Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 4

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 4

The average number of automatisms per 100 persons Smith found to be in

children 176, in adolescents 110. Swaying is chiefly with children;

playing and drumming with the fingers is more common among

adolescents; the movements of fingers and feet decline little with

age, and those of eyes and forehead increase, which is significant for

the development of attention. Girls excel greatly in swaying, and

also, although less, in finger automatism; and boys lead in movements

of tongue, feet, and hands. Such movements increase, with too much

sitting, intensity of effort, such as to fix attention, and vary with

the nature of the activity willed, but involve few muscles directly

used in a given task. They increase up the kindergarten grades and

fall off rapidly in the primary grades; are greater with tasks

requiring fine and exact movements than with those involving large

movements. Automatisms are often a sign of the difficulty of tasks.

The restlessness that they often express is one of the commonest signs

of fatigue. They are mostly in the accessory muscles, while those of

the fundamental muscles (body, legs, and arms) disappear rapidly with

age; those of eye, brow, and jaw show greatest increase with age, but

their frequency in general declines with growing maturity, although

there is increased frequency of certain specialized contractions,

which indicate the gradual settling of __EXPRESSION__ in the face.

 

Often such movements pass over by insensible gradation into the morbid

automatism of chorea, and in yet lower levels of decay we see them in

the aimless picking and plucking movements of the fingers of the sick.

In idiots[8] arrest of higher powers often goes with hypertrophy of

these movements, as seen in head-beaters (as if, just as nature impels

those partially blind to rub the eyes for "light-hunger," so it

prompts the feeble-minded to strike the head for cerebrations),

rockers, rackers, shakers, biters, etc. Movements often pass to fixed

attitudes and postures of limbs or body, disturbing the normal balance

between flexors and extensors, the significance of which as nerve

signs or exponents of habitual brain states and tensions Warner has so

admirably shown.

 

Abundance and vigor of automatic movements are desirable, and even a

considerable degree of restlessness is a good sign in young children.

Many of what are now often called nerve signs and even choreic

symptoms, the fidgetiness in school on cloudy days and often after a

vacation, the motor superfluities of awkwardness, embarrassment,

extreme effort, excitement, fatigue, sleepiness, etc., are simply the

forms in which we receive the full momentum of heredity and mark a

natural richness of the raw material of intellect, feeling, and

especially of will. Hence they must be abundant. All parts should act

in all possible ways at first and untrammeled by the activity of all

other parts and functions. Some of these activities are more essential

for growth in size than are later and more conscious movements. Here

as everywhere the rule holds that powers themselves must be unfolded

before the ability to check or even to use them can develop. All

movements arising from spontaneous activity of nerve cells or centers

must be made in order even to avoid the atrophy of disease. Not only

so, but this purer kind of innateness must often be helped out to some

extent in some children by stimulating reflexes; a rich and wide

repertory of sensation must be made familiar; more or less and very

guarded, watched and limited experiences of hunger, thirst, cold,

heat, tastes, sounds, smells, colors, brightnesses, tactile

irritations, and perhaps even occasional tickling and pain to play off

the vastly complex function of laughing, crying, etc., may in some

cases be judicious. Conscious and unconscious imitation or repetition

of every sort of copy may also help to establish the immediate and

low-level connection between afferent and efferent processes that

brings the organism into direct _rapport_ and harmony with the whole

world of sense. Perhaps the more rankly and independently they are

developed to full functional integrity, each in its season, if we only

knew that season, the better. Premature control by higher centers, or

coördination into higher compounds of habits and ordered serial

activities, is repressive and wasteful, and the mature will of which

they are components, or which must at least domesticate them, is

stronger and more forcible if this serial stage is not unduly

abridged.

 

But, secondly, many, if not most, of these activities when developed a

little, group after group, as they arise, must be controlled, checked,

and organized into higher and often more serial compounds. The

inhibiting functions are at first hard. In trying to sit still the

child sets its teeth, holds the breath, clenches its fists and perhaps

makes every muscle tense with a great effort that very soon exhausts.

This repressive function is probably not worked from special nervous

centers, nor can we speak with confidence of collisions with "sums of

arrest" in a sense analogous to that of Herbart, or of stimuli that

normally cause catabolic molecular processes in the cell, being

mysteriously diverted to produce increased instability or anabolic

lability in the sense of Wundt's _Mechanik der Nerven_. The concept

now suggested by many facts is that inhibition is irradiation or long

circuiting to higher and more complex brain areas, so that the energy,

whether spontaneous or reflex, is diverted to be used elsewhere. These

combinations are of a higher order, more remote from reflex action,

and modified by some Jacksonian third level.[9] Action is now not from

independent centers, but these are slowly associated, so that

excitation may flow off from one point to any other and any reaction

may result from any stimulus.

 

The more unified the brain the less it suffers from localization, and

the lower is the level to which any one function can exhaust the

whole. The tendency of each group of cells to discharge or overflow

into those of lower tension than themselves increases as

correspondence in time and space widens. The more one of a number of

activities gains in power to draw on all the brain, or the more

readily the active parts are fed at cost of the resting parts, the

less is rest to be found in change from one of these activities to

another, and the less do concentration and specialization prove to be

dangerous. Before, the aim was to wake all parts to function; now it

is to connect them. Intensity of this cross-section activity now tends

to unity, so that all parts of the brain energize together. In a brain

with this switchboard function well organized, each reaction has grown

independent of its own stimulus and may result from any stimulation,

and each act, e.g., a finger movement of a peculiar nature, may tire

the whole brain. This helps us to understand why brain-workers so

often excel laborers not only in sudden dynamometric strength test,

but in sustained and long-enduring effort. In a good brain or in a

good machine, power may thus be developed over a large surface, and

all of it applied to a small one, and hence the dangers of

specialization are lessened in exact proportion as the elements of our

ego are thus compacted together. It is in the variety and delicacy of

these combinations and all that they imply, far more than in the

elements of which they are composed, that man rises farthest above the

higher animals; and of these powers later adolescence is the golden

age. The aimless and archaic movements of infancy, whether massive and

complex or in the form of isolated automatic tweaks or twinges, are

thus, by slow processes of combined analysis and synthesis, involving

changes as radical as any in all the world of growth, made over into

habits and conduct that fit the world of present environment.

 

But, thirdly, this long process carried out with all degrees of

completeness may be arrested at any unfinished stage. Some automatisms

refuse to be controlled by the will, and both they and it are often

overworked. Here we must distinguish constantly between (1) those

growing rankly in order to be later organized under the will, and (2)

those that have become feral after this domestication of them has lost

power from disease or fatigue, and (3) those that have never been

subjugated because the central power that should have used them to

weave the texture of willed action--the proper language of complete

manhood--was itself arrested or degenerate. With regard to many of

these movements these distinctions can be made with confidence, and in

some children more certainly than in others. In childhood, before

twelve, the efferent patterns should be developed into many more or

less indelible habits, and their colors set fast. Motor specialties

requiring exactness and grace like piano-playing, drawing, writing,

pronunciation of a foreign tongue, dancing, acting, singing, and a

host of virtuosities, must be well begun before the relative arrest of

accessory growth at the dawn of the ephebic regeneration and before

its great afflux of strength. The facts seem to show that children of

this age, such as Hancock[10] described, who could not stand with feet

close together and eyes closed without swaying much, could not walk

backward, sit still half a minute, dress alone, tie two ends of a

string together, interlace slats, wind thread, spin a top, stand on

toes or heels, hop on each foot, drive a nail, roll a hoop, skate, hit

fingers together rapidly in succession beginning at the little finger

and then reversing, etc., are the very ones in whom automatisms are

most marked or else they are those constitutionally inert, dull, or

uneducable.

 

In children these motor residua may persist as characteristic features

of inflection, accent, or manners; automatisms may become morbid in

stammering or stuttering, or they may be seen in gait, handwriting,

tics or tweaks, etc. Instead of disappearing with age, as they should,

they are seen in the blind as facial grimaces uncorrected by the

mirror or facial consciousness, in the deaf as inarticulate noises;

and they may tend to grow monstrous with age as if they were

disintegrated fragments of our personality, split off and aborted, or

motor parasites leaving our psycho-physic ego poorer in energy and

plasticity of adaptation, till the distraction and anarchy of the

individual nature becomes conspicuous and pathetic.

 

At puberty, however, when muscle habits are so plastic, when there is

a new relation between quantity or volume of motor energy and

qualitative differentiation, and between volitional control and reflex

activities, these kinetic remnants strongly tend to shoot together

into wrong aggregates if right ones are not formed. Good manners and

correct motor form generally, as well as skill, are the most economic

ways of doing things; but this is the age of wasteful ways,

awkwardness mannerisms, tensions that are a constant leakage of vital

energy, perhaps semi-imperative acts, contortions, quaint movements,

more elaborated than in childhood and often highly anesthetic and

disagreeable, motor coördinations that will need laborious

decomposition later. The avoidable factor in their causation is, with

some modification, not unlike that of the simpler feral movements and

faulty attitudes, carriage, and postures in children; viz., some form

of overpressure or misfit between environment and nature. As during

the years from four to eight there is great danger that overemphasis

of the activities of the accessory muscles will sow the seeds of

chorea, or aggravate predispositions to it, now again comes a greatly

increased danger, hardly existing from eight to twelve, that

overprecision, especially if fundamental activities are neglected,

will bring nervous strain and stunting precocity. This is again the

age of the basal, e.g., hill-climbing muscle, of leg and back and

shoulder work, and of the yet more fundamental heart, lung, and chest

muscles. Now again, the study of a book, under the usual conditions of

sitting in a closed space and using pen, tongue, and eye combined, has

a tendency to overstimulate the accessory muscles. This is especially

harmful for city children who are too prone to the distraction of

overmobility at an age especially exposed to maladjustment of motor

income and expenditure; and it constitutes not a liberal or

power-generating, but a highly and prematurely specialized, narrowing,

and weakening education unless offset by safeguards better than any

system of gymnastics, which is at best artificial and exaggerated.

 

As Bryan well says, "The efficiency of a machine depends so far as we

know upon the maximum force, rate, amplitude, and variety of direction

of its movements and upon the exactness with which below these maxima

the force, rate, amplitude, and direction of the movements can be

controlled." The motor efficiency of a man depends upon his ability in

all these respects. Moreover, the education of the small muscles and

fine adjustments of larger ones is as near mental training as physical

culture can get; for these are the thought-muscles and movements, and

their perfected function is to reflect and express by slight

modifications of tension and tone every psychic change. Only the brain

itself is more closely and immediately an organ of thought than are

these muscles and their activity, reflex, spontaneous, or imitative in

origin. Whether any of them are of value, as Lindley thinks, in

arousing the brain to activity, or as Müller suggests, in drawing off

sensations or venting efferent impulses that would otherwise distract,

we need not here discuss. If so, this is, of course, a secondary and

late function--nature's way of making the best of things and utilizing remnants.