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End Notes: Development of the Mind
The objective of this cheat sheet is to explore how the training of the abstract mind shapes the way we look at the world. It examines how learning and emotional imprinting in childhood form the foundation for perception, judgment, and bias later in life. This is not a detailed study of child psychology — it’s a functional model for understanding how our inner architecture of thought and feeling develops.
Observation: Early Development of the Abstract Mind
At birth, a baby’s brain is functional but largely a blank sheet waiting to be trained.
During late pregnancy, the fetus has already been exposed to the mother’s world — it can hear her heartbeat and voice, feel motion, and sense rhythms of day and night. These early sensory impressions form the first traces of abstract association — familiarity, comfort, and recognition.
The birth canal limits the size of the baby’s head, so the skull is built from separate cranial plates joined by soft sutures and fontanelles.
This design allows the plates to overlap during birth and later expand as the brain grows rapidly during the first two years of life.
Because of this immaturity, the newborn is entirely dependent on family support.
Every action — holding, feeding, comforting, and speaking — becomes part of the child’s growing memory base. The emotional tone of these interactions (approval, warmth, tension, frustration) forms the early calibration of the limbic–cortical connection: emotion becomes linked to experience.
Within the safety of the family, the child begins mastering abstract skills like listening, speaking, walking, and eventually, the symbolic patterns that underlie language and imitation.
Observation: Further Development of the Abstract Mind
Around two to three years of age, the child’s attention span and social curiosity expand.
This marks the start of training the abstract mind in a wider circle — learning through interaction with peers. Now the child encounters others raised with different family rules and emotional tones.
To play, cooperate, or compete successfully, it must begin to adjust expectations, developing a sense of fairness, sharing, hierarchy, and belonging.
Through trial and error, the child experiments with roles of dominance and compliance, discovering how emotional signals affect others. By the mid-20s, the brain completes its physical development, especially in the prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for planning, impulse control, and reflection. Even then, learning never stops: values and perspectives continue to evolve across life.
Consequence Drawn: Early Development of the Abstract Mind
Human birth is a compromise of survival between mother and child: our large brains require early delivery, leaving the infant dependent and socially bonded. This dependency forges the family as a biological and emotional necessity. Through this environment, abstract emotions like love, loyalty, and belonging take shape.
Family life imprints values and opinions — simple rules and ideals reinforced with emotional approval or disapproval. Examples include “Don’t interrupt,” “Say thank you,” or “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
When repeated and emotionally charged, these moments become memory patterns linking opinion and emotion. Later, when a rule or ideal is violated, the emotion is automatically invoked — a learned bias that shapes reaction.
Consequence Drawn: Further Development of the Abstract Mind
Before age three, children are mostly self-focused and only loosely aware of peers. As independence grows, so does exposure to new emotions — competition, friendship, rejection. By this stage, the cranial plates have fused, and the brain enters a phase of rough-and-tumble learning — a fitting metaphor for the social and emotional challenges ahead.
Across life, success and failure continue shaping opinions — our internal rules for what feels right or wrong. Repetition and intensity determine how quickly such opinions form. These opinions become gatekeepers of emotional bias, governing both our real and abstract senses:
- A sad melody → evokes melancholy.
- A smile → triggers warmth.
- A politician’s falsehood → provokes anger.
- A breakup → brings despair.
- Falling in love → overrides reason.
Our perception of reality is built on these internal models. We compare new experiences against prior opinions — “apples are best,” “this car brand is unreliable,” “bottle-feeding is wrong.” When reality challenges these models, emotions flare.
For instance:
- You see a car brand you dislike → mild contempt.
- Your father proudly buys one → anger or embarrassment.
At the social scale, this extends to opinions about how society should work, particularly around:
- Hierarchy: Who leads and who follows.
- Possession: Who owns what and why.
- Security: How individuals are protected or threatened.
- Ritual: The customs that maintain social order.
Each level — societal, interpersonal, and personal — interacts dynamically. This mixture produces both cooperation and conflict, from solidarity in catastrophe to the graveyards of war.
Action
The outward projection of emotion is our attempt to make the external world fit the ideals of our internal one. That impulse is both creative and dangerous — the root of empathy, invention, and art, but also of conflict and intolerance. Awareness and self-reflection become essential tools:
To recognise that emotion drives action — and that understanding our own bias is the first step toward steering it.
📖 Series Roadmap
- Forward: A Little Background
- Introduction: Action, Reaction, and the Human Paradox (16.09.2025)
- Looking Back in Time: The Development of the Human Brain (23.09.2025)
- Abstract Senses: Enhancing the way we see the world outside (30.09.2025)
- Bias as a Concept & Climbing the Stairs: Pattern Recognition & Everyday Tasks (07.10.2025)
- Abstract Feelings and Abstract Senses (14.10.2025)
- Motivation (04.11.2025)
- The Social Knowledge Base (11.11.2025)
- Potential (18.11.2025)
- The Subliminal Way We Go Through Life (26.11.2025)
- Taking Responsibility (02.12.2025)
- Fishing for Complements (22.12.2025)
- Peter and Fermi (22.12.2025)
🔗 R&R Navigation
Back to Topics │ Abstract Feelings & Abstract Sense │ CheatSheetHub │ Start: Relativity & Reaction
End Notes: Development of the Mind
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