Symbols

Picture the first human painter, drawing animal figures on cave walls. He knows these are just symbols of the real world he routinely sees, hunts, runs from, is scared of, or eats. He painstakingly depicts these symbols and pauses to look at them. Picture another ancient human coming into the cave. He looks at the painter’s work, pauses and after a few seconds of contemplation, decides to pee on the mural. That act defined the first art critic in the history of mankind, that is, if you are to believe Mel Brooks’ classic hilarious film The History of the World.

Anthropologists and neuroscientists think that our human ability for symbolic thinking is one of the more fundamental hallmarks of what makes us who we are. Symbolic thinking involves two aspects: 1) knowing what the thing is for what it is; for example, a picture as an image; and 2) that it represents an image of something else. It is symbols in the form of artifacts, prose, poetry, plays, pictures, paintings and video images that enable us to make sense of our relationship with the physical world and of each other, and even more, it is symbols that enabled us to have a handle on what once existed, in terms of human civilizations, plants, animals, places and ideas, digest them intellectually and pass them on to the next generation. We are the only species who can allow ourselves to be moved by a play or musical or frighten ourselves with horror movies and theme park rides featuring Jurassic animals while still keeping that portion of our brain that says these are also symbols of an idea, or a natural past and not the real thing.

But symbolic thinking, no matter how common in the 100 billion people who ever lived in the entire human history, is not something we are born with, ready to wear and to use. Scientists have designed experiments to show that it is learned and a recent study has shown that it is learned within that period until we are 30 months old. This was shown by a very interesting study by Dr. Judy S. DeLoache, a Psychology professor at the University of Virginia, featured in the August 2005 issue of The Scientific American. 

The studies yielded that: first, infants (they tested on both nine-month-old American babies and babies from the Beng tribe in Ivory Coast) who are shown very realistic images, "reached out to feel, rub, pat or scratch the pictures," particularly when the pictures bear a high resemblance to the real thing. This does not mean that babies cannot tell the image from the real thing because side by side, babies will choose the real thing. This means that before anything else, as babies, we need to know what a picture is using our basic senses. The fact that it was also tried on Beng babies who have never seen a picture before, seems to show the babies’ instinctual need to explore. I think this also explains why babies put everything in their mouths. I was in a supermarket when I met a harassed mother who temporarily lost his little boy. When she found him, he was chewing a gum he did not have when she last saw him. When she asked him where he got the gum, the kid who could not talk clearly yet, pointed to the floor. All I can tell you of what happened after is that I have never heard so many gum-related expletives coming out of a mother’s mouth and some words that have to do with surgery.

Second, by 18 months, babies begin to grasp an image as a mere depiction of the real thing by just pointing to the picture and naming it (as opposed to grasping it and I guess, tasting it). Lastly, DeLoache found that 18- to 30-month-old kids cannot easily differentiate between the size of toys and what they can do with it (half of the kids tried to get themselves or part of themselves in tiny toy houses, cars, etc. after playing with life-size versions of the same toys) although most of them did not really grow berserk on their failed attempts. They call this "scale error" and DeLoache and her colleagues interpret this as some kind of distinction in brain function in our early years when we are just beginning to understand what we see and what we can do with it. Hmm, I cannot help but think that part of this "scale error" issue is carried over our adult lives evident in those who try to wear clothes that are two sizes smaller than what their bodies require.

The researchers think the implications of this research are particularly important in two areas: child abuse cases and in preschool or early education. Dolls are given to children on cases involving abuse so that kids can use the dolls as symbols of themselves. Assumptions by police and other investigative authorities hold that very young kids could relate their own bodies to a doll. However, this research as well as other independent researches by DeLoache and by others question this assumption because their findings have repeatedly confirmed that children’s reports were more accurate if no dolls were used. In fact, DeLoache said these new findings are beginning to change the way authorities question kids younger than five.

As far as the education of the young is concerned, DeLoache says the use of what they call "manipulative" aids like blocks and rods to symbolize numbers should be re-examined because very young kids could not yet distinguish what the object is and what it symbolizes. This apparently even applies to children’s books that have many "manipulative" features such as pop-us, buttons, etc. as experiments, too, have shown that the simple two-dimensional books are more effective in making children recognize more letters than the ones who were shown fancy "manipulative" books that seemed to distract the young learners. I think this is good science news for early education in our public schools that have to do with meager resources to teach the very young. It seems that the A is for Apple and B is for Boat, though probably staid for adult educators and parents, still works best for the young who are still so new to the world.

So we trace our symbolic thinking to the first humans who painted or the ones who ever wore ornaments and it is fascinating to know now that we learn symbolic thinking very early and the cultivation of this ability defines our characters the rest of our lives. Our chosen symbols are clues as to the people, things, places we hold dear. I once was so taken by a sculpture by Napoleon Abueva. It was of a woman with her hair loose, lying on her back on top of a man, and both were naked, if I remember right. All their arms were up, holding up a book they were reading and both had expressions of exquisite pleasure from learning things together. Below it was written "Mas Mahalaga ang Magbasa (Reading is more important)." There, I invite readers to argue with that.

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