Mary and I had a blast on her Mary Giuliani LIVE Internet show April 18, about my new book Don’t Try This Alone: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1976120128 .
The adult human head would never make it out of the birth canal; that's why I start the video patting My Big Fat Adult Human Head.
That’s one reason why babies are born with only the primitive third of the brain working, the Reptilian brain (brain stem), which we have in common with reptiles. Our Reptile brain must work at birth to provide basic survival functions like heart beat, breathing, and digestion. Try thinking your way into doing those sometime. Won’t work.
But–and here’s the key–the other two parts of our brain don’t function much at birth.
Reptiles only need the reptile brain; they’re born running.
But we mammals need more brain power. Mammals uniquely have developed the “limbic brain,” the emotional lobe of the brain. We created it so we could have emotions, attach to other mammals, and care for our young–so that mammals could develop into more elaborate creatures than reptiles.
Reptiles don’t have emotions; they don’t have an emotional brain. A reptile adult doesn’t need more than a reptile brain, either–they eat their young, they don’t care for them.
The real trick is that from birth, we mammals need other mammals to hold us and gaze into our eyes (that’s called limbic resonance), to stimulate our mammalian limbic neurons to fire–especially in the right brain. From birth to age two or three, that’s our job: fire up our mammalian lobes and right brain. And we need other adult mammals to be present with us, looking at us, to stimulate our limbic neurons to fire.
Dr. Allan Schore, the world’s living expert on this, calls it the “first thousand days” from conception to age two.
Also, starting about age two, we need to fire up our frontal cortex, the huge thinking lobe of the human brain. By developing most of the limbic lobe and frontal lobe after birth, a baby’s head triples in size from birth to age three.
Or Not
Or Not. If we don’t get that intimate presence, eye gazing, holding, and limbic resonance from another mammal, our mammal neurons don’t fire much during those first crucial years. Read more here: https://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/maryglive4-18/
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