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Odd Experiences: As A Child Versus As An Adult

IbisNibs said:
I've been wondering if children see and experience things that they don't as adults because of limits on brain development. ...
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Assuming I'm correctly interpreting where you're headed with this thought, I'd say, "Yes - the course of brain development could well accommodate a wider range of "perceptions" in children than can be readily be acknowledged by adults."

My one caution would be to qualify the "perceived" as that which the observer makes of the sensory input / stimulus / presentation rather than the sensory basis itself. Phrased another way - I would say any such difference has more to do with the observer's constructed or educed interpretation of sensory experience rather than the raw sensory experience per se.
 
I'm thinking that it's the neural connections that enable the brain to interpret the sensory stimulus, and that the interpretations create how that stimulus is perceived and understood. I assume that part of the brain development depends on the feedback one gets from the environment, including cultural cues furnished by other people and language, which would shape how the perceptions are understood.
HOWEVER, I am absolutely no expert AT ALL.

(Don't know how clear I'm making or not making this anyway . . . :thought:)
 
IbisNibs said:
I'm thinking that it's the neural connections that enable the brain to interpret the sensory stimulus, and that the interpretations create how that stimulus is perceived and understood. I assume that part of the brain development depends on the feedback one gets from the environment, including cultural cues furnished by other people and language, which would shape how the perceptions are understood. ...
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Agreed ... Over time the feedback would play a role in guiding which connections become progressively muted or extinguished versus those which are strengthened to the point they become persistent and / or so presumptive as to be automatic for the rest of one's life.
 
A couple of things strike me.

Children have to filter everything through 'what they already know'. Show a child who can't yet read a page of writing and they will either 'pretend' to read, making up a story whilst looking at the words, and the story will bear no relation to what's written down, or they won't understand that it's words at all (if they are young enough). So children seeing a 'something' which they don't understand may, in their minds, turn it into something they do understand. It need not be paranormal - how many children are afraid of the 'monster under the bed' because they saw the shadow of their slippers, but imperfectly understand the way light falls and therefore, to them, it IS a monster?

And also there's the 'terror' hypothesis. That if these things actually exist, and we can neither understand nor control them, then what does that say for our lives in general - which makes us more likely to either try to reason away or simply blank out that which must be 'impossible' within our current understanding.
 
catseye said:
A couple of things strike me.

Children have to filter everything through 'what they already know'. Show a child who can't yet read a page of writing and they will either 'pretend' to read, making up a story whilst looking at the words, and the story will bear no relation to what's written down, or they won't understand that it's words at all (if they are young enough). So children seeing a 'something' which they don't understand may, in their minds, turn it into something they do understand. It need not be paranormal - how many children are afraid of the 'monster under the bed' because they saw the shadow of their slippers, but imperfectly understand the way light falls and therefore, to them, it IS a monster?

And also there's the 'terror' hypothesis. That if these things actually exist, and we can neither understand nor control them, then what does that say for our lives in general - which makes us more likely to either try to reason away or simply blank out that which must be 'impossible' within our current understanding.
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Yes. And thinking about this a bit more - my kids never got a hit of derision/fear or owt negative when they said creepy shit (and one of them said some really weird stuff at times...) Now they range in age from nearly 18 to 29, and the 25 year old, who was the one who was a bit 'I see dead people' as a kid, is the biggest cynic, the least woo, of all my kids. Something happened somewhere along the way!
 
That reminds me, Ghost, that the one of my children who is the least 'woo' and has absolutely no time for 'paranormal shit' as she calls it, is the one to have had the most experiences as an adult. She's the one who saw the ABC, for example. This is why I tend to believe her stories of the random stuff that happens to her, because she doesn't try to talk it up into being a 'ooooh, a reeeeeeaaallly spooky think happened today' event, it's just a 'something happened'.

She's an accountant. Can't be a co incidence, surely?
 
Hmm. All this talk about 'excess neurons' being 'pruned' over time makes me wonder.

If the perceived (no pun intended!) wisdom is that children are better able to see/experience 'weird' thing than adults, but this ability fades over time/is 'adulted' out of us, then could these 'excess neurons' be what enables children to see more 'weird' stuff?

And how does this relate (if it relates at all) with the idea that human visual perceptions are incomplete at the best of times, and the brain is hard at work 'filling in the blanks' by extrapolating from what visual information it has?

Best I could find is this wikipedia entry which is in all honesty a bit technical for me to grasp, so I may have gotten the wrong end of the stick.

I *think* that this bit is the most relevant part to the alledged, and poorly understood (by me, at least) visual/brain phenomenon I'm driving at.

So riding this rambling thought-train a little further - what if as adults, those moments when we get a sense that 'unexpected creeped out feeling' there is some part of the brain that these 'excess neurons' might once have tapped in to, but is now not receiving anticipated (somehow, I'm just spit-balling here!) stimulus, and so sends an 'alarm' signal?

Lets see if I can articulate that a bit better:

What if, as kids, these 'excess neurons' that will later be 'pruned' by natural brain development let us see/experience more 'weird' things.
As adults these perceptions have atrophied/been removed as the neurons have been 'pruned'. But could there still be a part of the brain that is wired to receive these now 'anomalous' perceptions that somehow knows we're 'missing out' and triggers a 'creepy feeling'?

Obviously, it can't be universal - there would be a whole lot more 'weird tales' and 'Fortean Experiences' for us to mull over. But human beings, whilst broadly the same, also have a gazillion tiny little diferences in their biology from individual to individaul, so perhaps these hypothetical bits of brain chemistry (which are no more, really, than the ranblings of some random internet denizen) only remain in a random smattering of individuals.

And now, having read all that - to post or not to post? Hmm. On the one hand, why not? On the other hand I have no idea what I'm talking about, its all just stuff I thought up whilst reading this thread. Its also probably complete nonsense.

Eh, publish and be damned! :cool:
 
Spookdaddy said:
Will do - sometime later this week, when I have a bit of time.

One is already up on the board somewhere - but just now I don't recall exactly where.
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:bump: I'd love to hear your dad's stories, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. They'd find an appreciative audience here if you did feel willing to share, and an understanding one if you didn't.
 
BeardSprite said:
Hmm. All this talk about 'excess neurons' being 'pruned' over time makes me wonder.
If the perceived (no pun intended!) wisdom is that children are better able to see/experience 'weird' thing than adults, but this ability fades over time/is 'adulted' out of us, then could these 'excess neurons' be what enables children to see more 'weird' stuff? ...
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A clarification ... My earlier comments did not claim children were better able to see (detect with their senses) weird things, but that they were less encumbered or biased in interpreting (and hence describing and retaining memories of ... ) what they see.

The "pruning" isn't a culling of physical neurons, but a progressive refinement or filtering of the relative connections among neurons / neural pathways.
 
BeardSprite said:
... Best I could find is this wikipedia entry which is in all honesty a bit technical for me to grasp, so I may have gotten the wrong end of the stick.
I *think* that this bit is the most relevant part to the alledged, and poorly understood (by me, at least) visual/brain phenomenon I'm driving at. ...
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Tho points you cited relate to "filling-in" tactics in basic visual processing (i.e., sensory seeing). The aspect on which I focused in my earlier comments relates to (what might be construed as ... ) a similar "filling-in" at the cognitive level (i.e., distinguishing / identifying / describing that which is perceptually seen).
 
EnolaGaia said:
A clarification ... My earlier comments did not claim children were better able to see (detect with their senses) weird things, but that they were less encumbered or biased in interpreting (and hence describing and retaining memories of ... ) what they see.
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Oh, no, I got that. I was referencing (inarticulately) the wider observation/belief that children are more open to experience/see 'strange' stuff than adults, and eventually have 'it' 'socialised' out of them. Not necessarily a belief I hold myself, but it seems common enough.

EnolaGaia said:
The "pruning" isn't a culling of physical neurons, but a progressive refinement or filtering of the relative connections among neurons / neural pathways.
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Yeah, I kept 'pruning' in quotes (I know, not realy quotes) as a way of denoting not literally being cut/removed. The whole post might have benefited from more editing/thought/clarity of presentation , but its out there now!

It was a stream of consciousness post from reading through the thread - hence the dithering over posting - I'm in no way knowledgeable or qualified to really pontificate on such things ;)
 
BeardSprite said:
... So riding this rambling thought-train a little further - what if as adults, those moments when we get a sense that 'unexpected creeped out feeling' there is some part of the brain that these 'excess neurons' might once have tapped in to, but is now not receiving anticipated (somehow, I'm just spit-balling here!) stimulus, and so sends an 'alarm' signal?

Lets see if I can articulate that a bit better:

What if, as kids, these 'excess neurons' that will later be 'pruned' by natural brain development let us see/experience more 'weird' things.
As adults these perceptions have atrophied/been removed as the neurons have been 'pruned'. But could there still be a part of the brain that is wired to receive these now 'anomalous' perceptions that somehow knows we're 'missing out' and triggers a 'creepy feeling'? ...
Click to expand...

As the brain progressively "tunes itself" to recurring experience, relations of neural connectivity (rather than neurons themselves) are reinforced or inhibited. Older neural pathways may fade in the sense they're no longer triggered quite so readily. Figuratively speaking these pathways fade (in status or readiness-to-hand) into "roads less traveled" rather than "roads strictly and suddenly blocked off."

Such older / faded / demoted pathways could well serve as occasionally triggered candidate perceptions (states, emotions, whatever ... ) that are no longer capable of being pulled into the spotlight of conscious internal examination. These could remain just out of conscious reach yet still serve as shadowy sources of perceptual or emotional "noise." This off-stage-in-the-wings noise effect might well be subjectively sensed as a background tension / apprehension.
 
BeardSprite said:
The whole post might have benefited from more editing/thought/clarity of presentation , but its out there now!
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Sounds just like my posts.

As I was reading about how we arrive at our perceptions of the world, I thought of another complicating layer: we don't see the things that make up our physical world, we see the light reflected off of those things. You could say we see a negative image of them. The light we don't see is absorbed by those things.
 
Anhedonian said:
Odd things do happen to us all, if only we'd realise and take the chance to look. Here's some weird things that have happened to me over the 30 years of my life;

I can remember when I was a kid and I was falling asleep in bed, I can sort of subconsciously remember something stroking my hair. And I used to have a re-occuring dream of being in a dark room whilst sat on a bench, being told something by a huge light before me. Very strange looking back. I can also remember being on my street and feeling something run past me, only turning around to find nothing there.. I also saw the spirit of my first pet dog enter my parent's bedroom one night. It looked completely real to me. I've had many precognitive things too - thinking of something (usually really trivial, like a certain film) and then finding myself seeing it later.

I believe in Spirit, and it's a nice affirmation when I look at these "oddities" that have happened over the years. :D
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Recurrent strange, vivid dreams are pretty common in childhood,

I used to watch myself in my cot when I was only a few months old. (sort of like a dream but not a dream). I used to feel nothing it was like watching a boring tv show. I felt like I was an "older person" watching a boring baby.


I don't attribute it to any supernatural abilities, 2nd sight, etc. I put it down to the very strange elasticity of a baby's brain as well as memory being distorted.

I still think there is very strange stuff out there, but I'm not as blown away by my earlier memories as I used to be.
 
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Naughty_Felid said:
Recurrent strange, vivid dreams are pretty common in childhood,

I used to watch myself in my cot when I was only a few months old. (sort of like a dream but not a dream). I used to feel nothing it was like watching a boring tv show. I felt like I was an "older person" watching a boring baby.


I don't attribute it to any supernatural abilities, 2nd sight, etc. I put it down to the very strange elasticity of a baby's brain as well as memory being distorted.

I still think there is very strange stuff out there, but I'm not as blown away by my earlier memories as I used to be.
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Wow - it must be very uncommon to have memories from being only a few months old. I wish my memory was as good,( as well as my hearing which Ms PeteS maintains is becoming very selective)
 
BeardSprite said:
Hmm. All this talk about 'excess neurons' being 'pruned' over time makes me wonder.

If the perceived (no pun intended!) wisdom is that children are better able to see/experience 'weird' thing than adults, but this ability fades over time/is 'adulted' out of us, then could these 'excess neurons' be what enables children to see more 'weird' stuff?

And how does this relate (if it relates at all) with the idea that human visual perceptions are incomplete at the best of times, and the brain is hard at work 'filling in the blanks' by extrapolating from what visual information it has?

Best I could find is this wikipedia entry which is in all honesty a bit technical for me to grasp, so I may have gotten the wrong end of the stick.

I *think* that this bit is the most relevant part to the alledged, and poorly understood (by me, at least) visual/brain phenomenon I'm driving at.

So riding this rambling thought-train a little further - what if as adults, those moments when we get a sense that 'unexpected creeped out feeling' there is some part of the brain that these 'excess neurons' might once have tapped in to, but is now not receiving anticipated (somehow, I'm just spit-balling here!) stimulus, and so sends an 'alarm' signal?

Lets see if I can articulate that a bit better:

What if, as kids, these 'excess neurons' that will later be 'pruned' by natural brain development let us see/experience more 'weird' things.
As adults these perceptions have atrophied/been removed as the neurons have been 'pruned'. But could there still be a part of the brain that is wired to receive these now 'anomalous' perceptions that somehow knows we're 'missing out' and triggers a 'creepy feeling'?

Obviously, it can't be universal - there would be a whole lot more 'weird tales' and 'Fortean Experiences' for us to mull over. But human beings, whilst broadly the same, also have a gazillion tiny little diferences in their biology from individual to individaul, so perhaps these hypothetical bits of brain chemistry (which are no more, really, than the ranblings of some random internet denizen) only remain in a random smattering of individuals.

And now, having read all that - to post or not to post? Hmm. On the one hand, why not? On the other hand I have no idea what I'm talking about, its all just stuff I thought up whilst reading this thread. Its also probably complete nonsense.

Eh, publish and be damned! :cool:
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What makes me wonder about this is why evolution would have chosen to 'prune out' those excess neurons? Surely there would be an evolutionary advantage to being able to perceive 'weird things'? Or, at least, no disadvantage sufficient to make the pruning out of them necessary? Why would we have out-evolved, for example, the need for telepathy (which would be bloody useful at the moment, given my telephone bill) or the ability to see dead people?

We've kept the overdeveloped ability to see 'faces' all over the place, or to feel slightly more alert to danger when it's dark. Why would we not have kept some of the weirder ones? And why should it be necessary in an evolutionary context, for children to be able to sense the weird, and not adults?

I am likewise just spitballing...
 
catseye said:
That reminds me, Ghost, that the one of my children who is the least 'woo' and has absolutely no time for 'paranormal shit' as she calls it, is the one to have had the most experiences as an adult. She's the one who saw the ABC, for example. This is why I tend to believe her stories of the random stuff that happens to her, because she doesn't try to talk it up into being a 'ooooh, a reeeeeeaaallly spooky think happened today' event, it's just a 'something happened'.

She's an accountant. Can't be a co incidence, surely?
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She sounds like a reliable witness! The only one of my kids who has had paranormal experiences in adulthood is the graphic designer kid... but he was laughing at me about my claims and his dad's to have experienced this or that, right up til he moved into his new flat on the site of the old Fever Hospital. Where things are now being apported and heard and he's gonna be a bit more open about it now, because it's happening to him. But previously he was the biggest piss taker his dad and I had to suffer! Revenge! My developer son though, sciencey, unimaginative, etc - I think a full body apparition could walk upto him and slap him in the face with a dead kipper and he'd still insist it wasn't real.
 
catseye said:
What makes me wonder about this is why evolution would have chosen to 'prune out' those excess neurons? ...
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Again ... It's not the physical neurons that are getting "pruned" - it's the connections / pathways among them. It's not so much the neural apparatus that's changing as the ongoing state of the apparatus. Figuratively speaking, it's more a matter of editing / refining the "content" rather than modifying the "vehicle."
 
EnolaGaia said:
As the brain progressively "tunes itself" to recurring experience, relations of neural connectivity (rather than neurons themselves) are reinforced or inhibited. Older neural pathways may fade in the sense they're no longer triggered quite so readily. Figuratively speaking these pathways fade (in status or readiness-to-hand) into "roads less traveled" rather than "roads strictly and suddenly blocked off."
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See, I knew someone here abouts would be able to make more sense of this than me - thanks @EnolaGaia ! :cool:

EnolaGaia said:
Such older / faded / demoted pathways could well serve as occasionally triggered candidate perceptions (states, emotions, whatever ... ) that are no longer capable of being pulled into the spotlight of conscious internal examination. These could remain just out of conscious reach yet still serve as shadowy sources of perceptual or emotional "noise." This off-stage-in-the-wings noise effect might well be subjectively sensed as a background tension / apprehension.
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Yes, this! This is the sort of thing I was thinking of, a sort of 'rusty, disused branch lines' left lying around. Smarter and more articulate!

catseye said:
What makes me wonder about this is why evolution would have chosen to 'prune out' those excess neurons? Surely there would be an evolutionary advantage to being able to perceive 'weird things'? Or, at least, no disadvantage sufficient to make the pruning out of them necessary? Why would we have out-evolved, for example, the need for telepathy (which would be bloody useful at the moment, given my telephone bill) or the ability to see dead people?

We've kept the overdeveloped ability to see 'faces' all over the place, or to feel slightly more alert to danger when it's dark. Why would we not have kept some of the weirder ones? And why should it be necessary in an evolutionary context, for children to be able to sense the weird, and not adults?

I am likewise just spitballing...
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Ok with evolution I'm on more familiar ground, I had to study it, once upon a time!

Its not really an active process, lots of things get thrown out there, shotgun style - the successfull ones make it to the next round, the rest left by the wayside.

And I'd venture thats what all those 'excess' neurons are - a 'shotgun' approach, hurl as many neural pathways at the developing brain as possible, and enough should 'stick' to leave us with a fully developed, functioning brain. The rest we can, uh, wind down, in case we need 'em later.

If I've grasped @EnolaGaia 's explanation properly :confused:
 
catseye said:
... Surely there would be an evolutionary advantage to being able to perceive 'weird things'? Or, at least, no disadvantage sufficient to make the pruning out of them necessary? ...
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If you're so highly "tuned to see the weird" that all you can do is marvel at the remarkable, you're unlikely to survive to reproduce.

No species has ever persisted on the basis of sitting in one place and living an endless "Oh, Wow!" experience to the exclusion of all daily grind. (Trust me - I came of age in the Sixties, and I know this full well.)

You'd forget to eat, forget to hold onto your branch, not notice the approaching predator, etc., etc.

Addiction to wonder can be as self-destructive as addiction to anything else.

It's fine to stop along the path and smell the roses (check out the novelties, etc.), but not to the extent that you always end up forgetting where you were going in the first place.

It's a matter of degree, and an appropriate (survivable) degree involves the interplay of potential and necessity.
 
catseye said:
... Why would we have out-evolved, for example, the need for telepathy (which would be bloody useful at the moment, given my telephone bill) or the ability to see dead people?
We've kept the overdeveloped ability to see 'faces' all over the place, or to feel slightly more alert to danger when it's dark. Why would we not have kept some of the weirder ones? ...
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The telepathy and seeing-dead-people items presume we possess(-ed) at least the potential for such abilities in the first place. The jury's still out on that ... But moving on ...

Consider the mundane / everyday ramifications of such abilities in the context of getting by and surviving.

A telepathic ability to "receive" psychic communications from others could well end up being akin to having a wide-open Web connection in which all content was continually bombarding you without pause - i.e., a cacophony of anything / everything every other bozo was broadcasting. The "noise" could be disorienting to the point of making you as helpless as the perpetual "Oh, Wow!" daze mentioned above.

If you could see everyone who ever lived, how could you see to safely walk, bicycle or drive along with all the distracting specters populating your field of view? How trying would it be to have to determine which were the immaterial figures you could ignore versus the material ones you need to accommodate / respond to?

On the other hand ...

Now consider the face recognition capability. As social animals of varying sociability we need to be able to recognize who's one of us and who's who among us. If you can't discriminate among other humans' identities and / or judge their states you'd be at a severe disadvantage in getting along within the ephemeral social realm in which much of our human experience is conducted through interactions.

Similarly, there's risk involved in blundering into the dark without heightened attention and care. Above and beyond the risk of walking into a tree or off a cliff there's the fact there are predators (literal and figurative) who have a sensory, and hence tactical, advantage in darker conditions.

Note that the former two items involve passive sensory / perceptual capabilities, whereas the latter two involve proactive guidance of perception or behavior.

The former two items' downsides illustrate that engaging everything all the time isn't necessarily helpful.

The latter two cases involve learning, and it's the progressive pruning of neural pathways / connections by which the persistent subjective bases for such learned tendencies arise.

The tuning / filtering required to render the former two capabilities useful rather than burdensome is - or would be - also a matter of learning, and hence also a matter of trimming / refining the neural connections by which we would engage our world in those additional dimensions of experience.
 
catseye said:
And why should it be necessary in an evolutionary context, for children to be able to sense the weird, and not adults?
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I think it's to do with energy expenditure as opposed to evolution. I can only really extrapolate from my field, but it transpires that any child, from any background, can learn to speak any other language like a native, provided they grow up in an environment where that language is spoken. Once you get past the age of about 4 or 5, though, the brain decides inter alia that it has heard all the sounds that it will ever need, and stops differentiating between sounds that do not occur in the child's mother tongue.

So this means, for example, that I can't pronounce my wife's name properly. It's a soft "l" (more palatalised), whereas English tends mainly to deal in hard "l"s (more alveolar, i.e. made using that hard ridge just behind your teeth). I can't even differentiate the sounds when people try to demonstrate them to me. And this is because the different sounds can denote different phonemes in Russian, but not in English (where - were it recognised at all - it would be understood as an allophone, or variant pronunciation of the same phoneme), and so my brain gave up on trying to distinguish them about 40 years ago, give or take. It was simply not worth the effort - or so my brain believed at the time. Thankfully, my wife is a forgiving sort (let's face it, she'd have to be...)

Which may - and, here, I freely admit I am wandering quite some distance from any expertise or linguistic knowledge I may lay claim to - allow us to speculate that if children find their reports of the "weird" are disparaged or otherwise devalued by the adults around them, their brains may likewise decide that it is not worth maintaining those neural connections, and so we lose the ability to perceive weirdness as we grow older. Conversely, those among us who found value in those experiences for their own sake (which seems to include not a few of us happy crew) may have maintained some of the ability into later life, only to be disbelieved by those people who did not. Equally, if it was experienced as scary, the brain may have reinforced that neural connection as a defence mechanism, so as not to be caught out in future. But I should emphasise that this last paragraph is entirely speculative.
 
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Krepostnoi said:
Which may - and, here, I freely admit I am wandering quite some distance from any expertise or linguistic knowledge I may lay claim to - allow us to speculate that if children find their reports of the "weird" are disparaged or otherwise devalued by the adults around them, their brains may likewise decide that it is not worth maintaining those neural connections, and so we lose the ability to perceive weirdness as we grow older. Conversely, those among us who found value in those experiences for their own sake (which seems to include not a few of us happy crew) may have maintained some of the ability into later life, only to be disbelieved by those people who did not. Equally, if it was experienced as scary, the brain may have reinforced that neural connection as a defence mechanism, so as not to be caught out in future. But I should emphasise that this last paragraph is entirely speculative.
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Excellent points! The ongoing adaptation of neural connections is, in principle, as subject to personal / internal factors as external events and outcomes.
 
PeteS said:
...... as my hearing which Ms PeteS maintains is becoming very selective)
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mmm interesting and pertinent point. You seem to be suggesting it's your faulty hearing machanism that's at fault and that Ms. PeteS is sure you are ignoring her on purpose. (Forgive me if I got that wrong but 'faulty hearing' is a common cause of family distress in the various households I've been part of over the years!)

As someone who is frequently being accused I have the following explaination. It could be that we have heard it well enough with our hearing apparatus but our subconscious didn't like it so filtered it out for us? So we aren't being deliberately obtuse, are we?

On the other hand it's handy to be able to play the deaf card ......... ;)

Sollywos x
 
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