Free The Social Animal by David Brooks Page B

with your finger,” the young boy pleaded. The child’s mother was astonished.
    “Why?” she asked.
    “I’m not here,” the boy cried. “Touch me, Mother, so that I may be here.”

CHAPTER 4
    MAPMAKING

    HAROLD HAD BEGUN HIS LIFE STARING AT MOM , BUT IT WASN’T long before the grubby world of materialism entered the picture. He didn’t begin this phase longing for Porsches and Rolexes. At first, he was more of a stripes man—stripes and black-and-white checkered squares. After that he developed a thing for edges—edges of boxes, edges of shelves. He would stare at edges the way Charles Manson stared at cops.
    Then, as the months went by, it was boxes, wheels, rattles, and sippy cups. He became a great leveler—consumed by the conviction that all matter should rest at its lowest possible altitude. Plates came off tables and onto the floor. Books came off shelves and onto the floor. Half-used boxes of spaghettini were liberated from their pantry prison and returned to their natural habitat across the kitchen floor.
     
    The delightful thing about Harold at this stage was that he was both a psychology major and a physics major. His two main vocations were figuring out how to learn from his mother and figuring out how stuff falls. He’d look at her frequently to make sure she was protecting him, and then go off in search of stuff to topple. He possessed what Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl call an “explanatory drive.” Harold could sit for long stretches trying to fit different size boxes inside one another, and then when they were finally together, some primeval Sandy Koufax urge would come over him and they’d be flying down the stairs.
     
    He was exploring and learning, but at this point in his life, Harold’s thought processes were radically different from yours and mine. Young children don’t seem to have a self-conscious inner observer. The executive-function areas in the front of the brain are slow to mature, so Harold did little controlled, self-directed thinking.
     
    That meant he had no inner narrator that he thought of as himself. He couldn’t consciously remember the past, or consciously connect his past actions to his present ones in one coherent timeline. He couldn’t remember earlier thoughts or how he learned anything. Until he was eighteen months, he couldn’t pass the mirror test. If you put a sticker on an adult chimpanzee’s forehead or a dolphin’s forehead, the animal understands that the sticker is on his own head. But Harold lacked that amount of self-awareness. To him the sticker was on the forehead of some creature in the mirror. He was very good at recognizing others, but he could not recognize himself.
     
    Even up to age three, children don’t seem to get the concept of self-consciously focused attention. They assume that the mind goes blank when there is no outside thing bidding for its attention. When you ask preschoolers if an adult they are watching is focusing her attention on part of a scene, they don’t seem to understand what you are talking about. If you ask them if they can go long stretches of time without thinking at all, they say yes. As Alison Gopnik writes in
The Philosophical Baby
, “They don’t understand that thoughts can simply follow the logic of your internal experience instead of being triggered from the outside.”
     
    Gopnik writes that adults have searchlight consciousness. We direct attention at specific locations. Harold, like all young children, had what Gopnik calls “lantern consciousness.” It illuminated outward in all directions—a vivid panoramic awareness of everything. It was like being exuberantly lost in a 360-degree movie. A million things caught his attention in random bombardments. Here was an interesting shape! There was another! There was a light! There was a person!
    Even that description understates the radical weirdness of Harold’s consciousness at this point. The lantern metaphor suggests that Harold