Psychology is a fascinating subject. I distinctly remember trying to nail down my second major and realizing that it had to be psychology when I almost literally started drooling over the list of classes I could take if I majored in psych. Man! The human mind is unbelievably complex, and people spend forever trying to figure it out. Guys want to understand girls (and vice versa), parents want to understand kids... we all want to understand each other, and we want to understand ourselves. Think about all those personality tests people take to try and get a glimpse at their own psyche. Anyway. Tangent. Specifically, I was just thinking about the psychological phenomenon called object permanence. Piaget said that infants begin to understand object permanence around 8 months old. In other words, from birth to about 8 months, babies don't just think "out of sight, out of mind," they really believe that out of sight means out of existance. Feel free to try this at home! Borrow a baby, and take his/her favorite toy. Get the baby all excited about the toy, then cover it with a blanket. If the baby has established object permanence, he or she will try to reach for the toy. If not, then the baby will not reach for the toy, because to the baby, the toy is no longer there.
I was playing with my boyfriend's 17 month old neice this evening. We were playing peek-a-boo with a blanket. I'd cover her up, ask loudly where she was, then respond with a smile and "boo" when she, grinning, pulled the blanket off her head. There was one special moment when I, instead of pulling the blanket off, stuck my head under the blanket with her. We looked at each other and it was as if no one else was around; we were in our own little world. Now, we both knew that there were others in the room. She and I had been playing this game for a while, and she would often wait under the blanket for an opportune moment, then pull the blanket off and say "boo" to me or my boyfriend or her parents. She knew we were still there even though she couldn't see us, and she wanted our attention. But somehow, under the blanket, she and I could pretend that we were special and hidden from everyone else.
As shown by the peek-a-boo game, my boyfriend's neice has developed object permanence. According to more recent studies than Piaget's, she may well have understood object permanence at around 3 months old! Three months old, and she already understood that just because you can't see it doesn't mean that it's not there. She can choose to ignore what's there, as she did with me under the blanket, but she never forgot the truth that she and I were not really the only ones in the room. It's so strange to me how we as adults can forget the basic truth that we learned at 3 months old. We sometimes convince ourselves that because we don't feel God's presence or see his hand working in our lives, he's not there. God never leaves us (Matt. 28:20) or forsakes us (Deut. 31:8) whether or not we see him. He is an unseen God (Matt. 6:6)!
No comments:
Post a Comment