Through A Child's Garden Toward a Neurological Aesthetic of Children's Literature

Abstract

Through A Child's Garden Toward a Neurological Aesthetic of Children's Literature Lucy Rollin (bio) Over the past twenty years, our knowledge of the human brain has accelerated at a rate most of us could hardly foresee. Thanks to imaging technology, scientists have mapped the brain in remarkable depth and detail, bringing new insights into the mind/brain relationship, brain development, and cognition. Knowledge about how neurons work is already affecting our daily interactions with medicine. How then might it affect our intellectual lives as scholars of children's literature-that complicated intersection of child and adult, word and image, feeling and thought? In this speculative essay, I will examine some of the recent information on brain development and function, and I will do so in the context of thinking about its relevance to Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses as an aesthetic experience. When I began to work on this essay, I chose Stevenson's Garden because it was handy, and I was already thinking about it for other purposes. As I reshaped the essay and read others' thoughts on Stevenson, it turned out to be a lucky choice because Garden is rich with the very possibilities I needed to explore. A little basic information may be helpful as a beginning point. From its origin in a single cell, the brain rapidly acquires billions of neurons-the cells that integrate and transmit information to, from, and within the brain-at the "astonishing rate of 250,000 per minute" (Thompson 319). Although the brain's development is finally a "profound mystery" (Thompson 320), a great deal is known about how the brain functions. The process which conveys the experiences of our bodies in the external world through our sense organs to our brains is accomplished through connections between neurons called synapses. A normal human brain may have as many as a trillion synapses, most of which function through the release of chemicals such as norepinephrine and dopamine at those points of communication. Especially dramatic, however, is the proliferation of neurons and the increased density of synapses in the brains of children from birth to about age fourteen. The child brain has as much as one hundred percent more synapses than the adult brain. Synaptic density peaks at about two to three years of age in humans, remains stable until about age five, and then declines, reaching at puberty the density level that lasts until old age (Chechik 1759). The presence of dopamine, one of the most active chemical transmitters in neural function, has been also tracked across age groups. Not surprisingly, considering the level of synaptic density at these ages, dopamine levels increase dramatically in the first years of life, peaking at about age five (Tamminga 168). Children two to five years old, then, are capable of processing approximately double the amount of information from the external world, and from inside their bodies, than they ever will again in their lives. A Child's Garden of Verses evokes the intensity of this sensory experience in childhood, especially in its reliance on visual imagery. Seeing seems to be the dominant mode in these poems. For example, the "Looking-Glass River" and "The Cow" are passionately observed. "The Wind" can be seen only through its actions and so frustrates the child watcher: "I saw the different things you did, / But always you yourself you hid" (25). In "Escape at Bedtime," the child slips out of bed to observe "thousands of millions of stars" through his window, and when the adults find him and pack him off to bed, there "the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes, / And the stars going round in my head" (21). All alone in "The Land of Nod," the child finds the strangest things are there for me,Both things to eat and things to see,And many frightening sights abroadTill morning in the Land of Nod. (16) The child in the poems sees his shadow, the bird on the windowsill, the sea rising in the holes he has dug on the beach, smoke from distant fires in autumn, and imaginary armies in the fires at home: "Armies march by...