Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 3

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 3

Modern psychology thus sees in muscles organs of __EXPRESSION__ for all

efferent processes. Beyond all their demonstrable functions, every

change of attention and of psychic states generally plays upon them

unconsciously, modifying their tension in subtle ways so that they may

be called organs of thought and feeling as well as of will, in which

some now see the true Kantian thing-in-itself the real substance of

the world, in the anthropomorphism of force. Habits even determine the

deeper strata of belief; thought is repressed action; and deeds, not

words, are the language of complete men. The motor areas are closely

related and largely identical with the psychic, and muscle culture

develops brain-centers as nothing else yet demonstrably does. Muscles

are the vehicles of habituation, imitation, obedience, character, and

even of manners and customs. For the young, motor education is

cardinal, and is now coming to due recognition; and, for all,

education is incomplete without a motor side. Skill, endurance, and

perseverance may almost be called muscular virtues; and fatigue,

velleity, caprice, _ennui_, restlessness, lack of control and poise,

muscular faults.

 

To understand the momentous changes of motor functions that

characterize adolescence we must consider other than the measurable

aspects of the subject. Perhaps the best scale on which to measure all

normal growth of muscle structure and functions is found in the

progress from fundamental to accessory. The former designates the

muscles and movements of the trunk and large joints, neck, back, hips,

shoulders, knees, and elbows, sometimes called central, and which in

general man has in common with the higher and larger animals. Their

activities are few, mostly simultaneous, alternating and rhythmic, as

of the legs in walking, and predominate in hard-working men and women

with little culture or intelligence, and often in idiots. The latter

or accessory movements are those of the hand, tongue, face, and

articulatory organs, and these may be connected into a long and

greatly diversified series, as those used in writing, talking,

piano-playing. They are represented by smaller and more numerous

muscles, whose functions develop later in life and represent a higher

standpoint of evolution. These smaller muscles for finer movements

come into function later and are chiefly associated with psychic

activity, which plays upon them by incessantly changing their

tensions, if not causing actual movement. It is these that are so

liable to disorder in the many automatisms and choreic tics we see in

school children, especially if excited or fatigued. General paralysis

usually begins in the higher levels by breaking these down, so that

the first symptom of its insidious and never interrupted progress is

inability to execute the more exact and delicate movements of tongue

or hand, or both. Starting with the latest evolutionary level, it is a

devolution that may work downward till very many of the fundamental

activities are lost before death.

 

Nothing better illustrates this distinction than the difference

between the fore foot of animals and the human hand. The first begins

as a fin or paddle or is armed with a hoof, and is used solely for

locomotion. Some carnivora with claws use the fore limb also for

holding well as tearing, and others for digging. Arboreal life seems

to have almost created the simian hand and to have wrought a

revolution in the form and use of the forearm and its accessory

organs, the fingers. Apes and other tree-climbing creatures must not

only adjust their prehensile organ to a wide variety of distances and

sizes of branches, but must use the hands more or less freely for

picking, transporting, and eating fruit; and this has probably been a

prime factor in lifting man to the erect position, without which human

intelligence as we know it could have hardly been possible. "When we

attempt to measure the gap between man and the lower animals in terms

of the form of movement, the wonder is no less great than when we use

the term of mentality."[3] The degree of approximation to human

intelligence in anthropoid animals follows very closely the degree of

approximation to human movements.

 

The gradual acquirement of the erect position by the human infant

admirably repeats this long phylogenetic evolution.[4] At first the

limbs are of almost no use in locomotion, but the fundamental trunk

muscles with those that move the large joints are more or less

spasmodically active. Then comes creeping, with use of the hip

muscles, while all below the knee is useless, as also are the fingers.

Slowly the leg and foot are degraded to locomotion, slowly the great

toe becomes more limited in its action, the thumb increases in

flexibility and strength of opposition, and the fingers grow more

mobile and controllable. As the body slowly assumes the vertical

attitude, the form of the chest changes till its greatest diameter is

transverse instead of from front to back. The shoulder-blades are less

parallel than in quadrupeds, and spread out till they approximate the

same plane. This gives the arm freedom of movement laterally, so that

it can be rotated one hundred and eighty degrees in man as contrasted

to one hundred degrees in apes, thus giving man the command of almost

any point within a sphere of which the two arms are radii. The power

of grasping was partly developed from and partly added to the old

locomotor function of the fore limbs; the jerky aimless automatisms,

as well as the slow rhythmic flexion and extension of the fingers and

hand, movements which are perhaps survivals of arboreal or of even

earlier aquatic life, are coördinated; and the bilateral and

simultaneous rhythmic movements of the heavier muscles are

supplemented by the more finely adjusted and specialized activities

which as the end of the growth period is approached are determined

less by heredity and more by environment. In a sense, a child or a man

is the sum total of his movements or tendencies to move; and nature

and instinct chiefly determine the basal, and education the accessory

parts of our activities.

 

The entire accessory system is thus of vital importance for the

development of all of the arts of __EXPRESSION__. These smaller muscles

might almost be called organs of thought. Their tension is modified

with the faintest change of soul, such as is seen in accent,

inflection, facial __EXPRESSION__s, handwriting, and many forms of

so-called mind-reading, which, in fact, is always muscle-reading. The

day-laborer of low intelligence, with a practical vocabulary of not

over five hundred words, who can hardly move each of his fingers

without moving others or all of them, who can not move his brows or

corrugate his forehead at will, and whose inflection is very

monotonous, illustrates a condition of arrest or atrophy of this

later, finer, accessory system of muscles. On the other hand, the

child, precocious in any or all of these later respects, is very

liable to be undeveloped in the larger and more fundamental parts and

functions. The full unfoldment of each is, in fact, an inexorable

condition precedent for the normal development to full and abiding

maturity of the higher and more refined muscularity, just as

conversely the awkwardness and clumsiness of adolescence mark a

temporary loss of balance in the opposite direction. If this general

conception be correct, then nature does not finish the basis of her

pyramid in the way Ross, Mercier, and others have assumed, but lays a

part of the foundation and, after carrying it to an apex, normally

goes back and adds to the foundation to carry up the apex still higher

and, if prevented from so doing, expends her energy in building the

apex up at a sharper angle till instability results. School and

kindergarten often lay a disproportionate strain on the tiny accessory

muscles, weighing altogether but a few ounces, that wag the tongue,

move the pen, and do fine work requiring accuracy. But still at this

stage prolonged work requiring great accuracy is irksome and brings

dangers homologous to those caused by too much fine work in the

kindergarten before the first adjustment of large to small muscles,

which lasts until adolescence, is established. Then disproportion

between function and growth often causes symptoms of chorea. The chief

danger is arrest of the development and control of the smaller

muscles. Many occupations and forms of athletics, on the contrary,

place the stress mainly upon groups of fundamental muscles to the

neglect of finer motor possibilities. Some who excel in heavy

athletics no doubt coarsen their motor reactions, become not only

inexact and heavy but unresponsive to finer stimuli, as if the large

muscles were hypertrophied and the small ones arrested. On the other

hand, many young men, and probably more young women, expend too little

of their available active energy upon basal and massive muscle work,

and cultivate too much, and above all too early, the delicate

responsive work. This is, perhaps, the best physiological

characterization of precocity and issues in excessive nervous and

muscular irritability. The great influx of muscular vigor that unfolds

during adolescent years and which was originally not only necessary to

successful propagation, but expressive of virility, seems to be a very

plastic quantity, so that motor regimen and exercise at this stage is

probably more important and all-conditioning for mentality, sexuality,

and health than at any other period of life. Intensity, and for a time

a spurty diathesis, is as instinctive and desirable as are the copious

minor automatisms which spontaneously give the alphabet out of which

complex and finer motor series are later spelled by the conscious

will. Mercier and others have pointed out that, as most skilled labor,

so school work and modern activities in civilized life generally lay

premature and disproportionate strains upon those kinds of movement

requiring exactness. Stress upon basal movements is not only

compensating but is of higher therapeutic value against the disorders

of the accessory system; it constitutes the best core or prophylactic

for fidgets and tense states, and directly develops poise, control,

and psycho-physical equilibrium. Even when contractions reach choreic

intensity the best treatment is to throw activities down the scale

that measures the difference between primary and secondary movements

and to make the former predominate.

 

The number of movements, the frequency with which they are repeated,

their diversity, the number of combinations, and their total kinetic

quantum in young children, whether we consider movements of the body

as a whole, fundamental movements of large limbs, or finer accessory

motions, is amazing. Nearly every external stimulus is answered by a

motor response. Dresslar[5] observed a thirteen months' old baby for

four hours, and found, to follow Preyer's classification, impulsive or

spontaneous, reflex, instinctive, imitative, inhibitive, expressive,

and even deliberative movements, with marked satisfaction in rhythm,

attempts to do almost anything which appealed to him, and almost

inexhaustible efferent resources. A friend has tried to record every

word uttered by a four-year-old girl during a portion of a day, and

finds nothing less than verbigerations. A teacher noted the activities

of a fourteen-year-old boy during the study time of a single school

day[6], with similar results.

 

Lindley[7] studied 897 common motor automatisms in children, which he

divided into 92 classes: 45 in the region of the head, 20 in the feet

and legs, 19 in the hands and fingers. Arranged in the order of

frequency with which each was found, the list stood as follows:

fingers, feet, lips, tongue, head, body, hands, mouth, eyes, jaws,

legs, forehead, face, arms, ears. In the last five alone adolescents

exceeded children, the latter excelling the former most in those of

head, mouth, legs, and tongue, in this order. The writer believes that

there are many more automatisms than appeared in his returns.

 

School life, especially in the lower grades, is a rich field for the

study of these activities. They are familiar, as licking things,

clicking with the tongue, grinding the teeth, scratching, tapping,

twirling a lock of hair or chewing it, biting the nails (Bérillon's

onychophagia), shrugging, corrugating, pulling buttons or twisting

garments, strings, etc., twirling pencils, thumbs, rotating, nodding

and shaking the head, squinting and winking, swaying, pouting and

grimacing, scraping the floor, rubbing hands, stroking, patting,

flicking the fingers, wagging, snapping the fingers, muffling,

squinting, picking the face, interlacing the fingers, cracking the

joints, finger plays, biting and nibbling, trotting the leg, sucking things, etc.