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The raw material was there, in the affinitive signals. It
gradually became an evolved human behavior. It’s been shown in many
societies that mothers and adults talk to infants in a higher
pitched voice, and Iin my books are photographs of women, and men,
all over the world, with these odd but universal facial
expressions. You can also see the interaction going on in the
waiting areas of any airport in the world. The interaction varies
slightly. Not all societies are as demonstrative as in America and
the Caribbean or India. Some societies make more use of rhythmic
movement than vocalization.
Another neuroscientific finding is that in this interaction, the
mother and baby are coordinating themselves temporally. Even an
eight-week-old baby expects its mother to respond to its signals.
There have been experiments in which the mother and baby interact
in two separate rooms via closed-circuit TV. She can’t touch the
baby, but her voice and facial expressions and body movement are
all the same.
There are two cameras with sound. One is stopped and after a few
seconds restarted, so that it replays what has been happening,
although now the baby and mother are a few seconds out of synch.
Although her face and actions look just the same to us, the mother
is not really responding in real time to what the baby is subtly
doing, and so it starts to fuss or look perturbed. Finally, it will
look away and start fingering it clothes and otherwise show
distress. I have pictures of these expressions in Art and
Intimacy. If the experiment is done the other way around, the
mother will say, "I just don't know what’s wrong with him today, he
just doesn’t seem to like me very well.
To answer your original question about the relevance of
neuroscientific findings in my work, then, mother-infant
interaction relies directly on what occurs in the brain—the
temporal coordination and affiliative signals fundamentally are
motivated and reinforced in the mother’s brain and in the baby’s
brain, and they result in their emotion and behavior. Another
interesting thing is that neuroscientists say that it is in the
orbitofrontal cortexthat babies process the visual, vocal, and
movemen signals of their mothers all at once.
Now back to the arts, no one of course knows when they
originated, but if we look at premodern societies of today, we see
that the arts are preponderantly in ritual ceremonies, where they
are also visual, vocal, and kinesic. I mean that in these
ceremonies, people do not sing without dancing or dance without
singing. They are usually beautifully or strikingly dressed,
wearing masks and costumes. As in mother-infant interaction, he
experience is simultaneously visual, vocal, kinesic. The arts
in their origin would have been participatory, unlike today where
we sit passively in an auditorium watching somebody else perform,
or we stand and look at a picture by someone else on the wall of a
museum.
WSM: How do yoi get from mother-infant interaction to the
arts?
ED: To tell you, I have to bring in another piece of the
puzzle.
As i just said, originally the arts were like the mother-infant
interaction, they were participative, people were coordinating
their visual, vocal, and kinesic behaviors together. But now I have
to digress once more and describe mother-infant interaction in
another respect. Earlier I mentioned that mother-infant interaction
(or baby talk) is a "ritualized" behavior.
Ritualization is an important concept in behavioral biology and
it is important to my hypothesis about the relationship between
mother-infant interaction and the earliest arts. Ritualized
displays are common in many birds—think of peacocks, lyre birds,
birds of paradise, sandhill cranes. You see their displays in
nature programs on television. In ritualization, an
ordinary behavior that is used daily, like pecking for food or
preening--cleaning your wing--has been taken out of context and
exaggerated and used in another context to communicate something
else. One simple example is the garganey duck. When a
male is courting a female, he will turn his head sharply and just
touch a part of his wing and then turn his head away. It’s
very regularized, repeated, exaggerated. It no longer means
“I’m cleaning my wing.” And who would even care to know
that—it’s not very important. But when it’s done in a
ritualized way, the female he is signaling to knows he’s courting
her.
Peacock behavior has an interesting evolutionary history.
Pheasants that aren’t as elaborate as the peacock—the peacock is a
kind of pheasant—peck the ground in front of them to attract
females. It’s a good way to get the female’s attention as
that’s what mother hens do to get their chicks to come. It
usually indicates that there is food. But when ritualized,
the pecking movement becomes more regularized. In yet another
species of pheasant, the male’s tail erects a little bit as he
pecks the ground, making his behavior more noticeable. And
still other species don’t even peck any more but just look down at
the ground as they spread a larger and patterned tail.
The peacock is the real virtuoso of ritualized pheasant
courtship behavior. He looks down but it doesn’t resemble
anything like pecking for food. It’s his magnificent tail
that attracts females—so much grander than any other
pheasant. And he quivers it too. We would never suspect
that this behavior derived from a simple food-pecking enticement
that originated to keep chicks close to their mothers.
There are four different things that happen during
ritualization. First, the original behavior is
formalized. Some say “simplified” or “stereotyped.” In
any case, it’s made more formal: it’s not the desultory way you
would normally peck for food or clean your wing. Second, the
behavior is repeated, and not just repeated, but with what is
called “typical intensity”—a regular pace, almost metronomic.
Third, it’s exaggerated. This is unmistakable in the
peacock’s tail which is enormously large and noticeable, but even
when the duck repeatedly turns its head it’s noticeably different
from when he is only cleaning his wing. Fourth, the behavior
is elaborated—again, the peacock’s tail has such glowing and
spectacular color and patterns. Even the male garganey duck
touches a light blue patch that has evolved to be on his wing at
that precise place for a courtship signal.
Mothers do these four things in interactions with babies, and
people do them in the arts. That’s the connection I
make. The mother’s face, voice, and body movements are
stereotyped, repeated, exaggerated, and elaborated. They
attract attention and sustain interest, just like ritualized
signals in the birds I described. In artful behavior, artists
take ordinary reality, a wall or ordinary clay or an ordinary
vessel or an ordinary movement, if they’re dancers, or ordinary
speech if they’re poets, and they formalize, repeat, exaggerate,
elaborate.
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