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T he Nurture Assumption is accompanied on psychology bookshelves by another, written by two women: pioneer brain researcher Marion Diamond and science writer Janet Hopson. Their book, Magic Trees of the Mind: How to Nurture Your Child's Intelligence, Creativity, and Healthy Emotions from Birth Through Adolescence, has not received the media attention devoted to Harris's book but is very much worthy of attention from parents and childcare workers.
Diamond herself is a revolutionary figure. She describes with warmth and enthusiasm her participation with the Berkeley team that discovered that rats' brains actually grew in size through enriched experiences: toys in their cages and other rats for company. She did this work around raising four children. In 1964, Diamond presented her first paper on these radical findings. When she stood before a mostly male audience, "scared to death," and presented the results, a man rose in the back of the room and said, "Young lady, that brain cannot change!"
Diamond, a favorite with university students for her teaching, writes with immense clarity, describing the research process and the discovery of brain changes. Known as a careful scientist, she has been slow to generalize from animal research to human beings. Jepson fills in the gap through wide reading in other brain research.
The book moves from the Diamond group's animal research to a description of the human brain and its functions, including its ability to repair itself and to recreate functions that are missing at birth or destroyed.One provocative section deals with research on the effects of abuse on a child's developing brain, citing work by Bruce Perry, a child psychiatrist and developmental neurobiologist. Perry's clinic treated the surviving children from David Koresh's Branch Davidian cult. The children had been so dominated, Perry asserts, that the part of their brain controlling decision making had not developed normally.
The authors' account of Perry's research is marked by a heavy determinism, in reaction to which I recalled a story earlier in the book: a brain, incomplete at birth, adapted its functions by using other parts. Could not these children's brains also repair themselves?
Diamond and Hopson readily acknowledge the difficulty in research on human brains: people don't relinquish chunks of their brains at regular intervals for laboratory examination!
(It would, of course, be monstrous to deprive one group of children and enrich another to determine if such treatment permanently affects the brain. For any direct examination of a human brain, researchers have to make do with the few human brains that are donated to science. There is, however, increasing use of MRI and EEG.) Still, despite their caution and good sense, Diamond and Hopson transmit all too uncritically the popular cultural assumption that parental influence is practically godly in its power. Although I found their book fascinating, passing it on to friends with infants and small children, I was struck by the oversimplified emphasis on parental influence, and I returned with interest to Judith Harris's alternative view.
Harris's prize-winning article, "Where Is the Child's Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development," published in Psychological Review in 1995, outlines the theory formally in clear, readable prose. Harris writes to be understood. She is a scholar supporting her case with research and care but without jargon. The Nurture Assumption, on the other hand, is a very personal book, full of wit, sarcasm, and footnoted personal asides. I found myself laughing out loud at times and easily reaching for the book again when my reading was interrupted.
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