It’s The ‘Tongue’ That Guides Education!

An interesting addition to the vaults of ‘Cognitive’ learning theory is research currently being undertaken into how we humans start to learn. Amazingly, it appears that the ‘tongue’ and not the brain is the key.

For babies the ‘tongue’ is a singular   means of orally exploring the world around them. Until the middle of the first year of life the   ‘tongue’   more than   ‘vision’   is the chief vehicle by which we learn. While previous research has seen a dichotomy between the roles of ‘imitation’ and ‘exploration’ in infant tongue and mouth movement recent research has found that   these processes are in fact one and the same.  

According to Indiana University researcher Susan Jones writing in the journal ‘Infant Behaviour and Development’ ‘mouthing’ and ‘tongue protrusion’ are basically comparable strategies of ‘information gathering’.

Babies are born knowing nothing about the world which they have entered but they do have a mental model which   helps them to learn. ‘Imitation’ is used to create pathways in our brains that help us remember how to do the   repetitious   things that make up so much of our lives. These pathways are laced with intricate neural connections (so called ‘Mirror Neurons’) that help us execute imitated actions in the pursuit of our goals.

‘Imitation’ is, therefore, vital as a means of ‘Cognitive’, ‘Perceptual’ and ‘Social’ development. A baby will try and mouth and imitate auditory sounds just as it does with any interesting visual stimuli such as adult tongue movements and facial expressions.

This process according to Jones is ‘bidirectional’ in that   infants explore the objects of the external world while also learning about their own behavioural abilities and relations to them. Imitation and exploration produce information that the infant retains until the emergence of a more sophisticated ‘Behavioural System’ (which is independent of ‘oral exploration’) at approximately five to six months old.

The infant’s   tongue is a mass of muscle fibres covered by a mucous membrane and laced with taste buds called ‘filiform papillae’. Neonates imitate the facial expressions presented by adults or study the outlines of unfamiliar objects by   mouthing, thrusting the tongue against the cheeks and gums and creating   tongue protrusions via open lips.

Although one week old   chimps are behaviourally identical, at birth human babies are unique in their ability to continually develop this gift of   imitation. In this process the tongue   acts like a  tool activating our sensory system and causing the ‘Proprioceptive brain cells’ that control movement in the joints, tissue and muscles of the Central Nervous System (CNS) to grow and develop.

The response, however, is not   ‘learned’ it is innate and species specific.  The human tongue is not just a means of   ‘imitation’ but rather a device for establishing dialogue between one’s own behaviour and that of another person.