body model that controls them for a physical purpose. It is has nothing to do with object encounters and the physical world. The movements of its limbs are controlled by this model in order that they can gap fill and influence a shared model the other half of which is provided by another human being. The only purpose of the model is intimacy and the emotional energy is satisfied/ happy with interest/excitement riding on its back.
Thus we can say that the baby’s initial body/brain modeling includes a biological/experienced model that is the basis for the social world.
Though the baby starts with a shared model it is not long before it is carrying out the whole model on its own. When awake, alone and content it will be moving limbs, making sounds and facial expressions and trying to include the features that it has learned from the strange model/game that it plays with its mother and other humans. We know that the baby’s practicing/ playing is not the dominant point of the activity. It loves to be interrupted and quickly turns its own exercise into a shared one. We know that dancing, playing an instrument, singing and playing games are not inherently solitary activities, even though we can be company for ourselves as we do what the baby is doing as it divides its biological registers between switching on actions and registering the consequences and effects – making a sound and listening to a sound followed by kicking a leg while feeling the kick. The baby and all of us thereby create both parts of the strange model.
You can see this as the bedrock of self-awareness i.e. the earliest foundation of the ability to sense and perceive your own actions. It forms the basis of inner dialogue.
Shared attention life modeling underpins many very complex human animal actions that are common in all human cultures.
We commented earlier that we know that the baby is a participant in the model because of its superb timing. Timing is a crucial aspect of movement and action. The integrated movement models that we examine in the movement topic depend on timing, often measurable in fractions of a second. Everything produced by the mother and baby have exactly the same structure as every human interaction, every shared activity and conversation.
It includes split second timing that embraces vocalising, raising eyebrows, gurgling, kicking a foot and moving the head. Take any mixture of movements or actions and vary: intervals between movements; the repetition of movements; the mirroring of movements; the sequencing of movements; the intensity of movements (varying energy put into the actions) and the number of humans taking part. This is only the bare beginning of what shared attention life modeling can do. Vocalisation is a physical movement as is making a sound by blowing over a reed. All music, all dance and all games are intrinsically constructed the same way. We have yet to add in, selecting the elements in the music, dance or game to re-cognise anything in episodic and movement memory and also selecting elements that point to anything captured by the mind (language). Words, phrases, sentences, descriptions and all forms of language can become components. At the moment, just think of the humans around our mother and baby in the Savannah a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. We will find that they had the beginnings of music, dance and games and much more. They had to have as they had our physical nature, each other and language.
Why do we call this modeling shared attention life modeling?
Attention is the ever changing point of your individual sense of presence in the physical world of encounter. It is also the ever changing point of your social presence, until ‘recently’, before modern technology, it was always accompanied by your body but now the body is often assumed or just pictured. It is possible for animals to share attention, in that more than one animal smells, hears or looks at the same thing. This is most obvious with vision where ‘others’ can be seen to be looking at the same object. Elsewhere we have examined shared gaze in human experience. In interactive modeling it is vital that the two or more individuals involved keep their full attention on the model that is being constructed between them. When they have mastered it, and have begun to repeat it without change, then there is a lesser demand on focused attention. We describe this as doing things automatically or being well rehearsed. In reality the underlying movement models lose some energies and connections and become unable to ‘shout’ loud enough to get into attention.
With casual shared life modeling the loss of attention by a participant means the breakdown of the model/intimacy/relationship – if only briefly. Shared life modeling is constantly being shaped and this is often better described as ‘repair’ in situations where extended intimacy and relationship are being pursued by the participants. Even in rehearsed versions shared attention and agreed foci of attention are crucial. In the orchestra or football game lapses can have serious social consequences. Shared attention is central to life modeling and therefore central to all aspects of social life.
In the speech and language topic we meet the twins! They created their own language with its own phonology, grammar and vocabulary by setting their language registers within the shared attention life modeling that they made and developed between themselves. This neatly illustrates that their language was another form of intimacy and embedded into a more fundamental social modeling.
Language (mind and thought) evolved within this modeling as a way of enriching intimacy. Ancestral human/hominid animal vocalisations became more and more complex and biological physical changes had to evolve so that production complexity could increase. This complexity and flexibility enriched relationships between humans (key to group survival and hence the survival of each member of the group) but also allowed greater co-operation between them in their encounters with the physical world. Two aspects of this were more accurate references to what individual humans had done, were doing and were intending to do and more accurate references to the content of human registers led by vision, the other senses and the emotions.