THE TRAJECTORY OF THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL

HUMAN TRAJECTORY

OUTLINE OF THE INDIVIDUAL HUMAN TRAJECTORY

Conception

Unfolding the fetus

Experience begins the sensory when it penetrates the skin

Specialized organs

One-celled base

Pre-existing categories:  scaffolding paradigm

Participation of the person

Not everyone is the same, not everyone goes to the same level

LIMINAL VIRTUAL SPACE develops while a human forms

A new kind of map held in the brain connector

Unseen, made and remade, interpersonal, enabler of empathy

mother/infant

container of meaning

This account of creating a human person is not scientific so much as it is conjectural but informed by science.  There are assumptions that could probably be defended by research.

This section addresses how the tumult of the out-skin world is brought into the patterns of the individual in-skin.

An animal is a collection of one-celled creatures that have assembled into a cooperation made possible by first a skin to separate it from the environment and then circulating systems to distribute nutrition and directions.  The in-skin world is dependent on homeostasis, which is the directional flow of existence in time between two parameters: too much or too little.  This movement produces experience of two kinds, that which is in-skin and that which is out-skin.  The two are in dialogue with the out-skin pressing against the in-skin from the moment of conception.

At first the single cell and then the increasing number of proliferating cells is dependent on two sources of information: that from the blueprint nucleus and that from the placenta which conveys both nutrients and chemical information to the new cell-ball.  At this point there is no vascular system or nervous system.  Both develop in the context of what the mother is sending.  It must be the birth mother rather than any caretaker because it begins in the womb.

The first sensory information is a combination of rhythm and sound, both of them from the mother.  A womb is a noisy place: breathing, heart, digestion, and the mother’s voice.  It is also a mobile place so the new fetus builds its brain around her sitting, standing, lying down, walking (another rhythm) and macro-movements  like lifting or throwing.  If one thinks of movies of tribal dancing in either Africa or America (most commonly)  they are often stepping rhythmically while chanting, singing, drumming, in this pre-birth kind of experience.

Experience builds the brain from the nutrients meeting the capacities of the fetal sensing cells and organs. Amniotic fluid and the flesh of the mother cushions and muffles some sensory information, but the molecules managed by the mother’s brain and organs in reaction to her out-skin environment come directly and internally to the fetus.

When first born, an infant must learn to use its unfocused  eyes, its flailing limbs, to create the capacity of the brain to manage them along with the other senses.  The point of focus that’s needed to organize all of this comes from the mother, especially her face, and now includes other caretakers.  The “theos” notion of an overlooking larger caretaker may come from this early experience of being cleaned, held, stroked, fed, and talked to in a familiar voice.  The mother looks in the face of the infant while relating to it and the infant brain learns how to relate back with kicking and cooing.

This is the beginning of relationship between the in-skin and out-skin, whether it is comforting or distressing, and the extent to which the two relate.  This context creates the paradigm in the brain that structures whatever happens for the rest of life.  It also creates something “virtual,” meaning unseen, not factual and concrete but felt, though it is described in terms of a “space,” an area of experience that includes creation, play, and attachment.  It is a “place” of potential and imagination that develops in the brain and reaches out to the other person.  This is liminal space that contains ceremony/ritual.

Most of this is expressed and recognized in what I call the “frame of communication”:  the face, the breath and heartbeat, the ears and the oral/pharynx voice creation. Speech comes out of this formation.  Stephen Porges discovered a third autonomic nerve system that is myenilated so capable of carrying more information, and that comes directly from the brain stem to this “frame.”  The thought-world the brain has created is expressed and understood directly by variation in muscle movement or tension, breathing, heart rate and speech or singing or exclaiming.  The nerve carries information both ways.  What the person feels is both conscious and unconscious, relating to the homeostasis of the body.  The conscious part, which is much smaller than what is never conscious, is recognized as emotion and is recognizable to others.  We learn from experience to separate what should be brought up to consciousness and what should become habit, taken for granted and never examined.  “Instinct” is part of this.