A simple experiment illustrates this phenomenon well: for up to a month, when the face and the voice of his mother were dissociated in space (while the face of the latter was on his right, for example, a tape recorder located at his left emitted the sound of the mother’s voice), the baby showed his confusion and his discomfort by fidgeting, crying: such a differentiation clashed with his perception “lunar”, all-encompassing, all-encompassing of his mother. From the sixth week, on the contrary, this dissociation no longer seems to bother him, which shows that sight and hearing are now disjoint in him, and that he does not try to coordinate them. Likewise, he finds it increasingly difficult to put his thumb in his mouth, whereas this instinctive act, already present at the fetal stage, posed no problem for him during the first month. Finally, it has become almost impossible for him to do two activities at the same time, such as suckling and looking: when he suckles, he closes his eyes and when he looks, he stops suckling.

From now on, the perceived world is no longer for him formed of a homogeneous globality, but of a multitude of signals independent of each other, new, unknown and mysterious signs emerging from the undifferentiated magma of his previous perception. Nothing goes without saying any longer: he must now learn to interpret, to “decode” these strange signs to reconstitute a coherent vision of the world. The outside world, which previously left him indifferent, now interests him to the highest degree.

Curious and playful baby

At the Mercurian stage, baby therefore lives in a world “exploded”, made up of a thousand facets, the unity of which he is quite unable to grasp and which increasingly solicits his nascent, fragile, discontinuous attention, fond of new stimulations. Where he previously only perceived a massive reality of which all the elements (beings, things, atmospheres, situations) agglomerated into an indistinct whole, he now perceives a multitude of signals, each of which seems to mean something, each appears to constitute a separate unit. Where he noticed nothing special around him, he now realizes that a thousand different paintings beckon to him, challenge him, solicit his once floating attention, his previously almost non-existent interest. Beings and objects take on more identifiable forms, more precise contours.

A trifle arouses his instinct for research, his desire to discover, to explore this new world. He is curious about everything, in his own way, more contemplative than active. The unexpected stimulates him, it almost seems that he hopes for it, wishes for it, that he is waiting for the slightest modification of the situation where he finds himself, of the environment in which he lives, of the surrounding atmosphere. A situation, an environment, an atmosphere with which he is no longer confused and with which he must therefore learn to communicate. His wide-eyed eyes stare in astonishment at what is happening around him, on the lookout for the slightest novelty, the smallest incident likely to break the monotony of the hours and days and, controlling better and better the movements of his head, it considerably widens its spectrum of vision. He likes more and more to be taken out of his well-known cradle, with too limited space: when he is installed elsewhere, he perceives his environment from a new angle, with another point of view, other perspectives. Happy with these changes, he smiles. But he should not be asked to fix his attention for too long on a single being or a single object: he is too thirsty for varied stimulations to be able to truly concentrate on a specific subject or object. His centers of interest dawdle, stopping briefly on one element of the decor before moving on to another.

Also at this time, baby becomes more and more playful. He wakes up to have fun and besides, his mom and him spend more and more time playing together for the pure pleasure of useless play, good moments of relaxation that we share. even when it chirps, it has fun, rejoicing in the sounds it emits, taking a playful and disinterested pleasure in multiplying the vocalizations. And while playing, he learns a lot of things in scattered order… Baby is constantly skipping school. Needless to say, therefore, that the astrological tradition has always put curiosity under the influence of planet mercury…

The first signs of intelligence

Astrology has also attributed intelligence to Mercury. Does this mean that the child becomes between one and three months an intellectual capable of abstract and logical reasoning and having an I.Q. (Intellectual Quotient) above the average? Observation and common sense clearly show us that this is not the case. And yet… The faculty, the ability to be without a prioriI curious about everything that happens around you, to open up spontaneously to the diversity of facets of reality, characteristic of the baby at the Mercurian stage, isn’t it the original form of intelligence?

If it is true that one of the first and therefore probably fundamental functions of intelligence is to be surprised and therefore to admit ignorance, to prefer to question oneself rather than to affirm, to formulate hypotheses rather than conclusions, to go from the known to the unknown, then it is between one and three months, during the first sidereal cycle of the planet Mercury, that the first signs of intelligence can be observed in the baby.

Going from the known to the unknown is precisely what the baby of this age learns, especially during his relationship with his mother. It has been observed that instinctively, she avoids repeating herself identically, harping on, that is to say reproducing the known, when she communicates with her child, as if she intuitively understood that It was impossible to focus her baby’s interest for long if she did not subtly and continually change her relationship with him. This is how, unconsciously, she always modifies her gestures and facial expressions, even during the most banal maternal activities (changing, feeding, sleeping, talking with the baby) to maintain her attention: while a known process takes place, recognized and therefore expected and clearly identifiable by the child (being swaddled, fed, lying down, communicating), the subtle variations of these common gestures and mimics, never repeated identically, make it possible to maintain a “thriller”, to solicit the interest of the child for the unknown. This is how the unpredictable manifests itself within a foreseeable situation, and the unknown bursts into the very heart of the known.

As the habit of this type of relationship sets in, the baby at the Mercurian stage is more and more justified in formulating, in his own non-verbal way, hypotheses: what will happen again next time? Thus he is more and more often and intensely awaiting novelty, the unexpected, the unknown, the surprise, from the slightest sign that allows him to formulate new hypotheses: “Will the bottle or the breast come or not? Soon or later? Will it be the breast or the bottle? Mom talked to me a certain way last time, will she do it again?”

It is therefore well known and therefore recognizable elements that found these hypotheses. We also know that if the mother introduces too many visual variations (e.g. the expected bottle is rarely the same color, the same size and the same shape), the baby, constantly forced to re-identify the bottle, is no longer waiting for what could happen from the arrival of a bottle that he (re)knows well… Similarly, if the subtle changes in communication between mother and baby are not compensated for by a very regular dialogue, the baby is no longer receptive to the modifications of the dialogue, but anxiously waiting (and crying, and angry!) for the dialogue itself: “But what is mom waiting for to give me a sign?”.

The baby’s openness to the unknown is therefore well initialized from patterns known and repeated sufficiently frequently and in a fairly easily identifiable form, essential and necessary conditions for his intelligence to be exercised: the baby at the Mercurian stage does not opens up to the unknown only from the known, and therefore from clearly identified and identifiable patterns. And it is in this way, by winning over the unknown that he envisions or presupposes from the known that he recognizes, that baby becomes intelligent… in his own way!

The great communicator

For millennia, all astrology books have affirmed that Mercury is the planet of communication par excellence. Observation of the baby’s new behavior between one month (end of the first cycle of Moon) and three months (end of the first Mercurian cycle) confirms this very old intuition.

We have already noted that the Mercurian Age saw the onset of Curiosity. Let us now specify that this curiosity is for a very large part oriented towards the human beings who surround the baby: his mother of course, but also his father, his brothers and sisters, as well as all those who pass one day or another within reach. of his gaze. In short, it is at this age that the small child becomes sociable, open to others, eager to establish links of communication with him: having lost and exceeded the attitude of fusion, of communion with others proper to the first month, he now looking for contact.

This desire to communicate is wild, innate, spontaneous: it constitutes a real basic need for the two-month-old baby. His eyes meet those of others with insistence, as if seeking to establish a relationship. Whatever people approach him, he follows them with his eyes, stares intently at their faces, takes an interest in them, whether they are known or unknown. A trifle elicits his amiable and engaging chirps. In the presence of his mother like a stranger, he smiles, fundamentally available for all encounters, and his happiness is total if his tweets are answered with other tweets or with words, certainly incomprehensible to him, but which mean for him there is exchange, communication.

The baby at the Mercurian stage is a big talker, a real chatterbox. Through his increasingly differentiated chuckles and chirps and the responses they attract, he learns to memorize little by little the social meaning of the various expressions of his interlocutors, these multiple facial expressions by which, beyond our words, of our speeches, we express our emotions, our feelings and our thoughts. In a way, the expressions on our faces when we talk to others are immediately recognizable social conventions that identify tenderness or coldness, anger or calm in others. Baby spontaneously imitates these expressions, these basic signals of all human communication, and soon reproduces them so well that at the end of the third month, he has become a real expert in communication, mastering better and better the implicit rules of communication. ci: speak to each in turn, listen to the other attentively and respond to him taking into account his facial expressions.

Note in passing that this communication is pre-verbal: the baby is unable to express himself, to communicate with others using the official, conventional language that is that of adults. In themselves, his tweets mean nothing: they simply testify to his fundamental openness to others, to his desire to establish an exchange with him that does not commit anything. He is moved by the pleasure of the encounter, of dialogue for dialogue’s sake, and not by that of transmitting clear and precise information.

Sociability without affection

A great communicator, the baby from one to three months is therefore an extremely sociable being outside of his sleep periods. Nothing interests him more than a human face bending over him and listening to the sounds of the human voice. However, an experiment has shown that this sociability is devoid of any affectivity: if a child of this age is presented with a mask with the schematic image of the human face (an oval, two circles for the eyes and a “smile-banana” for the mouth), he immediately reacts with a smile, as he does in the presence of a flesh-and-blood person. He makes no formal distinction between a mask and a face, which means that for him the other is not really a concrete partner, a living person, but above all a “transmitter of interesting signals”, or in other words a “communication vector” rather abstract.

Another behavior, characteristic of this age, illustrates this sociability without affectivity of the baby “Mercurian”. We observe that with the exception of his mother, with whom he continues to maintain the powerful links of instinctive complicity which were forged during the fetal and lunar period, the child does not seem to develop a marked preference for regard to the various people with whom he comes into social contact and establishes a chirping communication. The current interlocutor is the right one. The stranger, the stranger are entitled to the same smiles, the same looks, the same giggles as the close friend. The baby does not become attached to anyone in particular and maintains a relationship with each of the beings he meets without emotional demand. We will see that this attitude changes completely from the third or fourth month, a period during which the baby begins to “to have his heads”, to attach more precisely and more deeply to the people who “please”… But let’s not anticipate the Venusian stage.

unconditional understanding

The sociability of the baby at the mercurian stage, if it is devoid of any affective investment, of any privileged attachment (with the exception of the mother) towards the people with whom it communicates, is nonetheless subject to imperious and binding prerequisites. For this spontaneous openness to others, this instinctive sense of dialogue to develop harmoniously, it is essential that the child immediately feels understood, recognized, accepted as a fully-fledged interlocutor.

If no one shows interest in him, if no one listens to him, the baby of this age is quite incapable of demanding that communication be established on his own, except by crying to testify to his unbearable loneliness and call any interlocutor to his rescue. These tears are for him, not the expression of a new alternative mode of communication, but a regression to the previous stage, the lunar stage: he generally feels bad in this situation of absence of communication, and thus manifests his displeasure.

Thus the child needs a benevolent gaze, an attentive ear that demands nothing of him. A powerful certainty imposes itself on the baby: whatever “say” in his own way through his facial expressions, his looks or his tweets, he must be immediately and unconditionally the object of obvious interest on the part of the other. He expects everything from the other.

If contact with others is not established as the baby expects and hears a priori, he is disarmed, unfit to negotiate, to seek an agreement with him, to find by himself compromise solutions or common ground allowing discussion. He is convinced that from the outset there is such a total complicity between him and the other that it is not possible for the dialogue not to be established. In this sense, the baby’s spontaneous sociability makes him deeply dependent on others: an interlocutor can only be for him a friendly accomplice with whom there is a tacit understanding, and not someone who must be convinced, persuaded, who you have to demonstrate that you have something important to tell him.

The mercurian state

We are in a mercurial state when, like the baby of one to three months, we adopt a spontaneous attitude of awake and disinterested curiosity, when the slightest signal from the outside world appeals to us, interests us, encourages us to see things in a new angle. When we tell ourselves “why not”, that we are unrestrictedly ready to open ourselves up to novelty, the unexpected, the unprecedented, the unknown, without ever prejudging what might happen. We are in a mercurian state when our attention is volatile, discontinuous, dispersed, it flutters from one situation, idea, being or thing to another without ever settling permanently.

We are in a mercurial state when we are available for all chance encounters, ready to communicate with anyone anytime and anywhere, as long as these encounters are non-binding and pleasant, for the simple pleasure of exchanging irrelevant remarks with someone, just “to see” what will happen during this exchange. We are in a mercurian state when we are a priori interested in everything that the other might say to us, not because of what he says to us, but for the happiness of the conversation, without feeling involved in anything. be in what we say.

We are always in a mercurial state when we keep an open mind for all that is possible to imagine, to conceive, to anticipate, when a film, a book, a painting, an encounter “talk” from the outset and encourage us to go further, to question ourselves, to question ourselves, to formulate a multitude of gratuitous hypotheses, when we are on the lookout for the slightest clue that could astonish us, surprise us, amuse us, delight us. We are in a mercurial state when we listen to all the bells ringing, to all the opinions and we refuse to select among them the only one, the unique, the true one, so great is our welcome to diversity, to the innumerable facets of the world and of people, so much the slightest event arouses in us a host of contradictory ideas.

We are also in a mercurial state when we are unable to take anyone or anything seriously, when we approach beings, things and situations lightly, casually, casually or humorously, when we engage in activities fun, free, fair “to see”, for the joy of discovery or the pleasure of the game, without interest, without calculation: activities of no importance, which do not commit to anything, where there is nothing to “earn”, where no purpose or discipline is required. Finally, we are in a mercurial state when we cultivate many centers of interest simultaneously, when we do multiple projects at the same time, without worrying too much about deepening them or giving them a tangible foundation.

The beings in whom Mercury is dominant are excessively open, curious, sociable, communicative, talkative, inquisitive, jack of all trades, mobile, playful… at the risk of being unstable, dispersed, superficial all their life. On the contrary, those in whom Mercury is weak in the natal chart may be, in extreme cases, incapable of gratuitous amusements, smiling casualness, spontaneous curiosity, attentive listening, carefree lightness, relaxed sociability, mobility. of mind.

From two months, the language network is running

In the article titled Astro-brainology published in September 1991 in No. 17 of Conditionalist notebooks, I reported on the latest discoveries in early childhood psychogenetics made by J. Mehler and E. Dupoux, researchers from the joint cognitive science and psycholinguistics laboratory of the CNRS and the EHESS, discoveries presented in their fascinating book born human (Ed. Odile Jacob). Since then, science has progressed further, confirming once again (unknowingly or unintentionally of course) the meanings of planetary functions in the Conditionalist Theory of Ages discovered and formulated more than forty years ago…

Innate or acquired?

One of the major lines of research in psychogenetics is to succeed in identifying, in the human functioning of the first years, what is innate (neurophysiological structures common to the whole species) from what is acquired. (learning and socio-cultural conditioning). To put the meaning of these new discoveries into perspective, let us recall that until about thirty years ago, research on the functioning of babies was monopolized, with a few exceptions (such as Jean Piaget, for example), by various psychologists. who persisted in projecting their Freudian adult fantasies onto newborns.

Only when a new approach, called “cognitivist”, appeared, that things began to change. “Cognitive Science, write Mehler and Dupoux, aims precisely to determine, through experimental and formal study, the psychological properties which, beyond cultural and individual differences, are common to human beings. He must describe the functioning of memory, language, attention, interaction with others or perception, but also determine the nervous structures that support them. The study of behavior therefore requires the collaboration, even the integration of many disciplines, from linguistics to neurobiology and computer science.” You will notice that these poor shrinks have been forgotten in the list, which is not the result of chance or an unfortunate oversight…

Mehler and Dupoux criticize “learning by instruction”, who is “the mechanism that would allow structures present in the environment to be transposed into an organism.” Example illustrating this theory: it is because the child, a blank sheet at birth, “lives within an environment rich in linguistic utterances, that he would integrate this structure and become capable of producing such utterances.” Which doesn’t answer the question: “How is this learning possible?” Piaget tried to answer. According to him, the regular repetition of external stimuli (in our example, linguistic stimuli), would end up creating internal structures. The structure would be born from the function. Conditionalist translation: the Theory of Ages would create the R.E.T.

Another theory, which Mehler and Dupoux also reject: “learning by selection”, which assumes an individual “rich in potential, but so much so that it becomes incompetent. He must select the possibilities that are compatible with the environment and eliminate the others. The impoverishment of the cognitive potential therefore allows progress in its effectiveness.” It is, among others, defended by Jean-Pierre Changeux (see the previous article), and poses a major problem: of what nature is the “diversity generator” innate in man? And what are the selection mechanisms? Conditionalist translation: this “diversity generator” would be a kind of R.E.T. non-innate, the mechanisms of selection returning to the Theory of ages.

Result of this double refusal: the two cognitive scientists think that there are innate structures, genetically transmitted and allowing, by keeping our initial example, to do automatically, if the environment allows it, the learning of language: “As the baby grows and moves towards mastering a natural language, we see a series of stages that seem to depend more on a ‘biological clock’ than on the environment”. Conditionalist translation: first, there is the R.E.T., an innate structure, then comes the Theory of Ages, which allows it to be actualized. In this perspective, the innate and genetically transmitted structure would determine the functioning of the internal biological clock and would condition the chronological development of “learning”.

The multitude of experiments to which Mehler and Dupoux subjected the babies lead them to affirm that “We don’t have to learn to coordinate the different data of our senses to extract objects from them, miraculously. From the outset, the perceptual world is organized, and this, because it refers to abstract representations that are originary. They provide, in a way, schemas that make it possible to establish correspondences between stimuli.” The experiments carried out on babies confirm the general perception of the child less than one month old (lunar stage). Then, the baby gradually structures his vision and perception of the world from “abstract representations that originated”. The formulation evokes very precisely the “extensive R” : innate, pre-established models allowing us to represent the world: “From space to objects, the baby seems equipped with a rich model of the world.”

Better: we know that the order of the theory of ages is not that of the R.E.T. Our representations only become conscious solar stage, between 8 and 12 months (confirmed by cognitive scientists). Previously we live mercurian stage, then to venusian stage, in a world of self-unconscious proto-representations, which this book postulates: “Thus, it is perfectly possible, and even plausible, that the model of the physical world is expressed in the newborn only in the form of a few fairly primitive mechanisms, similar to precursor behaviors.”

Functional Mercury Resonance

Ten years later, new experiments confirm the work of Mehler and Dupoux. They demonstrate that from the mercurian stage (1 to 3 months), language mechanisms are present. For information, here is the text of the article that Sylvie Briet published in Release from 10/12/2002:

“Baby does not speak, but from the age of two months, everything is ready. It is the left regions of his brain that process language. As in adults. The brain is very early equipped with the mechanisms of language, and it has great plasticity, this is what emerges from work published by a French team from the CNRS who worked at the hospital. Necker-Sick children in Paris. She obtained these results thanks to a recent technique that is increasingly used to understand how the brain works: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). But this is the first time in France that a research team has been authorized to carry out such exploration in healthy babies.

Right side up, upside down. We know that in adults, the left hemisphere is dedicated to this function (at least in 90% of cases, some have indeed ‘the language on the right’. On the other hand, the difference in voice timbre generally makes work the right hemisphere. Is there a region of the brain specialized in language from birth? Is the adult an ‘extension’ of what happens in the baby? To find out more, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, a trained pediatrician, recorded her voice as she read a children’s book. It was this recording in French, scrolled forwards and backwards, that twenty babies aged 2 or 3 months heard during they were in the MRI machine. Babies can indeed tell the difference between their native language and a foreign language, but this ability disappears if the text scrolls backwards.

The babies were either naturally asleep or awake, lying down, immobilized in the MRI machine for 15 minutes. While watching images on the screen placed above their heads, they listened to the story at the 20 second point. And, after a silence, they listened to it backwards for 20 seconds as well.

MRI makes it possible to ‘see’ what is happening in the brain thanks to digital images of an unprecedented quality of spatial resolution. So-called ‘anatomical’ MRI has become a key instrument for detecting tumors and other brain lesions. More recently, so-called ‘functional’ MRI (fMRI) has been used for research: it reveals the areas of the brain that come into activity when they are called upon by a mental function. When a brain region is activated, it needs oxygen, which is supplied by the vascular system: this is what the MRI shows.

The results show that when the baby listens, the left hemisphere activates more than the right, and more so when the language scrolls upright. Some areas, such as the angular gyrus (word memory area), are not stimulated by backwards language. ‘The frontal activation interested us, explains Ghislaine Dehaene: we believe these regions are little used by the baby because they are the last to become mature. The frontal is the seat of complex activities: planning, social relations… And we have found that babies have more frontal activity when the word scrolls upright. There was no frontal response in the sleeping babies.’

Two opposing camps. For the researchers, these results lift a corner of the veil: all the networks present in adults exist in babies long before they can speak. The brain is organized very early, but the system is very plastic: the left hemisphere is designed to process language, but if a cerebral lesion occurs on the left in children, the right hemisphere then takes over in a very good way. more effective than in adults. These works do not settle the debate between the two opposing camps on the acquisition of language: the first believe that the ability to process language is innate and the second believe that the brain gradually acquires this ability. The results, however, provide an argument in favor of the first hypothesis.”

Conditionalist deductions…

All this only confirms the work of Mehler and Dupoux and what conditionalists have known for a long time thanks to the Theory of Ages. So that doesn’t tell us much. What do these experiments tell us about the Mercurian stage? That with the Mercurian function, we have a language (source-level “Representation”) virtual which has nothing precise, desired, specific to say (no level-goal “intensive representation” at the house of Mercury) but who can say virtually anything, even nonsense, even nonsense (goal-level “intensive transcendence”)… as long as the word scrolls right side up.

Sobering… Even the “anything” mercurian has its rules and its syntax!

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  Next article — Venusian stage (from 3 to 7 1/2 months old): the age of affection