Abstract of the lecture given by Prof. Rita Levi-Montalcini at the Symposium on “Child and adolescent health in Europe”, Rome September 28^th, 2006

The infantile phase is the individual’s formative period par excellence. In the playgrounds of early childhood and at the small desks of primary school, a child learns the first rules of social cohabitation and, in the span of a few months, covers the same distances that took his ancestors – from the time those distant predecessors began to employ that extraordinary communicative tool made out of symbols which is spoken and written language – tens of thousands of years to tread. With our specie’s discovery of language, the opportunities for exchanging messages – with other individuals, between individuals and masses, from members of past generations to our own, from the present generation to those yet to come – have increased a thousand fold.

In the post-natal period, infants savor the pleasures in the tumultuous development of their vital functions but, at the same time, they suffer their first, harsh experiences of physical hardship. They react to one and to the other, respectively, with manifestations either of joy or of pain and fear in ways that are not dissimilar from those of puppies in the canine species. Unlike their puppy-dog playmates, however, they intuit with dismay in the course of early infancy the existence of another mysterious and immense world which they cannot directly perceive by means of their sense organs: sight, hearing, smell and touch. This first intuition of the mythical existence of a world invisible and inaccessible to the senses creates an unbridgeable gap between them and those animal playmates which, uninitiated to these mysteries, continue to live on innocently and happily.

In past centuries, the total absence of knowledge about the mechanisms responsible for the formation of the brain’s circuitry in the post-natal period was reflected in the static character of educational modes.

The molded and painted putti in the famous ceramics of Luca della Robbia provide a typical illustration of the limits to our past understanding of the development of the sensorial-motor system. In his works, the little body of the infant is always represented as being wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes, as was everywhere the custom in those days and today is still the practice in certain remote rural areas. Though their aim is that of protecting the baby, these methods actually hamper its physiological and functional development. In the same way, it was not considered important then – and it is still not today – to direct such messages to infants as would stimulate their intellectual development.

The educational methods being employed today are still strongly under the influence of the Victorian approach, based upon the principle that an infant should be the object of either rewards or punishments in the same way as one commonly trains a puppy dog. This is a result of the fact that adults charged with the responsibility of satisfying the infant’s vital needs do so on the basis of the emotional reactions the latter expresses in an outspoken manner by either laughing or crying. The infant can rely solely on the paleocortical component² of its brain to express itself and communicate. Though the neocortical component³ is subject to great and rapid development in this initial phase of growth, the infant cannot yet rely upon language to communicate and must await for verbal expressions to be formed in order to interact linguistically with whomever is taking care of it.

How does the brain of the “human puppy” differ from that of a puppy dog? The paleocortical component, which has played a fundamental role in evolution ever since our distant ancestor Australopithecus ventured into the savanna and faced up to the dangers that were threatening it, develops in both humans and dogs in substantially similar ways. But the paleocortical system is only dedicated to the formulation of emotional, aggressive and affective reactions; it the neocortical system, rather, which lies behind the extraordinary intellectual capacities that are the exclusive mark and privilege of the human species.

As demonstrated by the molds of the interior of skulls uncovered by paleontologists, the neocortical component has, unlike its paleocortical counterpart, undergone formidable development in the passage from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, thanks to the folding of the cortical membrane which, in turn, opened the way to an increase and reorganization of the brain’s neuronal circuitry⁴.

All nervous circuits are endowed with an extraordinarily plasticity⁵ and capacity to respond to solicitations that come from the outside world. Though such a faculty is undeniably present throughout an individual’s life cycle, it is during the infant stage that it expresses itself to the utmost degree.

The cognitive faculties at work in the infant’s brain are, in reality, vastly superior than was believed to be the case in the past. This statement is based also on the observation that, since the earliest childhood, the members of the new generations are manifesting an entirely unexpected and natural proclivity towards the use of modern technologies. The latter have revealed the enormous and unimagined ease with which infants and prepubescent children are able, not only to receive information that was believed to be the prerogative of brains more fully developed, but also to put such information to immediate use. Children’s capacity to make use of information and digital technologies is absolutely surprising. The average age at which a first reckoning with such tools is occurring tends to get lower and lower.

Novel didactic programs and the introduction of computers even in pre-school and primary school contexts, in fact, have highlighted the precocious development of infants’ mental capacities.

Unlike the toys of the past – which were not meant to be incentives to the activation of the neocortical circuits of the child’s brain that are at work since birth and thriving from the very earliest age – the games that children have available to them today not only contain a playful aspect, but are conceived on the basis of novel didactic principles so as to provide strong stimuli to those circuits’ development.

When designing and developing educational and didactic systems to be applied during the phases which immediately follow upon early infancy, it is important to bear in mind that one should not indoctrinate children by transmitting knowledge to them according to traditional methods but, rather, provide incentives to the faculties that they already possess, and to use the latter to enable the children to pass from a passive condition, in which they simply “take in” information, to an active one in which they learn from their own direct experience.

Seymour Papert, the renowned expounder of a novel pedagogic-didactic theory, affirms that children should be promoted to the status of “active producers” from that of “passive consumers” of learning. Papert’s point of view is based upon a constructionist concept, according to which knowledge cannot be transmitted or conveyed ready-made from one person to another; on the contrary, in his view each subject reconstructs for him or herself a personal version of the information he or she receives⁶.

Already in earlier centuries, though especially in the 20^th, despite the fact that there was still no clear awareness of the cognitive potential of the brain of Homo sapiens, the existence of child prodigies had raised the question of the role that is played by genetic and epigenetic factors in extraordinary intellectual precocity. It was believed that, in the child prodigy, the precocious faculties are always of a genetic nature, that is, innate. Today, so-called child prodigies are no longer a rarity because the new information technologies have shown that children of both sexes and all types of social extraction can become “prodigies” if they undergo an intense and directed preparation from their pre-school days onwards.

A typical example is that of Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics. His father, Leo Wiener, a professor of Slavic languages at Harvard, was convinced that intelligence was the result of the stimuli and training that a child receives in early infancy. On the basis of this conviction, he took charge of the instruction of all four of his children, all of whom went on to become child prodigies. One of them, Norbert, began his university studies at the age of eleven and received his doctorate in mathematics by the time he was eighteen. As is the case with most geniuses, his character showed serious behavioral deficiencies of an affective and emotional nature, which manifested themselves in a pronounced shyness combined with arrogance and in a marked inability to get along with his colleagues. The famous mathematician Bertrand Russell, who was his tutor, described him as someone who had been so worshipped as a child that, as an 18-year-old, he believed himself to be Almighty God and provoked continuous disputes as to whom was the student and whom the teacher⁷.

Such dissociation between cognitive and behavioral capacities shows how important it is that the former be allowed to develop in harmony with the latter.

Human offspring differ from those of other mammals also by way of the slowness of their behavioral development. Their protracted dependence upon their parents or surrogate parents leaves an indelible mark upon the structures of their nervous system which govern their emotive behavior. Parenting adults influence the development of the affective capacities of their children from the latter’s first post-natal period all the way through to the ensuing ones of puberty and adolescence.

In their very first years of life, children are entirely dependent upon the information they receive from those entrusted with their education in order to come to a first definition of themselves in relation to the world. It is in this phase that adults exercise a fundamental influence upon children by way of the religious-political credos of the tribe or social group to which they belong.

Upbringing, since a child’s earliest age, has a profound influence upon the character and behavior of the adult of tomorrow. Hostility – handed down from generation to generation and instilled from early childhood – towards those who are “different”, however the term may be defined, has as a tragic consequence the genocides and wars that even today cause the world to be bathed in blood.

Cultural transmission in the vertical sense, namely from parents to offspring, is that which maintains important characters throughout the generations. Horizontal cultural transmission – which instead occurs by means of a diffusion that is more rapid, at times extremely rapid, of characters, of ideas, essentially, that are either new or acquired from others – is subject to almost random fluctuations and cannot satisfy the growing individual’s most real and important needs. Traditional culture is transmitted vertically and, therefore, always very difficult to uproot. In this terribly critical phase of the history of mankind, it is to both vertical and horizontal transmission, which are different yet complementary in the roles they can and must perform, that the fundamental task of directing the course of present and future generations belongs⁸.