PEDIATRICS Vol. 37 No. 1 January 1966, pp. 149-176
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I. ADVANTAGES OF AND METHODS FOR THE STUDY OF CHILDHOOD IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES

Elucidating the Languages of Sensory Input Operating in the Programming of the Human Nervous System

PRIMITIVE CHILDHOOD, nurtured by exotically varied cultures in diverse environments and patterned by markedly differing divergent languages, offers unique opportunities to the investigator for studying extremes in the programming of the human nervous system by light, sound, temperature, pressure, odor, taste, vibration, and rhythm. In a few remaining societies wherein civilization and the major religions of mankind have not yet set their pattern of imprint upon the social fabric in which the child is reared, we still have situations and practices which expose the infant and the young child to markedly different languages of touch, smell, kiss, voice, and embrace; nursing, feeding, and swaddling; gesture, story, dance, myth, music, and song; to differing grammars of speech, kinship, and designation; and different patterns of manners, morals and etiquette which each direct the developing nervous system uniquely along paths which will be denied to our future observation and possible realm of experience. Herein are passing experiments in human potentiality which we cannot recreate for ethical, moral, and legal reasons, nor can we ever hope to reproduce their equivalent in the laboratory. If we could read and interpret these many existing experiments in different styles of nervous system functioning we should know more about the possibilities open to man than we are likely to learn from any other mode of inquiry. Human destiny may well depend upon such knowledge.

In the process of studying child growth and development and disease patterns in primitive cultures and trying to formulate methods and techniques, we have been beset by the realization that most of what we observe is transient, aperiodic, nonrecurring, and unreproducible.




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