The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking

  • Peter Hobson
Pan Macmillan: 2002. 291 pp. £20
Credit: DAVID NEWTON

How does the mind grow? This is a question that has exercised some of the best minds over the centuries, and Peter Hobson joins this laudable effort to try to answer it with his new book The Cradle of Thought. Hobson is critical of the classical piagetian answer, because it focuses on the child as a solitary mini-scientist, testing his or her current (and usually mistaken) theory in the laboratory of the sand-pit or the playroom. Quite correctly, Hobson points out the limitations of this essentially asocial perspective on cognitive development. Instead, he argues that the origins of all thought lie in social relations.

This line of argument has a long and noble pedigree. Marx suggested that all thought was a product of social and economic relations, and the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (no doubt influenced by his own post-Revolution society) proposed that learning is typically facilitated by one's peer group. But Hobson's slant on the social origins of the mind comes not from this socialist framework so much as his psychoanalytic background.

Sigmund Freud, and later John Bowlby, argued convincingly that one's earliest attachments with 'significant others' shape the development of the mind. Usually the 'attachment figure' is an adult caregiver, but — as demonstrated in the famous case of the orphaned Jewish victims of the Nazis studied by Anna Freud — in the absence of a parent figure, attachments can be equally strong towards a peer or sibling.

There is little doubt, from the thousands of experimental studies of the effects of the quality of attachment, that such early relationships are strongly deterministic of later emotional well-being. No one today (if they ever did) now questions whether abuse and neglect are bad for your later mental health — they invariably are. Hobson also reviews the intricate experiments by such pioneer child psychologists as Colwyn Trevarthen and Daniel Stern showing the exquisite sensitivity human infants have to their caregiver's emotional states and behaviour; how the 'dance' between a mother and her infant can become derailed by events such as postnatal depression.

It is not surprising that early emotional factors predict later ones. The surprise from this line of research is that early emotional factors partly predict cognitive outcomes — IQ, for example, and school attainment measures such as literacy. Reviewing the large body of evidence leads Hobson to conclude that all the unique aspects of human thought, including our capacity to use symbols, are social in origin.

He is careful to acknowledge that genetic and neurobiological factors can prevent a child from emotional engagement with others, when discussing children with the psychiatric condition of autism, with whom normal social relations are not possible. But he also reviews studies suggesting that forms of deprivation can also lead to autism, such as the sensory deprivation of congenital blindness or the emotional deprivation of children discovered during the past few years in Romanian orphanages.

There is much to admire in this immensely readable book, and Hobson is both an outstanding scholar and passionate about his subject. His human and clinical concern for people comes through clearly in his writing, and his book will be a welcome contribution to the debate in cognitive development. I part company with him on three fundamental issues, though.

First, just because some aspects of thought (such as empathy) clearly have emotional origins doesn't mean that all human thought is social in origin. How, for example, does an autistic 'savant' who can compute all prime numbers at lightning speed do this with little if any experience of emotional intimacy? This suggests to me that some aspects of cognition have little to do with social relations.

Second, although Hobson acknowledges that genetic factors might partly determine the mind, he attacks the idea of the existence of innate, pre-programmed cognitive modules. I find this argument incoherent. Modularity theorists do not suggest that modules can function and develop without experience any more than geneticists believe that genes can function without an environment. If you accept that there are genes that can build brain structures, why not at least remain open to the possibility that genes can build mental modules?

And finally, while Hobson's ground-breaking studies of individuals with congenital blindness, or Michael Rutter's seminal studies of the Romanian orphans, have shown us that the effects of early deprivation can resemble autism, might this be no more than a surface similarity? We should be careful not to assume that just because two church bells are ringing simultaneously they are causally connected by the same rope.

Hobson's own important studies of emotion perception in autism are nicely described in this book, and in many ways were ahead of their time. There is no question that this major figure in the field of developmental psychopathology will continue to stimulate healthy debate.