How a baby learns?

Newborn babies enter the world unable to take care of themselves. They cannot find and prepare food. They cannot walk and cannot even eat or drink alone. Left to themselves, babies would soon get cold. Without their mothers, they could not survive.

Babies cannot even ask for help or tell if they need something. They cannot speak. To survive alone at home, they need to learn how to eat, walk, and put on their clothes. They need to learn a lot more before they can leave home alone.

However, babies have a serious problem with learning. They not only cannot speak, they cannot understand speech either. Before they can learn anything else, somehow they need to figure out how to understand and communicate with their mothers.

Yet, in the next few months, babies learn to sit, recognize familiar words, and stand by themselves. It takes about a year to learn how to walk. In our first year, we learn most of our most important skills we will use in the rest of our lives. Impressive progress for someone who cannot speak.

First, we learn to react to sounds and giving out sounds ourselves. Then we learn to smile and we recognize our mothers. It takes about three months to acknowledge a smile vocally, the first step to communication. At around the fifth month, babies can make different sounds to express joy, satisfaction, or wants. We can also distinguish familiar people from strangers. It takes about eight months to notice familiar words. Babies of this age experiment with speech by babbling.

We learn to stand and walk in about a year, but we still cannot speak. Learning to shape words is the mission of our second year. We start by learning the names of things, but it takes one more year to get to the first two word expressions. Another year passes by learning to construct simple sentences of four to five words. Most kids learn to talk in complete sentences with proper grammar by the age of five.

So in the most important first years, we cannot use language for learning. Our parents cannot explain how to raise our head, eat with a spoon, sit, stand, walk, or express our feelings before about the age of three. We must rely on other ways to learn our most important skills, including speech.

How do we learn without understanding speech? What newborn babies already have for learning? They have a brain, muscles, and senses. They can see, hear, feel a taste, smell, and sense by touch. Babies cannot speak or understand speech, but they have wants and needs. They also have adults around them. Those adults try to take care of the babies and they do it pretty well. Babies soon figure out that whenever they want something, they need to get the attention of adults. They cry.

Crying is an efficient way to get attention, but it does not help with letting adults know what babies want. Fortunately, adults are good at guessing and eager to figure out what babies want. When they cannot guess it, they try different solutions while paying attention to the baby’s signals. But how can newborn babies tell what they want? How can they tell at least whether they like something? How can they learn what gesture works? There is an easy way.

Parents also want to communicate with babies. They know that babies cannot speak or understand speech, so they try something else. They play to babies, gesture, and babble. But how gestures and babbling helps babies and parents understand each other? It does not. Repeating or trying to repeat what they do, however, signals that their newborn is paying attention and acknowledges their effort. Mimicking their parents is a sign of comfort from the babies and also a way of learning. They will soon realize that some gestures have meaning.

Babies start their long way of learning by mimicking their parents. How do they know what muscles to move for the same result? First, they experiment. They try to mimic the gestures they see and try again if they fail. Second, special brain cells called mirror neurons help them with experimentation.

Mirror neurons are neurons that fire both when we act and when we see others acting the same way. So babies feel what muscle to move. We are hard-wired to mimic the actions of others.

When a baby sees her mother smiling, she smiles. When her mother is babbling, she tries to make the same sounds. She may fail at first, it needs some practice, but mirror neurons and experimentation help to find the right way to move the right muscles. Babies learn to give sounds by mimicking their parents.

They learn to move their hands, feet, or turn their head the same way. Little by little, babies learn to move, walk, and speak by mimicking and experimentation. Step by step, their brain learns to send the proper signals to all muscles involved. As they learn more complex moves, they discover meaning. They understand that certain phenomena are related to each other. Standing up requires the coordinated tension and relaxation of various muscles. Certain sounds are related to specific actions or events.

The patterns babies can make sense of become more complex over time. Their skills to mimic also develop. Once they learned to shape phonemes, the vocal building blocks of speech, it gets easier to learn new words. They already know how to shape the sounds, they only need to associate the new word with its meaning.

How babies know whether they succeed or fail in learning something? How do they know whether they understand meaning right? Feedback is an important part of learning. Babies know whether they succeeded or failed in their attempts from the expressions of their parents.

But how babies get feedback before they can understand speech or the proper meaning of gestures? Our senses cannot only used for discovery but also for feedback. They help us decode the feelings from expressions and gestures. How can babies decode feelings of others without having much experience about life or knowing anything about their parents? Well, they feel them.

Babies decode the feelings of their parents reading their expressions. Reading expressions is not a telepathic experience. Babies read expressions the same way as they learn to give sounds or move. Mirror neurons respond not only to hand movement or intentional gestures. They also mirror unconscious facial expressions.

Babies looking at their mothers’s face mimic her expressions and unconscious gestures before any of them knows it. When mirror neurons fire, babies reproduce the expressions of their mothers to some extent. Beyond seeing the tiny movements of facial muscles accompanying their mother’s feelings, they also sense the same muscle tensions. These sensations in their bodies, in return, evoke similar feelings in their minds.

I already mentioned that babies discover meaning by realizing that certain phenomena are related to each other. Kids learn the meaning of more complex emotions in the same way. They build their own library of experience, which associates different stimuli with different events and memories from their past. Basic emotions, however, are the same for everyone. We do not learn them. We are born with them.

Various scientists name and group basic emotions in different ways, but they agree that fundamental human emotions are the same for everyone. We all feel love, joy, surprise, fear, or anger, for example.

Basic emotions are crucial for our survival. They make us react fast when our life depends on it and provide motivation for perseverance or helping each other, including our kids. Besides, humans can only live in groups or societies if they also understand the emotions of others. Emotions are visible on our face. We may not know what made someone angry, but we recognize anger on a stranger’s face. We also recognize amazement, excitement, or joy.

Recognition of the emotions of strangers is based on two mechanisms. First, our bodies and faces react to basic emotions in the same way. Expressions may be more restrained in some cultures, but they are the same. We all smile when we are happy. Second, with the help of our mirror neurons, we mimic the expressions of others without knowing it.

Mimicking cause us feel the same muscle tensions. As our body would react to the same emotion in the same way, these physical sensations evoke the same emotions. Our basic emotions and our physical reactions to them are hard-wired in our nervous system. Whenever we feel the same, our body reacts the same. Whenever we mimic physical reactions, we evoke the feelings associated with them.

What makes learning by mimicking possible? What causes our bodies to react the same way to the same basic emotions? These are fundamental characteristics of our human operating system designed to secure our survival. Our emotions result from the delicate process of assessing our complex environment. They are our responses to the multi-dimensional challenges we face. The physiological reactions to our basic emotions are designed to secure our survival. When we are agitated, it mobilizes our energy reserves. The excitement of curiosity opens our mind. When we are joyful, we relax and lower our shields.

The human operating system is a delicate system responsible for preparing our body to the changing circumstances. To understand how meditation works for each of us, I discuss this operating system in my book Meditation: Creating space in more detail.