The Importance of Motor-Sensory Refinement
by David Fleischacker, Ph.D.
As one scans the animal world, one notices that in moving from more primitive animals to higher animals, there is an increase in the freedom gained to operate in this world. That freedom is not merely in a single individual of the species but rather found in the species. Every individual has a plasticity potential when they are conceived. This plasticity potential gives the individual its range of possibility as it develops and grows over the years. In all animals, this potential is comprised of everything in the initial zygote – the DNA and of all the bio-chemical molecules and their relationships. In sexually differentiated organisms, this includes the male and female genetics as well.
As the initial plasticity develops in each individual, it lays the further foundations for future stages of life. The development for example of the neural tube sets up for various kinds of neural developments. These work in various ways with the development of other tissues to form a coordinated motor-sensory sequence of developments. What sets higher and lower animals apart, in part, is the expansion of integrations of these cell systems and the range of the motor-sensory activities. Higher animals have a larger range of integration of motor-sensory operations. Paw-eye coordination is not as expansive as hand-eye coordination. Likewise for vocal sound ranges and other kinds of motor responses and visual attentiveness. The capability of the imagination is especially informative. Higher animals excel in imaginative capabilities. The closer the creature is to human beings (eg. Apes and monkeys), the greater this creativity. Of course, this imaginative creativity and refinement is the greatest in human beings. Some animals may have this or that organ that is more refined than in human beings, but not as an integrative whole and a creative whole.
As a note, the greater the plasticity potential at the beginning, the longer the developmental sequences. Worms can develop in a short time to adult life. Human beings take years.
And the greater the plasticity potential, the greater ranges of types of adults one will find. In simple worms, once hardly finds any differentiations of roles (even male and female is not differentiated). But as one moves to frogs, fish, birds, and mammals, one finds greater differentiated roles. In human beings, this reaches an apex again, and the roles differentiated are linked to the history of culture and society and religion.
The point in this blog is to highlight a principle that explains the interior need in children for refinement. In human beings, the plasticity potential of our physical life opens us to our future as men and women, living together, building a civilization, seeking eternal life and happiness. Feed this refinement properly, and you will find a great joy and peace in the child and open doors of life and growth into their future. Certain stages–which Montessori has already discovered–are rich in this need. The practical and sensorial materials are filled with this. Hearing and the vocal chords become refined in music. Smell, taste, and motor skills become refined in hunting, gardening, preparing and cooking food and drink. Seeing and creating become refined in the making of clothes, the building of gardens, and the feeding of animals. Touch and movement become refined in sandpaper letters and cylinder blocks. The proprioceptor sense and balance becomes refined through a variety of controlled movements in walking (along a circle for example or across a beam), especially through an obstacle course when blind-folded. This refinement of all the motor-sensory operations grows, integrates, and differentiates with unique focal points in each sensitive period of life.
This refinement prepares the imagination to be a powerful collaborator with intelligence (search for understanding), reason (search for truth), and the moral life (search for the good). Why? Because these properly human operations require a motor-sensory refinement that allows for what St. Thomas (following Aristotle) calls phantasm. It also allows for the creation of nuanced signs and symbols which become the material home of human thinking and reflection. Without this refinement in the motor-sensory imagination (and its habituation into the neurons and thus into memory), the higher operations do not flow and emerge so easily. Thus, this refinement liberates the child for a life of intelligence, reason, moral goodness, and charity. Of course there is the possibility of greater evil here — but that has an answer, and must wait for another blog.