Although the basic design of the experiment has been used in developmental research since the late 1960s, related research traditionally focused solely on infant activity, treating infant and environment as separate entities
That seems like an obvious thing not to do to a layman. Why did that persist for so long?
Wetern science is only now becoming aware of egolessness consciousness, through exposure to eastern meditation practices (Buddhism stresses this restful state of consciousness also pointed to in the article) and classical psychedelics used by indigenous peoples for 1000s of years (which were outlawed in the 60s and are only now being taken seriously again).
In other words, because we mostly (and mistakenly) associate consciousness with ego, which doesn’t develop until adolescents.
Depends on your interpretation of recent.
There was research published along these lines since the 50’s and a large surge in the 80s.
It’s back in vogue again now and everyone likes their research to be paradigm changing.
I hear you.
I was taking a stab at why we never bothered to look for consciousness in babies interactions with the environment before. It does seem an obvious place to look now but considering half of us are still caught on I think there fore I am, I can see why they never bothered to look here.
In Buddhism the ego is sort of a filter of consciousness. Rick Doblin from MAPs said in a podcast I was listening to recently that babies are in the psychedelic state, like egolessness from 5-meo and shit. And that base structure is still there. So it’s the base human experience and arises with the environment and then we filter everything through the ego. Including our questions about consciousness itself right? Because it’s our lived experience so we’re looking through something that’s similar.
Clickbait title.
The studies findings? Babies are subject to positive feedback loop with environment.
Research is all about assessing a single variable and this was accomplished within this study, “the MCR procedure involved four phases: spontaneous baseline (no mobile movement), an uncoupled reactive phase (experimenter triggered mobile movement), tethered phase (tethered foot triggered mobile response), and untethered phase (tethered foot is disconnected and mobile is stationary).” There’s also data demonstrating it was much more than just a positive feedback loop highlighted in the research, “the tethered phase peak rate does not represent a set point in time during the tethered phase across infants. Rather, it is a measure of activity across a time window comparable to other time samples (1 min) reflecting maximum activity during the tethered phase across infants. This step allowed peak rate to be compared to movement rates of other experimental phases.” The findings weren’t just based on a hey look, they smiled data point. If you dig into the data collection, “the magnitudes of various multidimensional velocity vectors (i.e., between the two feet, between the trigger foot and the mobile, and between the unconnected foot and mobile) were cross-covaried across the first minute of each phase for each infant using the aforementioned method to obtain Pearson r values. Differences between experimental phases were tested using repeated measures ANOVAs.” As a fellow researcher, it seems apparent this displays more than just a positive feedback loop according to the methods and procedures utilized in the study. To write this off as nothing more than a positive feedback loop means your conclusion was drawn before assessing how the information was collected and evaluated.
