Children's Folklore, Children's Brains

Jay Mechling

American Studies Program
University of California, Davis

This essay was prepared for a panel on "Science, Cognitive Science, and Folklore" at the meeting of the American Folklore Society, Oct. 21-24, 1999, in Memphis, TN. Please do not quote or cite this essay without permission of the the author.

Nothing breaks the triviality barrier in our society quite like science. The specific "triviality barrier" I have in mind is the one named thirty years ago by Brian Sutton-Smith (1970) when he was complaining about psychologists' and others' overlooking children's folklore as too everyday, too mundane, too trivial to warrant serious academic study. Sutton-Smith has devoted much of his scholarly life to arguing precisely the opposite case, and his latest book-- The Ambiguity of Play (1997)-- pursues the case by following the trajectory of academic psychology's interests from its older concerns to the new, interdisciplinary cognitive and brain sciences. Sutton-Smith's book ends where I would like to begin my own inquiry into the relationships between children's folklore and children's brains. Put differently, I am asking whether we who study children's folklore should be paying more attention to what is happening in those sciences, and whether children's folklorists might have something important to contribute to scientific inquiry in those sciences.

I shall begin with a very brief sketch of the history of the uses of psychological research by those who study children's folklore. Sutton-Smith's own career is a useful example here. Then I shall review some recent developments in cognitive and brain sciences. Finally, I shall speculate on the implications of the current state of knowledge in these sciences for our study and understanding of children's folklore.

From Piaget to Gould

Trained as a developmental and educational psychologist, Sutton-Smith is largely responsible for bringing scientific psychology to bear upon the folklore of children. Some children's folklorists-- including Martha Wolfenstein and Alan Dundes (see Mechling 1996)-- have used psychoanalytic theory to interpret children's folk texts, but far more common is the use of the developmental psychologies of Piaget, Vygotsky, and others. Sutton-Smith has both used Piaget and offered useful critiques of Piaget's work. In some of Sutton-Smith's research, children's folklore serves as the texts to help measure the abilities of growing children to acquire certain cognitive skills. His large project on story-telling by children, for example, uses structural methods to determine how children acquire the skills to become competent narrators (Sutton-Smith 1981).

Part of that work, for example, involved showing children Bugs Bunny cartoons (which follow traditional trickster tale structures) and measuring the ability of children of different ages to learn the trickster formula. Similarly, the research arising in the early 1970s among graduate students in folklore and linguistics at the University of Texas (called the Texas Children's Folklore Project, and supervised by Richard Bauman) used children's abilities to replicate jokes, riddles, and other minor genres of everyday folklore as measures of the cognitive and linguistic development of children (see the essays by McDowell and Roemer in Sutton-Smith, et al., eds., 1995).

These developmental concerns in the study of the folklore of children rather rapidly disappeared in the 1980s, when folklorists began paying more attention to the sociological functions of children's folklore in natural settings, away from the psychologist's laboratory. At the same time, collaboration between children's folklorists and psychologically-oriented linguists effectively disappeared, though Sutton-Smith maintained his connection with both camps. For their part, the developmental psychologists seemed to lose interest in children's folklore (especially the folklore collected in natural settings) as evidence of child developmental processes. Developmental psychology continued working from well-established paradigms that seemed to have little interest in the ways the ethnographic study of children might pose anomalies for the paradigms; and, besides, money and professional prestige in developmental psychology continued to coalesce around the laboratory. By the 1990s, the two communities of scholars-- the folklorists and the developmental psychologists-- pretty much had lost contact with each other.

Enter the cognitive and brain sciences in the 1990s. For better or worse, there is hardly a social science discipline that is failing to consider what recent research findings in cognitive and brain sciences have to say about the discipline's own paradigms. Again assuming his usual role as pathfinder, Sutton-Smith has begun the process of tugging the study of children's folklore into the cognitive and brain sciences. His book, The Ambiguity of Play (1997), is about more than children's folklore; the book ranges from animal play to children's play to adult play. Sutton-Smith's aim in the book is to map seven "rhetorics of play"-- for example, "play as progress" or "play as power"-- and to uncover the ideological baggage that accompanies the unreflective uses of these rhetorics. There is plenty in the book to interest the folklorist, but I want to draw our attention to the author's closing gambit.

Reading Stephen Jay Gould's Full House (1996) as he was completing his own book provided Sutton-Smith with a possibly new rhetoric with which to talk about play. Especially salient for Sutton-Smith are the ways Gould talks about evolutionary variability-- "1. Evolution is characterized by quirky shifts and latent potential. . . ."; by "2. Redundancy. . . ."; and by "3. Flexibility" (Sutton-Smith 1997: 222-223). Sutton-Smith sees a remarkable parallel between Gould's description of the role of variation and adaptation in evolution and an emerging rhetoric of play as "a model of variability."

Sutton-Smith returns to the research on animal play and adds to that recent work in the cognitive and brain sciences to sketch what is more a blueprint for future work than a complete paradigm of play. He recommends that we think of play variability as analogous to adaptive variability, that

play potential is analogous to neural potential; that play's psychological characteristics of unrealistic optimism, egocentricity, and reactivity are analogous to the normal behavior of the very young; and finally that play's engineered predicaments model the struggle for survival. What then follows from this account of cultural natural selection in human affairs is that play, for its part, may be an invention meant to model such natural selection processes. (Sutton-Smith 1997: 229)

Far from trivial, play emerges as a crucial evolutionary, adaptive strategy for survival. Play establishes crucial links between brain processes and behaviors. Play provides scenarios for developing and practicing flexibility in response to novel situations, thereby reinforcing "organismic adaptive variability in the real world" (1997:230), and play's special characteristics-- such as its metacommunications and its stylizations-- may be crucial to its usefulness in modeling predicaments and solutions. These are just "hypotheticals," as Sutton-Smith calls them, meant to invite us to think differently about play and to begin examining play events in terms of play variability. This is only the beginning of the important work, notes the author, rather than its culmination.

So let us take up Sutton-Smith's provocative challenge and look at bit more closely at some current research in the cognitive and brain sciences, with an eye to how this research helps us elaborate Sutton-Smith's hypotheticals. There is a considerable literature in this field, but fortunately two recent books help map the field nicely for those making this interdisciplinary foray. They are Frank R. Wilson's wonderfully readable and accessible book, The Hand (1998), and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's more formidable (though still accessible) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999).

The Embodied Mind and Minded Bodies

Wilson and Lakoff and Johnson share the project of destroying the Cartesian basis for most of Western science and philosophy. We are not minds who "have" bodies. Our minds are "embodied," which means that the coevolution of minds and bodies makes it a serious mistake to assume that minds and bodies can operate independently.

Wilson is a neurologist at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco, and his meditation on the hand reflects how that organ (but what is a hand, he asks--how do we know where the hand begins and ends?) lies at the intersection of two important aspects of his life-- his life as a neurologist, and his life as an amateur pianist. A delightful aspect of the book is that Wilson weighs equally all kinds of evidence, from the "hard" evidence of evolutionary theory, paleobiology, brain science, cognitive science, and anatomy, to the more person testimony of musicians who are his patients, to the juggler and the auto mechanic and the master puppeteer and the magician and the chef he interviewed for the book. An aphorism borrowed from Canadian novelist Robertson Davies captures Wilson's central message, namely, that "the hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand" (quoted in Wilson 1998: 60).

Wilson guides the reader through the findings of physical anthropology and evolutionary theory to recount the complex evolution of the human hand, but always with the understanding that the coevolution of the brain and the hand means that the brain "teaches itself" how to think by processing and organizing information it receives from the actions of the body (e.g., p. 97).

Most important to the folklorist, I think, are the implications of evolutionary theorizing about the origins of language. There is a mountain of evidence to suggest that the brain "organizes and oversees the child's interactions with objects exactly the same way it organizes and oversees the production of speech" (Wilson 1998:165). Wilson cites, as an example, Greenfield's discovery of the parallel developmental chronology of acquiring skills associated with manipulating objects and manipulating words. The Vygotsky-Chomsky approach to children's acquisition of language notes exactly this matching of language and motor milestones. "What is it that transforms the child's compulsive, chaotic sound-mapping of the world into the primary tool of her emergent powers of discrimination and intellect?" asks Wilson. "It is the progressive commingling of speech with the whole constellation of objects, people, and real-life situations encountered in the child's life" (Wilson 1998:193).

But the most dramatic evidence of the role of the hand and the body in the acquisition of language comes from those who have worked on American Sign Language. Put simply, research shows that the Chomskian capacity for language-- the language generator somehow hard-wired in the brain-- "must be indifferent to the form and medium through which the messages are transmitted" (1998:198). Put differently, the language generator is a feature of the brain quite independent of speaking and hearing. Remarkably, American Sign Language equivalents of aphasias exist and "they are produced by nearly the same brain lesions that cause these forks of aphasia in patients with normal speech and hearing" (1998:200).

These findings provide support for a theory pointing to the gestural origins of language, probably in social groups engaged in collective, cooperative work, such as making stone tools (1998: 203). Wilson argues that the evolutionary modification of the hand, with its increasingly "precise and extended control of external objects," combines with the emergence of "motivated planning and rehearsal" such that "the praxic movement . . . is perforce a sign for the act which it accomplishes, irrespective of the communicative intent of the doer" (1998: 204).

This view of the coevolution of the hand, intelligence, and language has enormous implications for educational theory and practice. Wilson discusses the work of Jeanne Bamburger ("another modern-day apostle of John Dewey") and others who have shown how "hand knowledge" and "symbolic" knowledge are "equally powerful but different" ways of knowing the world, and how "'in the body' knowledge" and "formal verbal representations" might be connected (1998: 281-283). The lesson in all this work? "The most effective teaching techniques for cultivating intelligence aim at uniting (not divorcing) mind and body" (1998:289).

What escapes Wilson's survey is a body of ethnographic educational research that is fully consistent with the laboratory research. Proving again the wisdom of John Dewey, researchers the likes of Jean Lave (Lave and Wenger 1991, Chaiklin and Lave 1993) and Barbara Rogoff (1990) have been developing theories of "situated learning" and "apprenticeship in learning," all aimed at confirming that effective learning and the development of intelligence occur in praxis, in activities uniting the mind and body.

The folklorist should be most interested in the last piece of this puzzle, the piece provided by Lakoff and Johnson. Folklorists are well-acquainted, of course, with the authors' earlier book, Metaphors We Life By (1980), a book that argues for the grounding of our metaphorical language and thought in our bodies and their movements. Given the importance of metaphors in folklore, Lakoff and Johnson's work helped folklorists see how productively we can think about symbolism in relation to the body. The recent book, Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), builds upon the earlier work but makes a full-out assault on the mind/body dualism as the basis of so much Western thought. Cognitive science (born in the 1970s), say Lakoff and Johnson, presents us with three findings that should destroy forever the mind/body dualism: "The kind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical" (1999:3). The authors then spend nearly six hundred pages exploring these three findings (and their implications) in detail. Without recapping those details, let me say here simply that Lakoff and Johnson continue their earlier project by showing how our thought (largely based in metaphors) is grounded in our bodies.

The final body of research I want to mention before turning to the question of children's folklore has to do with gender, sex, sexuality, and biology. Two recent books-- Deborah Blum's Sex on the Brain (1997) and Robert M. Sapolsky's The Trouble with Testosterone (1997)-- together summarize a great deal of research on these relationships. The message in all this research is that in accounting for the similarities and differences between male and female behavior, we must take into account the fact that our brains are awash in hormones, beginning in the womb, and that these hormones have real, detectable effects on human bodies and behavior. The role of testosterone in both men and women, as you might guess, is central in these research projects.

But we must not understand the argument here as simple biological essentialism or determinism. Rather, what emerges in most of the research is an appreciation of the complex ways nature and culture interact in creating male and female, sexual preferences, and sexual behavior. True, testosterone works differently in men and women and there are good reasons for believing that testosterone levels effect aggression, a concern for hierarchy and status, and a proclivity for rough-and-tumble play (Blum 1997:72, 80, 146, 171). It is also true that our experiences physically alter the brain (Blum 1997:87) and that such seemingly purely biological events as the onset of puberty are quite subject to social variables, such as parental strife or father absence (Sapollsky 1997:46). The choice is not simply between an essentialist and a social constructionist view of gender differences. Instead, we have to look closely at particular behaviors to see how nature and nurture mix in producing the patterns we think we see.

Children's Brains, Children's Folklore

I provided a necessarily brief summary of the diverse research going on in the brain and cognitive sciences; instead, I have created something more like a reading list of easily accessible books that summarize some of this research for the general reader, which makes them valuable for the interdisciplinary foray by a folklorist into this research. I am forced to ask, though, the William James, pragmatist's question: what differences do these ideas make in our actual practices as folklorists studying the lives of children?

In some ways, the news is old news. If you take seriously Gregory Bateson's work and its relevance to doing folklore research, then the new research simply confirms the advice that Bateson was giving fifty years ago-- namely, that it is a serious epistemological error to see cause-and-effect as linear rather than a dialectical within a system. Bateson's interest in the cybernetics of all sorts of systems, from biological systems to social systems and in understanding the similarities (homologies) between evolution and learning preceded by generations the present interest in understanding the brain, the body, intelligence, language, and learning as coevolving elements of a single system. Asking what would Bateson think about an event has always helped me puzzle through folklore, and the current research simply reinforces this Batesonian way of looking at the world. Still, the brain and cognitive sciences provide elaborations of the basic Batesonian way of approaching children's folklore, so let me be quite specific in the lessons we should take from those sciences.

First, we need see children's minds and bodies as unified systems. This means that we must pay even more attention to children's bodies and to their physical activities. Simon Bronner (1995) and some others have tried to get us to focus more on the material folk culture of children, and I would say that we need to pay far more attention than we do to both the material practices and the gestural culture of children. Put differently, we may be stressing the oral culture of children at the expense of the system consisting of their oral and gestural (broadly conceived) culture. Part of this larger purview is keeping a lookout (as Sutton-Smith advises us) for instances of play variability.

Second, we have to be more open to the possibilities that some gender differences we see in children really are based in their different bodies. This is a hard lesson for feminist and profeminist folklorists. I began my Boy Scout research with a fully social constructionist bent, but the more I studied pubescent and adolescent boys (while I was helping raise my own daughter and, now, two grandsons) the more I have come to appreciate the complex dance between biology and culture in children's lives.

In my Boy Scout work, I was struck by the remarkable similarity of the emotional lives of boys across time and space. Not only was I observing in in California of 1995 a camp culture remarkably like that I saw in Florida in 1960, but the features of both camps were recognizable in the late nineteenth century writing of G. Stanley Hall and Ernest Thompson Seton about adolescent boys. I realized that such stability across time and space must surely arise from both biological constants and cultural continuities-- a kind of "elective affinity" (as Weber might have called it) between boys' developmental stages and certain sorts of social organizational programs that seem to "fit" boys' needs and desires.

We adults tend to turn children into "texts" for talking about and struggling over things that have little to do with the children themselves; they are surrogates for other issues in the culture wars, for example. I do not want our attention to children's brains to turn those brains into yet another text to be interpreted by adults for adult purposes. But the brain and cognitive sciences are going to continue their work, regardless of what the folklorists do, so I recommend that we pay attention to this work, incorporate it thoughtfully into our own work when we think it helps, and be ready to use our folklore research to challenge and to otherwise modify the work, including any tendency to move toward a purely essentialist position. Children always surprise me, which proves (I guess) that neither the essentialist nor the constructionist position has much predictive power, after all. Maybe we should be looking to chaos theory instead.

References Cited

Blum, Deborah. 1997. Sex on the Brain: The Biological Differences Between Men and Women. New York: Viking.

Bronner, Simon J. 1995. "Material Folk Culture of Children." In Children's Folklore: A Source Book, ed. Brain Sutton-Smith, et al. New York: Garland. Pp. 251-272.

Chaiklin, Seth, and Jean Lave, eds. 1993. Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. New York: Cambridge Universoty Press.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1996. Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. New York: harmony Books.

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Universoty of Chicago Press.

_____. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York: Cambridge Universoty Press.

Mechling, Jay. 1996. "Psychology and Folklore." In Amertican Folklore: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand (New York: Garland), 601-602.

Rogoff, Barbara. 1990. Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sapolsky, Robert M. 1997. The Trouble With Testosterone, and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1970. "Psychology of Children: The Triviality Barrier." Western Folklore 29: 1-8.

_____. 1981. The Folkstories of Children. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

_____, Jay Mechling, Jay, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon, eds. 1995. Children's Folklore: A Source Book. Reprinted by Utah State Universoty Press, 1999.

_____. 1997. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wilson, Frank R. 1998. The Hand: How Its Uses Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. New York: Vintage/Random House.

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