Brain complexity: baby brains under study (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 23, 2018, 14:20 (2496 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Unfair criticism: My view is clearly stated through nine years of time here. A personality is 40% genetics, 40% family nurture, and 20% developed by the individual and his/her experiences.
dhw: The personality is the “self”. If you believe that 40% of the personality/self is genetics, then how can you argue that the newborn self is a blank slate?
DAVID: Because what I have described as soures of personaliy all have to be expressed or developed by the blank slate as life progresses. The 40/40/20% are all active influences as personality develops over time. A personality develops from zero in all of us.

What is this “blank slate”? If a personality is 40% genetics, then right from the start your baby has 40% of its personality. 40% is not zero. But the personality will develop and change through interaction between its given elements (the original 40% according to you) and nurture plus experience. That goes on all through life. As for the “instantly” newborn baby itself, of course it can’t express every aspect of its personality the moment it says “Wah!” That doesn’t mean it’s born with zero personality.

DAVID: It's time I introduce Jean Piaget who was an initiator of child mental development studies in a very structured way:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html
The goal of the theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses.

DAVID’s comment: Thinking develops from zero. We had some of this in med school.

Thank you for this informative article. You wrote that a newborn baby’s “self is a blank slate as it starts out in life”. If by this you only meant that a newborn baby is not aware of itself and is not capable of reasoning, analysing, conceptualizing, philosophizing etc. (different types of thinking), I doubt if many people would disagree. But if you meant that all newborn babies are born with identical non-personalities, the Piaget article offers no support, and I would disagree, as would my daughter-in-law. Here is one website for you:

Children & Blank Slate Evolution - psychcentral.com
https://psychcentral.com/blog/children-blank-slate-evolution

"The “blank slate” view of human development was first documented in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and is generally credited to Locke and Rousseau. The idea is that a child is born completely free of any predisposition or vulnerabilities, and that everything the child would become was due to the effects of the environment. With advances in biotechnology, neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and psychology, this view has all but been completely discredited today.
Most people are now thought to have significant “pre-programming” from genes that have some influence on almost every want, trait, feeling, thought, and action."