The Importance of Emotional Connection for Human Health and Happiness: How our early experiences of connection shape expectations about how other people are likely to treat us.
Transcript Start

Adam Graves: And with that, I want to turn it over to Suzanne Zeedyk.  If you're ready, Suzanne.

I'd like to bring you back up to the stage.

[applause]

Zeedyk: Can I begin by saying that in no way do I feel qualified to follow all of that?

So I think, okay, that would be a really good place to end, Adam.  Why did we do the awards at the end?  And then you have me!

Because it will be really important that you all leave here confident and able to do that kind of sowing of seeds that Adam just spoke about because the why the world needs you, you get something about connection that not everybody else gets because you have had to work and be so present and aware to tap into and connect into what many people have happen quite naturally and therefore take for granted.

So you get something that the world needs, even though a whole lot of the rest of the world out there who have no experience of deafblindness, if you say deafblindness to them, their faces go blank.  I don't have to tell you that, you live it.

But I know in the work that I do and I try to bring together all sorts of different sectors, I watch their faces go blank, and at the same time I know that you know and live something that would be really valuable to them.

So what I hope to do in the final session today is to give you a little bit more information that can help to stoke your confidence, give you some new language if you need that, in order to talk to the people who don't yet know what you know.  Or to put it in Robbie's words, you know, that's Harvard!

Okay.  There is even more ‑‑ there's more research out there.  In addition to what Harvard has been producing that I think is helpful to all of us.

So if I wrap that together what would I call it?  Here's the timeline, human beings are born already connected.

But it turns out that I get really impatient with language.  I can never settle on just one title.  So I could have put those words in other ways.  What if I had called them this?  That changes to sensory modalities don't change the capacity for connection? 

Just because you don't have all the modalities that somebody else may have, it doesn't take away your capacity for a connection.  And lots of people out there sometimes kind of assume that it might.

Or what if I called it this?  That communication is always about connection.  They're effectively synonyms, they mean the same thing.

But if I had called my little contribution to today, these last several days anything, I would have called it this.  I would have started it with a question.  What happens when we place connection at the center of all thinking in the DeafBlind field? 

What happens if we take away teaching or coping or managing or whatever word might come first, what if we place connection at the center? 

And then things transform. 

Okay.  So who am I ‑‑ how do I come to play with words and talk about the things that I have contributed in the last couple of days?  I am, as you've all heard, Suzanne Zeedyk.  I'm also a little bit crazy because I did this wacky thing.  I have for most of any career been an academic and a research scientist where I studied parent‑infant interaction, and I loved it.  But I became increasingly aware that I had access to cutting edge research that other people didn't have.  Either because the language that scientists use is too jargonish or we don't have the money for it.  If you have an article you're interested in, it will cost you roughly $30 to gain access to it.  And even if you had both of those, most people don't have time to read the newest, latest science, because they're going other things with their lives.

But I knew that there was all this stuff that I had access to that I thought other people who worked with children and love children and parents would be interested in.  So about six years ago now, I did this kind of a crazy thing, I took my well paid, well pensioned job, and in the middle of what turned out to be the worst recession in post‑war Britain, I resigned.  [ Laughter ].

No, no, I need a bit more than that.  It's a very bad recession.  [ Laughter ].  And I resigned from a good job!

Oh!

Thank you.

Why would you do that?  Here's what's crazy.  I resigned from that job in order to get people interested in science.  That truly is crazy.

But it turns out that if you make it accessible, people do want to know.

So this is a slide that shows you the kind of people I now am asked to go and speak to, and the reason I want to show it to you is because the same basic things that I'm going to talk about in the next few minutes are the same things I talk to all of them about.

So I talk to social workers and childcare staff and teachers and musicians and baby theater people and police and manufacturers of strollers and politicians and people who work with DeafBlind and people who work with autism.

When you put all of that together the world is changing.  Once upon a time the police had no idea they would be interested in strollers. 

How does that go together?  And it all has to do with connection. 

So it makes you put the things we've been talking about in the last few days into a wider conversation.  And over those last four years, six years, we've now had about 40,000 people who are at events that I've put on, which is astounding to me, and we now reach up to about 300,000 people a week on social media trying to help them to understand connection, which how connected baby, which is my organization, came about a couple of other years ago, because it wasn't enough to work with organizations as I had been.  I wanted to see if I could reach individual members of the public.

So putting together connected baby gave me a way to reach individual moms and dads and teachers whose organization hadn't yet put on an event.

Okay.  So that's been an interesting journey that I wouldn't have anticipated when I made my crazy leap out of a well paid job.

What do I talk about these people to?  These are the three key things I forever talk about.  That we arrive in the world already connected to other people, that we're born connected.  It isn't something that happens later.  You're born with the capacity to connect to other people.

Secondly, we now know that that connection shapes brain development as we have already heard about a bit yesterday.

And if we can get our heads around those two ideas, we can think about this third one, which is that babies who don't feel connected to other people suffer.  And grownups who don't feel connected to other people suffer.  And societies who have within them a lot of grownups or babies or children or teenagers who don't feel connected to other people suffer as a society. 

So if we can begin to understand some very basic and really take it seriously, then we discover the solutions to some of the key societal problems that we have, which makes this information really powerful.

So I presume you've all brought your sleeping bags because we're now about to have a three‑day residential for the rest of the conference, yes?  Are they not all in a pile out there?  No? 

Okay.  If I can talk literally for days about this stuff, which I can, what am I going to talk about in well under an hour?

I thought we would do this.  I thought we would talk a bit more about innate connection, about what it means to arrive connected because there could be no other theme that I want to talk to you more since I call what I do the science of connection, which is why there could be no better conference actually for me to be at than one called making connections.  I want to leave here being sure that you get ‑‑ that we are connected.

Secondly then I thought I would come back to brain development.  I know that Judy did some of that with us yesterday, but I want to make sure you leave confident.  And thirdly I want to talk about the implications of that for the DeafBlind field.  Does that sound good to you for the next 45 minutes or less? 

This is my whole message.  If I can get people to understand this is ‑‑ I could be done and go home and plant for vegetables.  Which is my alternative dream.  Have a vegetable plot.

Okay, but until people understand this image, I can't do that.  Because there are people who think this is sweet.  And actually this is a three month old demonstrating that in the middle of rough and tumble play, she can keep her eyes on her mom.  She can keep her head up.  She can even put tension in her arms.  How do I help people understand that what this shows is connections and the importance for societies?

Well, what if I went back to the book that I suggested in yesterday's panel.  Now, at this point Kate is going, hang on, that slide was not in the PowerPoint slide that she said ‑‑ which is true.  So those of you that may be following along in your PowerPoint slides.  I need to let you know I put in a few extra slides because they seemed really relevant to the conversations we were having and I couldn't resist doing that.  And Kate needs a bit of comfort that I did that, because I messed up the plan.

So if I tell you that there are a few extra slides, it's because I think they're really relevant and I didn't think of them two months ago.  So this is one that's relevant.  Okay.  This is the book I mentioned yesterday, promoting social interaction for individuals with communicative impairments making contact.  I couldn't remember the name of it yesterday.

[laughter]

This tries to bring together a whole range of topics.  And this is the title of one of the chapters on deafblindness.  Sharing communicative landscapes with congenitally DeafBlind people with a walk in the park by Paul heart.  That draws on the research that Joe was telling us about when we began yesterday.  But that chapter is mixed in with lots of others.  Like that, professor color win [indiscernible].  So one of the things I'm trying to do is to say this may be useful to you.  But I'm also trying to say, it mushes together a whole range of topics.  It's one way to get information out.  But here's another that my team has tried.  This is an exhibition that we put on a couple of years ago called stories of connection.  And in that exhibition we had hundreds of parents, people who sent in photographs of connection for them.  We just said send us your photos of connection.  And we had hundreds of them, which went up on a really long wall.  Here we are in the party announcing it.  And it turns out that people want to talk about connection.

Here are a few people celebrating it.  To look at images of connection.  All right.  We thought got the local press involved.  We got the local academics to come.  We experimented with imperfection, because this is us putting it up.  Here it is going up.  See the tall guy there in the gray?  He came with me.  So some of you have spoken to him.  And this is the big ta‑da moment in which we've gone ta‑da.  You notice we've only captured two sets of hands instead of two people at either side.

I want to ‑‑ this stuff helps us to understand even imperfection, in trying to communicate connection.  And the reason I want to highlight it is really, because of this.  Amongst those many photographs that we got sent is this we lad, who is the only image that we got sent of a young man with CHARGE syndrome.  And this is the description his parents sent.  This photo shows our four year old son trying to comfort his baby brother.  Despite severe hearing and visual impairments problems he was somehow able to work out something was wrong with the baby and felt the urge to help.  It was a magical moment.  All barriers were overcome through the simple need to care. 

Connection is in all of us.  But that was the only image that we received of disability.  How do we bring disability more into the mainstream, and help people to see that connection exists in all of us?  We do it by coming back to this image.  We are born already connected and it's what our brains are meant for.  If this is a three month old connecting, well, this is a brand new newborn connecting.  So this is a newborn, in the arms of her grandma minutes after she was born.  And it was suspect to me by her mother who had come to a training and was so excited to understand connection, she said this is it, this is it, isn't it?  This is what you mean by connection.  I hadn't noticed that my baby is looking at the face of my grandmother ‑‑ of my mother in the delivery room until you mentioned that.  And it's true, she is.  The baby has just been born.  There's a zillion things she could be looking at.  But who and what she's choosing to look at is another face, is her grandmother, is probably the voice that she has heard while she was in the womb.  Our brains are wired to engage with other people.  But this mother hadn't really seen that in the image she had taken until she had ‑‑ until she heard someone else talking about it.  So it's happening all around us and we often miss it.  How do we help people to really get how connected babies are?

I want to show you a video.  This baby is eight weeks old.  There's no sound.  It's the classic sort of thing that psychologists do in experiments.  What we've done is we've taken an eight week old baby.  The real baby is the big baby.  The little baby in the corner is her mirror reflection.  So we've put an eight week old baby in front of her own mirror reflection.  And we're going to see what sense she makes of that.  Okay.  There's no sound.

Why would you put an eight week old baby in front of a mirror?  Most people think they can't even see fully properly yet.  And yet the baby is clearly interested, because she's looking at her reflection.  She's, in fact, kind of making friends, she's ‑‑ when her head tips forward she's keeping her eyes on her friend.  She's nodding her head.  Even there she dips forward.  Oh, let's go back to [indiscernible].  Oh, can you lift your arm.  She's engaging with her friend to her reflection of the stimulus in front of her.  I don't know what she thinks.  The point is, she's engaging. 

So in a second, we're going to play a trick on this baby.  Because it isn't really a mirror, it's actually a fancy computer set up, and we can put her reflection back in time by a minute.  And so she will now be mismatched with her friend.  And the question we're going to ask ourselves is, will she notice and how will we know she notices?  And how long will it take her to notice?  But right now it's still live and she's engaging.  She's got a pleasant expression on her face.  Keeping her eyes on her friend.

There she goes tipping her head forward again.  Even when it's far forward.  You can just see the interest in her eyes.  There we are back to tongue conversations.

Now, though, it's a replay.  Does that laughter imply you think the baby has noticed?  I think the baby has noticed, that's interesting given that she's only 8 weeks old.  But you're right.  Her behavior does seem to have changed. 

Come on, a minute ago you were doing this with me.  Come on. 

[laughter]

Can you see her mouthing, mouthing is often a sign of anxiety.  Come on.  Look.  Her gaze has just dropped down.  Her gaze never dropped down in the previous clip.  Big sigh.  I like that.  Oh, big ‑‑ her behavior has changed.  So in a second we're going to play another trick on her.  We're going to put it back to live and ask the same thing, will the baby notice, how long will it take her, how do we know if the baby noticed.  But right now, it's still on replay.   

She gets really solemn expressions.  There she is mouthing again. 

Now it's back to live. 

[ Laughter ]

Does that laughter imply that you think the baby has noticed? 

Can we stop and think about that for a moment then please?  Can I ask how many of you think that the baby noticed within a second or two ‑‑ let's just take that last one.  When we put it back to live, how many of you think the baby noticed within a second or two, put up your hands?  Can you look around the room? 

Okay.  How many of you think the baby noticed within a second or two when we put it to replay?  When we replayed that first time?  Can you look around the room? 

You need to think about what you are saying because this is really important.  You just said that you think an eight week old baby with full visual capacities can notice a difference in timing between herself and a new person, a stranger.  You think an eight week old baby can do that?  And you think that she can notice really quickly and you think that her behavior indicates that. 

Lots of people think an eight week old baby can't even smile meaningfully yet.  So if you really think that a human being can notice that quickly, you have just said something core about humanity, about our humanity that we note the relationship and the knowing between self and other as young as this. 

It doesn't grow later, it doesn't come to you.  We're born with it. 

But most people don't know that.  Lots of people think it comes later.  Lots of people think it might happen perhaps only in vision.  They might not know that it happens in other modalities. 

If you think human beings are born with this, then it changes our understanding of what we need and who we are and how we solve societal problems and why relationships matter.  How do we help people to get that?  How do we know that?  What do we need to tell them?

Okay.  Here is how scientists have come to work out that babies are born connected.  Here's some of the evidence.  It turns out that when you look at ‑‑ if a baby looks at their parent at the age of three months, the heart rates change simply by having your parent look at you.  And if they look at you a lot, then your baseline heart rate changes because you feel connected. 

Now, when you hear that research, people might think that that's because of the looking rather than the connecting.  But what they have measured in that particular experiment is the heart rate change that goes with looking.

What about this?  What about being picked up?  There's research now that shows that babies at the age of two months adjust their posture as their parent comes to pick them up.

At the age of two months they put their arms up and they strengthen their bodies, anticipating that their parent is going to pick them up.  That's how much in tune they are to the actual behavior postures of other people. 

How about this?  This takes us down to newborn level.

So this is imitation.  This is Andy Meltzoff and research in the 1970's when he's demonstrating sticking tongues out at babies.

In the 1970s when he revealed this, it was a huge controversy amongst scientists because they didn't think that newborn babies could copy tongues sticking out or could copy mouth openings, ah, or mouth pursing.

Do you see that last one?  That baby is working so hard to do this, it's going cross eyed.  [ Laughter ]. 

Why should babies do that?  Is it a reflex or is it a conversation?  It's part of the discussion that scientists have.  But the real question is why should they do that?  Why would they notice at all what another face is doing within minutes and hours of birth? 

If you have a brain that is made to know other people's faces, other people's bodies, you start to read everything they're doing as meaningful.  But when this research got really discussed, some people got worried that we shouldn't put too much on babies' mouths, so some researchers say could we find it going on in other parts of the body?

So this research is from Emese Nagy's research and he said lots of babies do things with their mouths.  What if we do fingers.  So she sticks out her index fink we are newborn babies and that's her finger down in the front that I have the arrow pointed to.

And we have a baby who is about 36 hours old.  Why would a brand new baby respond to finger pointing?  And yet that's what she finds.  This baby was so into her that she not only put out one finger, but put out the fingers of both hands.

A brand new baby takes even hand gestures as meaningful.  Her brain is wired to respond to it in a matched fashion.  And of course, Emese's work shows that babies can carry on conversations to you for happen to half an hour of exchanging matched fingers.

Can I get you all to do this with you?  Can you please make this? 

Okay.  That's hard to do.  Keep doing it.  It's hard to do, isn't it?  Yes?  Some of you are finding it so difficult you're looking at your own fingers to make sure you've got it right.

Brand new babies will copy this with you if they can see it.  And they will do it in time with yours.

What I'm trying to do is to give you flavors of what it means to say we arrive connected and the kind of evidence that scientists have been able to draw on to discover that. 

It turns out to not only be when they're born.  It turns out that even babies in the womb are connected.  So this is the research ‑‑ this is the Cat in the Hat research from the 1980s.  In other words, this is not brand new.  1980s, they had mothers read the Cat in the Hat to their baby in the womb everyday for the last six weeks of pregnancy.  And when they got here three days later they hooked them up to an electronic nipple and then they could measure how fast the babies are sucking.

And when they played them a recording of their mother reading Cat in the Hat or their mother reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the babies sucked faster to the recording of the story that they have heard in the womb.  And it turns out that not only do they know the particular story they heard, they know the storyteller because if you play them a recording of their mother reading cat in the cat or a stranger reading Cat in the Hat, they suck faster to the sound of their mother reading Cat in the Hat.  Or they even suck a faster with the difference between Cat in the Hat and dog in the fog.

All you have to do is change the vowel sounds and babies can tell the difference between what they heard in the womb and what they didn't.  They know ‑‑ they know the stories of the world they will be coming into.  They know the people who will be in their world.  They know the music of their world because if you don't know that a story has a plot line because you're a fetus, it's basically a song.  So they then know whether the singers sing songs of laughter and happy things or whether they sing songs that are a bit scary with lots of shouting. 

Our babies know something of the emotional tenor of the world they will be born into before they get here. 

They even know the wider cultural songs.  This is one more piece of research done with soap operas.  So this is a very popular soap opera in the UK.  And it turns out that babies whose mothers watched this particular soap opera ‑‑ so it's a bit like if your mother watches General Hospital as opposed to all my children.  All of my children, versus General Hospital, and you can have arguments between you about which is the better soap opera.  Of course some of them think none of them are really good soap operas.  But the point is they come with music.  The babies know which soap operas you watch.

In fact this article when it was published came out with the title fetal soap addiction.  Since then we learned all sorts ‑‑ this is Annie Murphy Paul's book called how the nine months before you're born shapes the rest of your life.  It turns out that we are wired for connection and that that is starting even before we are born.  That's the point.  Babies are already connected.

I now spend all my time trying to figure out what information is helpful to people, what resources are helpful to people.  What do we need to say or do or create to help us to think about this one idea.  We are born already connected.  We are born already relating conversational communicative in partnership with other people, because it is what our biology is wired for. 

Does that make sense?  Okay.  I'm going to try that one more time.  Does that make sense? 

Yes.

Yes?  Okay.  Then we feed to figure out how we help other people to know that, because not everybody knows.  In my workshop this morning, there was a doula, everybody turn and look at [indiscernible].  She's being very brave.  She's been a doula for 14 years.

I was, yes.

Was a doula for 14 years, and she didn't know that new babies could imitate.

Her profession hadn't trained her to tell her that.  So there are sorts of professionals working with babies that don't know what some of the science knows.  Can you shout what was it like this morning when we talked about it in the workshop, just for people that weren't there.  What is it like to learn this down the line and not to have had it to begin with?

As a doula, it was ‑‑ I haven't been a doula for many, many years, and to see it was just amazing.  But as we said in the session, you still can't put ‑‑ I still can't describe what it is, but connection.  And that I would protect this space for families to bond, but I still had no idea that that connection, went even further to where a ten minute old child could imitate.

A ten minute old child can imitate, as she experiences as profound, but her field didn't know to teach her that, to think about birth.  Thank you for your courage in standing up here.

[applause]

All of the research that I just have been telling you about, is not new.  Some of it's from the 70, it's decades old.  And so it's there for us to draw on, but we somehow haven't always worked it into our understanding of what it means to be a human being and the kinds of services and support we provide to families, professionals, babies. 

What's interesting is that brain development has captured people's attention.  So there's this ‑‑ so I'm going to talk just a little bit about brain development because I want you to leave here confident about brain development too.  But the interesting bit to me is, this is where people are now excited.  So Judy Cameron spoke to us really helpfully about that yesterday at length.  But I wrote down something she said.  When she got to the bit of where she was talking about relationships, she said neuroscientists didn't used to think about relationships.  So we've got the information on brain development and that's captured a lot of people's attention out there.  Politicians love brain development information.  But we haven't linked it to what developmental and baby psychologists have known for decades.

So how do we put these two together?  Right.  I want to be sure that you go out of here able to confidently talk to other people about this.  So I want to just build a little bit on what Judy gave us yesterday.  And give you some other analogies that might help you when you talk to other people.  This is obviously a brain and if you are going to talk for very few minutes about brain development, what is the most valuable and informative stuff to know?  I think it's this.  This one piece of information that at birth, the brain is the most immature of the body's organs.  Now, that's what Judy told us yesterday, but I've just put it in a slightly different way.  Brains are not fully grown at birth, they're designed to grow after birth.  If you know that, you can start to ask all sorts of questions like how fast do they grow, when do they stop growing and what causes them to go and Judy was talking about that yesterday.

Let me give and you couple of other numbers.  By the age of one, roughly 70% of final brain mass is in place.  And by the age of three, roughly 90% is in place.  Brains grow more rapidly between birth and three actually earlier before birth than three, than they ever will again.  That's why people are so interested in the early years.  That's what I meant by, we bring with us to our adulthood our early histories, because babies are paying attention through that connection that I've just been showing you videos of, to everything that happens around them.  They're trying to figure out what is meaningful in their world.  And since they don't yet know, they don't know, well, maybe in this planet, the way everybody says hello to each other is they stick their tongue out, because somebody's sticking their tongue out at me.  Maybe I need to learn that.  Maybe everybody on this planet shouts.  So this is a scary planet.  Maybe everybody on this planet plays that loving music I heard.  Great, I'll be expecting more of.  Babies experiences are driving brain development and it's happening more rapidly in those other years than it will later on. 

Okay.  How do I help people to get that?  This is a slide that Judy didn't show us yesterday.  This is the work of Bruce Perry.  And it helps us to think of what final mass means.  This is two CAT scans.  One that's normal and one that has had extreme neglect.

Now, it's interesting ‑‑ I work with this slide sometimes, it's interesting that Bruce Perry is a lot more local to here than he is when I talk in the US.  And Bruce Perry runs the trauma academy.  So it leads directly to what ‑‑ some of the themes Judy talked about yesterday.  And the point of this slide is that these are both three year old children.  And if one has had what he labels normal experience, and the other has had extreme neglect.  If you have a childhood where there's neglect, your brain simply doesn't grow at the same rate.  That's what he's trying to say with this slide.

Now, that's why politicians and services need to know this stuff so that they understand the importance of early intervention.  This is an extremely neglected child.  Some people will say, in fact, he goes on late tore say this is from a child who spent their early years in Romania, their first three years.  Let's just ask the question, okay, maybe the neglect in Romania was so much worse, it's like no other child in America.  Or actually maybe there are children in America that are that neglected.  And the reason it matters is because the brain starts to do later things after three. 

How do we help people to understand about brain development and the importance of connection that is driving that kind of development?  One of those is to show actual images of brains and show contrasting sizes.  The extremities help us to see the impact, to use one of the words we just heard a few minutes ago, of love.  Love grows brains. 

Okay.  How does that happen?  Judy showed you this slide.  This is a slightly different version.  See those upside down things, Judy went like that.  I'm going like this.

Those upside down hand looking things are neurons.  Remember there's all those blank spaces?  That's birth, 15 months and two years.

Okay.  I like to do this motion.  Please laugh because I feel stupid up here.  [ Laughter ].

Judy did it much more beautifully like that.  But if you think ‑‑ okay.  So everybody can see that?  Those neural pathways are being formed by every single tiny experience a baby has, which is what you just saw in that video I showed you, so every time a baby looks at you and you look back, or every time a baby looks at you and you don't look back, and every time your baby does their foot and you respond by tapping their foot, and whatever experiences a baby has they're forming neural pathways. 

Okay.  That's the key information.  How do you help people to take that away?  Well, here's my analogy.  I call that motor ways in the brain.

I know that here in America we should use the word freeways in the brain or highways in the brain, but somehow it doesn't have the alliterative effect.  Motor ways in the brain have de dumb rhythm.

In the early years they are particularly talking about the emotional weather. 

If you come into a world where there's lots of stormy, emotional ‑‑ you develop pathways that take you off into fear or anxiety or loneliness.

If you come into a world where it's emotionally sunny you develop lots of pathways for company and togetherness and joy.

What we want to do is be thinking about how do we grow pathways for joy and connection and togetherness?  And that fulcrum idea to make sure that the pathways to good experiences outweigh the number of pathways to fear and anxiety.

Here's another way to say that.  If you spend lots of your time worried that sabre tooth tigers are going to come through that door or bears are going to come through that door, then you develop sabre tooth tiger pathways.

Here's the one extra idea that I want to build on what Judy was saying, how do you counter sabre tooth tiger fear?  Do you it with internal Teddy bears.

What we should be doing for our children is helping them grow internal Teddy bears where they can comfort themselves in the midst of sabre tooth tiger moments.  When they want to go to the pool and it's even on their calendar and they're expecting to go to the pool and then they can't because there's a flat tire and they're dealing with terrible disappointment, it's a sabre tooth tiger moment.

How do we help them to have a strong enough internal Teddy bear to get them through the moments of disappointment and fear and anxiety and loneliness? 

How do we put those two ideas together and understand it as neuroscience?  Because when we do that the word neuroscience has stopped being scary and has become about building compassion.

If we can be curious enough about what are your sabre tooth tiger moments and how do I help you to build an internal Teddy bear that lets you comfort yourself in the middle of them, we're applying the neuroscience. 

Does that analogy help? 

Yes.

Zeedyk: Because what we need are words that make it easier for other people.  And once we get that basic idea, we can then start to understand how it changes so we stick with that for a minute.  So in your early years you're setting up your basic ‑‑ your basic motor ‑‑ your basic pathways so we go often to a town of joy and we go often to a town of excitement.  We don't often go to a town of loneliness.  We put together a basic transport system.

During the primary years you put in place things that strengthen it.  So you put in place the cash barriers, the cat's eyes, the cameras, the police cars that strengthen that motor way system.

In your adolescent system you have a lot of roadworks going on so those of you who have spoken to me about your teenagers, in road works you put in place new roads.  You put in place new flyovers and junctions and exits to more closely match the world that you're living in.

So if there were difficulties in early life, adolescence is a perfect time in which to redo the biology and produce healing for those difficult early years.

In your adult years you go round and round that motor way system that you got, unless you learn that there are ways to change it through things like meditation and yoga that are really body based.  And then in your final older years, you start to get potholes.  [ Laughter ].  Which is why you need to do cross roads and learn a new instrument because you create new neural connections by doing new things.

And at the end of your elderly years I don't know what happens next, okay?  [ Laughter ].

But in other words if we can find analogies that work we can track this all the way through life.  It's not just about babies.  It's about the way in which our early experiences which set up the basic neural pathways in the brain stay there and therefore are part of the history that we bring to our adulthood. 

How do we help people to take that seriously, including with childhoods that are perhaps were filled with some fear, and at the same time not get scared by that so that we can feel empowered to be curious and sensitive to what might have happened while keeping healing in mind.  That's the big ask.

I put my hands like this a lot.  How do I help to contain people's anxiety about getting that, and yet move them to really feel it?  That's the balance that we're trying to go for.  So let me come back to here.

If this is my language of sabre tooth tigers and Teddy bears, how do we help people get that?  As I almost sort of, not quite yet start to wind down, I just want people ‑‑ people say where can I know more?  Okay.  This is our book.  This is sabre tooth tigers and Teddy bears.  You can get that from my website if you find I haven't talked about it enough but that's because you can't really have a residential because there's no room for the sleeping bags in this large hotel.

Right.  That's our sabre tooth tigers and Teddy bears.

This is Barbara miles, famous language of the hands.  And people think about the hands, but what's underneath those hands is the Teddy bear.  So I like the little messages like that are getting out, but we may not have paid attention to the Teddy bear on the front of Barbara miles' book and yet the idea is there if we know to look for it.

Okay.  In your packs you have handouts from me.  Is it helpful to have short things rather than books?  Perhaps that's what's helpful to people.

Okay.  Out there there are some cards, although I think most of them are gone now, you about some of the other things that we have been creating.

We've got, for instance, on E‑courses there are fliers for that out.

If they're gone you can get those off my website, okay?  What I'm trying to say is we ‑‑ here's some of the things we have been creating to help people to get it, and it's working because we have books on dementia.  People are linking early experiences in baby hood to the symptoms of dementia.

We have films because maybe it's helpful to show films to help people to see babies.

We are often trying to highlight other people's work, so this is some of our work on why children fidget.  DeafBlind children fidget a lot, but if you don't know why DeafBlind children fidget, people often think it's badly behaved.

Okay.  Here's Allan Shore's work that I talked about at yesterday's panel and we've linked that to the movie Frozen.  Allan Shore's work is all about how to let it go!

This is Nadine Burke Harris' work on trauma which Judy was talking about yesterday.  There's a great TED talk on it if you didn't know.  Lots of information is out there if you want to know more to communicate it to other people.  But maybe it's not just information we need.  Maybe we need other kinds of tools.

So, we have a series of posters with inspirational quotes.  George said some wonfully inspirational things yesterday on this stage and I have asked him can we include his inspirational quotes and he said I can put his comments in our next set of posters.

So for people to walk in, and I know that those are seeing people, but lots of seeing people need reminded about connection.  Can we do that through simple things like posters?  These are our actual teddy bears in order to remind Terry bear language.  And this is a local authority in Scotland who ordered 250 of them.  This is what 250 teddy bears look like when you give them to the staff who need reminded of the importance of cuddling children and they are scared to cuddle them, because their authority thinks that you shouldn't get that emotionally intimate with children.  Because they think intimacy means other scary things.

And finally, I run a big Facebook account, which makes it easy to send things out to people.  Makes it easy to hit share.  And I write lots of blogs.  So this is me taking a pop at pampers.  At one of their campaigns.  Which I said objectified children.  And I even took a pop at Jimmy Kimmel.  Because I think that some of the things that we think are funny are actually not so funny if we really start to understand connection.  And Jimmy Kimmel has lots of power.  So Jimmy Kimmel is one of the people that I think doesn't yet know about connection.  And if any of you know him I would like you to ask him to get in touch with me, because I would like him to stop his Halloween and Christmas campaigns because it gets us to laugh at lots of children in ways that could be painful to them.

Okay, what I'm try trying to do is just highlight some of the ways that my routine has tried to find ‑‑ to communicate this information to other people.  How do we help them to get it, that brains are wired for connection.  Because if they don't get that, they may not realize how helpful the DeafBlind can be and why we can bring some things, insights back.  So let me just close with a few of these ideas.

The implication that this basic information that I've been talking about, here are some of the things it means for deafblindness.  It really helps us to think about human brains are built for connection.  It doesn't matter if all the modalities aren't there.  So these are the videos of Clarissa Volmar and her family, I don't know if you know all of them, but they're putting out great videos about what it's like to raise Clarissa.  They show in wonderful tiny ways this connection I'm talking about.  But many people may miss that connection if they think that connection is only about eye gaze, or is about hearing.

Okay.  Here's the second point for deafblindness.  We said it before, all communication draws on emotional connection.  But this lovely image, from the Perkins DeafBlind school, images that we put up can often emphasize functional communication.  And we want to help children and young people to have the skills to survive in the world.  But functional communication is also about emotional communication because all communication is emotional.  And we need to remember that even when we're designing tasks.  How about this?  I've said it before, people bring their developmental experiences to any interaction even if we don't know what their earlier development was.

So part of the point of Clarissa's videos or people that watch them can follow her growth because they've been doing that since she was wee.  It tells a lovely happy story if you follow the videos.

Here's another.  So this is another family with the images that were part of the Cogswell Macy Act.  It's just a photograph in the document that went forward for political argument.  But it says this child is coming from a supportive family.

Here's Heather owe rye on I wanted to put that up because I had no idea that Heather was a real person, because before I got here I had only seen her on video.  And then she showed up on my workshop this morning and I had videos of ‑‑ Heather's videos are full of connection.  Even if she doesn't use that word.  Even if it's not the way they've been ‑‑ if there were people to see, and if we get those happy ones, then we can think about one other thing I said, many children now begin life this way.  And there are many NICU units who don't yet know about connection.  They don't know enough about attachment.  And if there's a doula in the room who didn't know for 14 years that it's okay for NICU staff ‑‑ I mean, it's not okay, but it helps us to think about the fact that there are NICU staff that don't yet really understand connection.  And these babies need connection even more if the first lessons they're getting about other people are lessons of pain.

How do we help people to get this understanding that we arrive connected?  Because if we get that, we could have this fourth idea.  Good communication requires trust.  Which in our lovely little awards ceremony that we just had, the word trust came up.  Good communication is always about trust.  But finally, trust takes time to build.  And sometimes we push our children too quickly, and all we need to do is to leave time for trust to build.  Trust might be called things like relationships, connection, or communication.  At the heart of those, it's trust.  Which means that at the heart of a society that is healthy and happy is trust. 

You know because of the way you live and work and the challenges that your lives present, that trust is at the heart of what you do.  But sometimes the rest of the world has forgotten that.

So one of the lessons that you have to bring to the wider world is this very simple basic one about how much we need trust.  And without that, it starts to affect our biology.  And often all we need to start that is to have more time, which is one of the things that we have less and less of in today's world.  One of the things that surprises me about doing this is I started as a scientist and when I really began to get what this information was telling us, I started to sound like I'm in Dalai Lama land.  I start to talk about respect and presence and trust, and companionship.  Of course I do.  Because I'm talking about the science of human connection.  And what the science tells us is what it turns out we already knew.  But didn't always feel perhaps that we had permission to say.  Or that we took for granted, which is why, as I wind up, let me go back to where I started.

Human beings are born already connected.  Does that make a bit more sense now?  Does it make a bit more sense why I would also have called it changes to sensory modalities do not change the capacity for connection, because it's what our brains are primed to do, no matter what your body looks like.  Your brain is built for connection.  

So here's my proposal:  Let's be sure that we put connection at the center of all our thinking in the DeafBlind field and once we've done that, let's put connection at the heart of all our thinking about our much wider society.  Thank you very much.

[applause]