Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene | Page 8

although there is increased
frequency of certain specialized contractions, which indicate the
gradual settling of expression in the face.
Often such movements pass over by insensible gradation into the
morbid automatism of chorea, and in yet lower levels of decay we see
them in the aimless picking and plucking movements of the fingers of
the sick. In idiots[8] arrest of higher powers often goes with
hypertrophy of these movements, as seen in head-beaters (as if, just as
nature impels those partially blind to rub the eyes for "light-hunger," so
it prompts the feeble-minded to strike the head for cerebrations),
rockers, rackers, shakers, biters, etc. Movements often pass to fixed
attitudes and postures of limbs or body, disturbing the normal balance
between flexors and extensors, the significance of which as nerve signs
or exponents of habitual brain states and tensions Warner has so
admirably shown.

Abundance and vigor of automatic movements are desirable, and even
a considerable degree of restlessness is a good sign in young children.
Many of what are now often called nerve signs and even choreic
symptoms, the fidgetiness in school on cloudy days and often after a
vacation, the motor superfluities of awkwardness, embarrassment,
extreme effort, excitement, fatigue, sleepiness, etc., are simply the
forms in which we receive the full momentum of heredity and mark a
natural richness of the raw material of intellect, feeling, and especially
of will. Hence they must be abundant. All parts should act in all
possible ways at first and untrammeled by the activity of all other parts
and functions. Some of these activities are more essential for growth in
size than are later and more conscious movements. Here as everywhere
the rule holds that powers themselves must be unfolded before the
ability to check or even to use them can develop. All movements
arising from spontaneous activity of nerve cells or centers must be
made in order even to avoid the atrophy of disease. Not only so, but
this purer kind of innateness must often be helped out to some extent in
some children by stimulating reflexes; a rich and wide repertory of
sensation must be made familiar; more or less and very guarded,
watched and limited experiences of hunger, thirst, cold, heat, tastes,
sounds, smells, colors, brightnesses, tactile irritations, and perhaps even
occasional tickling and pain to play off the vastly complex function of
laughing, crying, etc., may in some cases be judicious. Conscious and
unconscious imitation or repetition of every sort of copy may also help
to establish the immediate and low-level connection between afferent
and efferent processes that brings the organism into direct rapport and
harmony with the whole world of sense. Perhaps the more rankly and
independently they are developed to full functional integrity, each in its
season, if we only knew that season, the better. Premature control by
higher centers, or coördination into higher compounds of habits and
ordered serial activities, is repressive and wasteful, and the mature will
of which they are components, or which must at least domesticate them,
is stronger and more forcible if this serial stage is not unduly abridged.
But, secondly, many, if not most, of these activities when developed a
little, group after group, as they arise, must be controlled, checked, and
organized into higher and often more serial compounds. The inhibiting

functions are at first hard. In trying to sit still the child sets its teeth,
holds the breath, clenches its fists and perhaps makes every muscle
tense with a great effort that very soon exhausts. This repressive
function is probably not worked from special nervous centers, nor can
we speak with confidence of collisions with "sums of arrest" in a sense
analogous to that of Herbart, or of stimuli that normally cause catabolic
molecular processes in the cell, being mysteriously diverted to produce
increased instability or anabolic lability in the sense of Wundt's
Mechanik der Nerven. The concept now suggested by many facts is that
inhibition is irradiation or long circuiting to higher and more complex
brain areas, so that the energy, whether spontaneous or reflex, is
diverted to be used elsewhere. These combinations are of a higher order,
more remote from reflex action, and modified by some Jacksonian third
level.[9] Action is now not from independent centers, but these are
slowly associated, so that excitation may flow off from one point to any
other and any reaction may result from any stimulus.
The more unified the brain the less it suffers from localization, and the
lower is the level to which any one function can exhaust the whole. The
tendency of each group of cells to discharge or overflow into those of
lower tension than themselves increases as correspondence in time and
space widens. The more one of a number of activities gains in power to
draw on all