birth

Brain growth and everything it implies is ‘experience dependent’. The last decade of research reveals a reciprocal dynamic between the brain and the environment. Change the environment and your change the brain. In many ways our modern life style is deficient in body touch and body movement – and this impacts the brain.

I grew to understand how much that bond plays in the prenatal to postnatal experience. Bonding brings a component of safety and security, which I don’t think adopted children feel.

Not one national or international medical association in the world, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association, recommends routine infant circumcision and now, recognizing the harm and life-long consequences, some are recommending against it.

What we are finding now is that the physical system (body) is completely changeable – based on the perceptions and the belief of the system.

It became clear that we have made a terrible mistake about what human nature is.

At birth, we do not distract ourselves with a machine that goes ‘ping,’ or with a gloved hand to examine our progress. Instead we ask our babies, how do you want to be born?

Through studying child-development, I saw how our cultural world view was formed by our social models; and how this view is locked into the very neural structures of our brains, not as opinion but as our world-forming, perceptual-conceptual process.

Memories of early trauma are there, underneath the surface. They’re there, in our dreams, attitudes, even in our vocabulary. People unconsciously walk around in them.

A conversation with Michael Mendizza and Marion Diamond, Phd, Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

A conversation between David B. Chamberlain, PhD., and Suzanne Arms from the DVD Babies Know More Than You Think.