In the childhood of every human being and at the dawn of human history there is an amazing and, until now, unexplained leap from simple genetically programmed behavior to language, symbolic thinking, and culture. In The First Idea, Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker explore this missing link and offer brilliant new insights into two longstanding questions: how human beings first create symbols and how these abilities evolved and were transmitted across generations over millions of years. From fascinating research into the intelligence of both human infants and apes, they identify certain cultural practices that are vitally important if we are to have stable and reflective future societies.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 9 reviews)

A classic

This book is written with a very exquisit languaje, very comprehensiveley written for everybody not just especialist in psychology. It is a classic, i fully recomend it.
September 24, 2008

The First Idea is a great idea!

This is a very interesting subject. While some of it seems a bit repetitious, it is very well researched and presents a fascinating view of human evolution. This book isn't for everyone, but everyone should understand what it's about. My personal view is that the author's downplay the role of genetics a bit too much. More likely, imho, genetics and cultural transmission had to work in tandem. But even with that minor criticism, this book presents a strong case for examining the role of emotional signaling and the importance of it for the development of our young. The family leave provisions in the US are pitiful compared to other industrialized countries. The first year is such a critical time in the development of a child that it should not be left to strangers at a day care center. After reading this book that will become abundantly clear to the reader.
December 07, 2007

A Book of the Century

This book should rank as one of the most important books published in the decade if not the century. Stanley Greenspan has studied the emotional development of children for twenty years and has developed insights about the development of mental processing in children. He has tested these insights by applying them to developing strategies for helping children diagnosed with autism. These strategies have brought a majority of such children close to or into the normal range of mental functioning. It seems to me to be "a cure for autism"!

Now, in this book, he and coauthor Shanker show how emotional interactions with children-playing with them, especially in long chains of back and forth connections that are fun for both adult and child-leads the child to the steps required for cognitive development. Emotions are not inferior to thinking, they are the foundation of the development of thinking.

The authors cite MRI data on the creation of synaptic connections in the brain associated with emotional experiences and relate that to Greenspan's work to hypothesize that human cognitive development has been accelerated by the accretion of gains made in one generation of children onto the next generation through the enhanced emotional and cognitive advances resulting from caregiving practices, generation after generation. In other words, they are positing the evolution of the human mind not through genetic change but through coevolving caregiving practices.

This hypothesis solves one of the most puzzling matters of human evolution-how did human beings surge in cognitive development in the last 8 or 10 thousand years, much too fast for genetic change. The authors' answer is that there was not genetic change, but there was the capacity for cognitive enhancement during the early growth of individuals through interaction with caregivers. And as the interactive patterns of caregivers with infants and children developed, so also did the number and complexity of synaptic connections in the brains of the children individually and, over time, cumulatively and collectively.

The implications of this insight are astounding. They provide a foundational basis for all human sciences that can lead to ways of diagnosing cognitive, behavioral and emotional difficulties on the basis of core causes rather than mere observational data as is currently the case with DSM IV. And arising from that, clinical work with such people can become at least as scientifically informed as physical medicine.

But there are larger implications for public policy and education. This approach provides a basis for saying reactive behavior and narrow frames of reference are not just individual ways of being, but are examples of developmental delays and should be dealt with as such, with compassion, indeed, but also with clarity regarding what they are.

The book is not as easy read, especially the later chapters, but there are few books ever written that more deserve to be read and understood.
November 04, 2007

Emotions plus a desire to interact plus evolution = language

When asked to cite what he believed but couldn't prove, Dan Dennett responded by saying that language was required for consciousness.

Interestingly Dennett's view easily harmonizes with strong trends in contemporary wisdom. The larger view is that there is something particular and special about humans and their capacity for language that is materially different than what evolutionarily has preceded them.

This book is a breath of fresh air for its helpful insight that humans are not materially different from what preceded them just more articulated in their thought processes and means of communicating them.

In seriatim the book traces infant development for the capacity of spoken language and compares that developing capacity with different species of animals within the animal kingdom. In a way, it's kind of reminiscent of the old medical school "ontogeny recapitulates philogeny." For those lucky enough not to have experienced medical school, the famous saying refers to the similarity between developmental stages of an unborn fetus and the various lifeforms in the animal kingdom. For example, the fertilized zygote resembles a one celled organism. The early developing fetus resembles a fishlike creature and so on.

In this book, needless to say, the more articulated the comparison being made between the infant's developing speech capacity, the more the authors will be inclined to use a more evolutionarily complicated life form.

Significantly the authors use the similarities between humans and other animals to highlight their basic likenesses which according to the authors subsist in their mutual emotive acquisition of knowledge. In this sense, this book is like Read Montague's Why Choose this Book wherein Montague merged Alan Turing mechanistic reasoning with emotive values to create an up to date model of cognition.

Again, these features are all welcome.

Where I think the authors falter is later in the book when they try to apply their theories to group dynamics. But even so the book remains healthy food for thought and welcome insight if only for the knowledge that when we visit the zoo, the animals looking back at us are really not that much different at all but certainly not lacking consciousness just because they don't speak out language.
February 11, 2007

Seminal Book Connects Speech, Cognition, and Autism

Since the research that supports the theory proposed by these authors is so thoroughly documented, it may prove too technical for the average reader. Still, the insights are stupendous and easily verifiable by anyone with good parenting skills. The fact that, when applied to people with autism, the results are outstanding and highly unusual, tends to validate their theory.

I found the book easy to skim and love the diverse perspectives of each author and contributor.

Now I wish someone would put all this together with another book, somewhat related: Nicholas Ostler's _Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World_. In this book, the author summarizes how various languages spread, supercede others, dominate, or suppress other languages, how they are learned, how creole and pidin languages develop, the structure of various languages, etc.

Perhaps if all these authors got together with someone else, they could explain how various languages shape cognition and even, perhaps, perception, framing the world as each person sees it, and maybe how various cultures tend to see it, based on the language in which they think.

In some languages, the verb comes first and in others, last. In some languages, adjectives come before nouns and in others, after. In some languages, nouns can be feminine, masculine, or neuter. In others, there is no neuter. All of this must shape how humans see things and think--at least as much as emotions do, if the theory these authors propose is accurate.

I heard a report on public radio about how, when people who speak Japanese view a picture of a tiger in a jungle, the parts of their brains that get stimulated are the parts that are viewing the jungle. When English speakers view the same picture, the parts of their brains that get stimulated are the the parts that are viewing the tiger. I don't know how they measured this and I don't know if language has anything to do with it, but it certainly seems to be a nurture, not nature thing.

The world is evolving and there is so much more to be understood about where we came from that may have implications about where we're going.

This book helps move us forward on that journey.
October 18, 2005

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health: A Comprehensive, Developmental Approach to Assessment and Intervention
by Stanley I. Greenspan, Serena Wieder

Building Healthy Minds: The Six Experiences That Create Intelligence and Emotional Growth in Babies and Young Children
by Stanley I Greenspan, Nancy Lewis, Stanley I. Greenspan

The Growth of the Mind: And the Endangered Origins of Intelligence
by Stanley I. Greenspan, Beryl Lieff Benderly

Playground Politics: Understanding the Emotional Life of Your School-Age Child
by Stanley I. Greenspan, Jacqueline Salmon

A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain
by John J. Ratey