Normally in any work related to Buddhism pre-birth personality aspects would relate to re-birth (reincarnation, for some), but I'm on the subject of how my kids seemed inside the womb instead. It relates to two starting points: telling someone about that in a message recently, and also a point raised by Jordan Peterson, that You-tuber psychology professor (really in this video about personality related to Piaget, but the next one related to Freud was probably slightly more interesting overall).
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Jordan Peterson, my favorite psychologist (credit his website) |
Let's start with those online discussion comments, the story about interacting with my kids before they were actually born:
I had believed that culture and learning through experiences must play a much larger role in personal development and attributes than genetics before I had kids, but that experience has changed that. My son and daughter were different people when they were still inside the womb; they could express it in the way they interacted while I would sing to them. Keoni was hyper in there; he would be excited to hear from me, and would really kick the side, and seemed to be agitated by being crowded towards the end when he was outgrowing the size of the space. Kalani interacted enough that I knew she understood we were communicating, in a sense, but she was calm about it.
Even the way they both took being born matches up with the way their personalities turned out later. Keoni screamed like something horrible was going on, and stayed a bit hysterical for some time, and Kalani cried a little but then was curious to see what was going on. I can’t really fill in how that connects with how they are right now but it does. She first saw him when she was about an hour old, maybe just a little later, as we were coming down from the operating room level after she’d been cleaned up and checked out. She was in a plastic box to control temperature and access to air and pathogens, I guess it was, and as he looked at her and talked to her she smiled. I really didn’t think that’s an innate expression, and maybe it was just coincidence, but it really looked as if she recognized him. For sure she’d been hearing him for 9 months.
If I was more into psychology I'd probably be expressing that more related to big five personality characteristics, and could go on to say more about how it maps to how they are now, but I'm not that read up the subject. Eventually I might do more with those concepts and models but the ordinary framing of related ideas probably covers a lot of the same ground in this case anyway. I might add that to the extent that psychology and philosophy overlap (not so much, but a little) I'm a lot more familiar with it, since I did study that subject somewhat extensively.
I won't really say more about that part, about how they were as fetuses, or about how they seemed to already partly be who I would later know them as. As an 8 year old my son is still easily agitated, and very emotional, and as a three year old my daughter is still a lot more calm and curious about new experiences, versus anxious about them. He had trouble adjusting his first week of school, for example, or the first few weeks really, and she didn't, at all. The ideas extend from there but most of the point is already made.
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meeting for the first time, in a sense |
Babies and sense of humor
Onto the second starting point already then: Jordan Peterson raised the idea in that video about how babies seem to have a sense of humor almost immediately, or at least as soon as they are able to interact and demonstrate such an attribute. He didn't explain it, and actually went the other way with that, mentioning it's not completely clear why they would possess that so early (or is it how?; maybe both questions make sense, and one comes before the other). I guess it partly ties in with the idea I've proposed that a lot of someone's character is already pinned down before they are born, but here I'm going to take that mostly in a different direction.
I'll pass on some thoughts about why it would be practical to have a sense of humor so early. Oddly I dreamt an answer to why. It's kind of strange for my subconscious to be getting in on mulling the subject over, but why not. It seems related to play. He mentioned the importance and function of play before, which is all obvious enough, not exactly requiring psychological study to follow. It prepares children to face real life situations similar to those they act out, and provides an opportunity to work on physical skills, and social roles, mapping related ideas together, exploring cause and effect, etc.
Related to parts of that, for young kids he mentioned "rough and tumble" play is critical, part of figuring out physical limits. I'm reminded of my Dad throwing us into the air; the kind of thing kids love, and mothers don't like so much. Of course I do the same with mine, with a favorite form as them doing a "super-baby" pose, holding them up overhead so they can experience that height and practice something like planking, sort of like a yoga move. Apparently a baby can do that a bit before they are one year old, and my eight year old would still like to give it a go but kids get a bit heavy and unwieldy around 5 or 6 or so (he's 8 now).
Another type of play is to practice variations of simple games like peek-a-boo, which in Thai goes by "ja-ay" instead. We most often play that with them older than one, in a form of hiding behind a curtain, but he refers to that as a game related to hiding simply by holding a hand in front of their eyes, so the kind of thing a baby a few months old could take up. According to Jordan Peterson the game variations help them practice both reasoning and social interaction, related to recognizing more complex forms of patterns of the game (more or less; I summarize).
Why express humor within the first few months though, as early as they can possibly interact? It makes one wonder what it connects to, and of course I have no idea, but I'll speculate. It seems possible play and exploration are two related things, and so is humor. If my kids see me bang my head it's funny to them, and although actually getting injured wouldn't be funny it seems to play a role in helping them avoid a more serious pattern of cause and effect.
Why would it need to be funny, though? Games tend to be funny or at least fun, enjoyable, and this helps kids enjoy repeating the same type of practice over an over. In an interesting observation Dr. Peterson mentioned that they are copying themselves in a lot of early learning, for example hitting a "mobile" with their hand, then trying to do it again on purpose, with it taking nearly countless attempts to master hand and eye dexterity. There would have to be some reward mechanism to trying that sort of thing over and over; it couldn't really just be an academic curiosity to a baby in the same sense I might watch Youtube videos on psychology just to learn. If it's funny to see something that doesn't match expectations in different ways, like a two month old banging a mobile around, or watching me bump my head, it might help with repeating the cycles of learning. Actually hitting me on the head would work better as an example of physical limitations play, and they do get around to such things.
Linking the two ideas, about my son talking to me in the womb (communicating by kicking the side), and a baby playing with a mobile, there is no reason why the process would need to start at birth. A baby would know where it's own hands were from idle months spent in the womb, with only itself and the edges as stimulus (and sound, and motion; they would hear and feel a lot from the outside world).
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she could definitely smile within a couple of days |
A baby enjoying the skill of banging into a mobile intentionally, or later sucking on toes, finding a new body part, and a fetus sucking it's thumb wouldn't seem to reflect the same emotional reward pattern as humor. Even if they're related they still seem quite different. It makes one consider what humor is really doing, and again we've reached a point where more background in psychology and awareness of common understanding would be useful.
Humor really spans a range, doesn't it? Slapstick was based on enjoying people falling down, and fart jokes are kind of a lower end baseline, seeing body functions that are regarded negatively as funny. More intellectual humor is related to observation of unusual linked references, of getting a connection that is unexpected. Related to function humor can diffuse a type of tension, or resolve a type of conflict. Physical space and body control would pose a large conceptual problem for a baby for quite some time, so to them in a sense these could be lower forms of problems to work on, with situational tension and conflict requiring more concepts to build up to.
Considering a parallel with animals
It's a bit of a stretch but all of this makes me consider to what extent an animal can do some of the same things. They tend to not really have much sense of humor, typically, don't they? Or more intelligent dogs can seem to. We had a cat that was painfully stupid (he would get stuck on the same roof for two weeks in a row, always forgetting how he got up there, or not realizing that he couldn't un-do those steps) and he seemed to really enjoy interactions and play on a level cats typically don't. Of course "play" cats can do, and dogs, and it seems to fill a similar role. A cat bats around a ball of string to mimic catching a mouse, although it's perhaps not clear that the same cause for doing both isn't common, that it could be acting out the same thing for them, not practicing one by way of the other. Some dogs love to chase a stick as a game, and that does seem social, that it's as much about interaction as practice. My brother had a cat he named "fetch" because it would do the same. But what would a dog find funny?
If the same pattern holds they might expect something, and experience some degree of tension, or lack of expectation resolution, then something unexpected would happen. Of course with my kids the unexpected thing can be the same hundreds of times; it's more just a resolution. I would participate in rough and tumble play with the smartest dog that we ever owned; she would jump around, and pretend to bite me, barking a bit, and I would grab at her. But it didn't seem to extend to humor, which would require more concepts. Maybe a relationship to time and abstract concepts bridges play and humor, in ways that might not be obvious.
It's a given that dogs experience emotions, isn't it? It seems so to me. They experience equivalences to anger, and fear, happiness, anxiety, and boredom. Cats less so; ours seem complex to me but not common with us in character, for the most part. I raised pigs as a child (four; I wasn't exactly a farmer, but that was some experience) and they really do seem roughly as intelligent as dogs, but different in character. Maybe they're less emotional. Then again dogs learn to interact with us in the same ways we do based on different factors, which include how intelligent the dog is, other in-born character aspects, and the extent to which they interact with people, and related to the nature of that interaction. This tangent really doesn't get far with the main theme since to me they definitely can play but humor is something else. As far as I've noticed animals don't find things to be funny.
I Googled dogs and humor just to see if anyone thought differently, and it turns out Charles Darwin did (cited in this modern reference article on dogs and humor):
In the 1872 edition of The Descent of Man, he writes: Dogs show what may be fairly called a sense of humor, as distinct from mere play; if a bit of stick or other such object be thrown to one, he will often carry it away for a short distance; and then squatting down with it on the ground close before him, will wait until his master comes quite close to take it away. The dog will then seize it and rush away in triumph, repeating the same maneuver, and evidently enjoying the practical joke.”
Play versus humor seem interrelated but different, as I've mentioned, but the article does go on to give dogs credit for extending into the latter.
Conclusion
I don't have much for conclusions. My kids seemed to experience play to different degrees before they were born, or at least interaction, and I tried to extend that considering a relation to humor. I'm not sure how early interactions with my kids seemed to clearly be expressions of humor, of finding things funny. They seem quite aware long before they are able to make their own impressions of things clear, which builds up slowly. If my daughter really did smile within an hour or so of being born then that form of expression is available nearly right away, or could be, but I'm not sure to what extent they practice and master such things versus learning them from scratch.
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what she looks like now |
Both my kids really did seem to know me within hours of being born, to recognize me by voice--but again that's a little off the main subject. She might not have smiled within an hour but she did seem to use that expression in a typical way within the first week.
I took a video of my daughter laughing for the first time--the kind of thing you would absolutely never catch on "tape" since you wouldn't expect it--and she was just over three months old then. I guess in a limited sense she had already passed a milestone related to humor just then. She wasn't laughing at something funny, really, unless her mother laughing with her seemed funny to her (and maybe it did). Somehow I suspect me bumping my head would have been funny to her even before that, or her brother acting silly. I guess the part about how or why she had that ability then I don't know, and can only ramble on about it in speculation, as I already did.
