Expressionless Babies, Bored Lovers

Studies that show that human touch diminishes stress; lowers heart rate; boosts healing; and strengthens bonding, are well established.

A bit creepily, given the timing, in November of 2020, Monika Eckstein, Ilshat Mamaev,Beate Ditzen, and Uta Sailer^{, in “}Calming Effects of Touch in Human, Animal, and Robotic Interaction—Scientific State-of-the-Art and Technical Advances”, showed once again that touch signals safety.

They summarized many studies revealing that humans are calmed and reassured via touch, explained the neural mechanisms underlying the calming effects of touch, and then — explored the question of whether robots and other “non-human” service providers, could provide some “beneficial effects of touch” via machines relating to humans:

“The increased use of intelligent robots as service machines, especially in the medical context, makes human–robot interactions more and more frequent in daily routine as well as in healthcare.

This raises the question of whether the beneficial effects of touch depend on the social source of the tactile stimulation or whether they can also be elicited by mechanical or robotic devices […]”

I raise this issue of how we bond, because what I am seeing in many of the human beings around me is: a failure, dissolution or diminution of physical and psychological bonding. Parents are losing the bonds with children and lovers and spouses seem to have lost bonding with one another as well.

Sights I saw recently, that before 2021 I literally never saw: I keep witnessing adult parents walking ahead of their small children, with the kids running to catch up.

The body language of parents, except perhaps those with psychiatric disorders, would never have allowed for this before 2021; remember when parents were always aware of where their kids were, in crowded or possibly dangerous settings?

On my way out of JFK recently, I saw a perfectly sane-looking, well-put-together mom go through security, in a crowded, chaotic setting, and not look back once at her seven-year-old, or her five-year-old, as the kids made their way through security, barely overseen by a dad struggling with luggage, folded stroller, etc.

The dad scarcely looked at the two children either, as the kids walked through a scene rife with strangers, confusion, and the possibility of one or both of them getting lost.

I keep seeing versions of this — desperate-looking children racing to keep up with their families, or wandering a bit too far from their parents, with no one rounding them safely back into the parental orbit.

At the Monterey Aquarium, which we visited a couple of weeks ago, both Brian and I were horrified by scenes we could not have imagined before 2021. Glass displays filled with fish were illuminated, but the rest of the exhibit hallways in the aquarium were shrouded in darkness so intense you could barely see who was around you.

Brian and I and our adult friends kept losing one another in the darkness. Meanwhile, dozens, if not hundreds, of children, some of them extremely small, were milling around, disoriented, in conditions of complete blackness, and they were getting separated from their parents continually, in a roiling crowd; this was a situation ripe for a child to get lost and very frightened, if not worse.

I was appalled, as it would be so easy for another adult to take a child’s hand, and simply walk him or her away.

In the whale watching balcony outside, which looked out over the harbor and involved a steep fall if a child managed to get over the railing, I kept seeing tiny children wandering away from adults, and climbing onto the bottom rung of the balcony railing – and no one was chasing them or even watching them.

(In fact I feel I have scarcely seen a parent chase a child – something we who were parents of small children in the past recall spending much of our lives doing — since 2021.)

On a return journey to JFK, I saw four children wandering alone all the way from a checkin counter, halfway around the terminal, where there were thousands of people coming and going, ultimately to enter a men’s room unaccompanied.

One of the youngest kids was about six years old. I waited outside to make sure that they got out safely — but I was dumbfounded. This kind of release of children into the “wild” in a dangerous, crowded public space would have verged on a parent’s risking neglect or abuse charges, pre-2021.

To me as a parent, this all means that that “radar” you achieve along with the newborn that comes home with you from the hospital — you know what I mean, parents — that almost-sixth sense born in you along with that baby, with which you are always scanning for, always aware of, your child, in relation to possible dangers in the environment — what Brian calls “situational awareness” — is off, or dialed down, or impaired in some way, in many human parents in 2023.

Something else I am not seeing? The fascination that parents used to have in gazing face to face into the eyes of their babies. Parents of babies and toddlers used to spend hours — certainly when stuck on a plane, but also just when they were holding or carrying their children, or seated near them — gazing into the faces of their babies and toddlers and engaging with them in a million ways.

They would make faces, and laugh when the little ones mirrored their expressions. They sang “Itsy Bitsy Spider”, and would start over and over when the child would cry, “Again!” They would stare into the eyes of their babies as if hypnotized, and they kissed their faces impetuously.

They would dandle them and sing to them, fathers and mothers both.

This is instinctive behavior that took millennia to evolve. It helped us to survive and it helps to make us into human beings, with a range of emotions and expressions available to us.

Mothers’ brains actually change when they give birth, and a feedback loop is established that gives them pleasure when they interact with their babies. Betty Vine, in “Motherhood and the Brain: The Science Behind Kissing, Cuddling, and Making It Better”, summarizes the feedback loop that neuroscientists have established between dopamine release in the mother and her engaging with her baby:

“The first and most primal of relationships is not only experienced by every human being, but has the capacity to change every human being, socially, psychologically, and, perhaps most surprisingly, on a cerebral level.

These changes begin immediately in the mother’s brain following birth, it’s been proposed. A study published in Behavioral Neuroscience concluded that the size of mothers’ brains increased shortly after childbirth. […]

Increases in gray matter have been documented in the hypothalamus, amygdala, parietal lobe, and prefrontal cortex, regions responsible for emotion, reasoning, and judgment, the senses, and reward behavior.[…]

Dr. Pilyoung Kim, principal investigator at the Family and Child Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Denver, proposes that hormonal changes affecting the brain — caused by increases of levels of estrogen, oxytocin, and prolactin — happen immediately after birth. […]

A sort of positive feedback loop seems to be operating: a baby’s smile can release dopamine in a mom’s pleasure-reward centers, further reinforcing maternal behavior […]”

Have you seen a lot of parents do this lately with their babies and toddlers? Gaze into their eyes, do just about anything to make them laugh, make silly faces, sing songs, play goofy word games?

This is what I hear when I am around parents of babies and toddlers: total silence.

This is what I see — most babies are gazing around vacantly, not even trying to get the parents’ attention, because the parents are staring vacantly elsewhere. Or else the parents are on their phones.

Indeed I have started to see toddlers and even babies being given phones or electronic devices by their parents, so that there is no human-to-human interaction between them at all.

What I am seeing may be a disruption in that dopamine feedback loop of some kind. Or it may be some other kind of interference.

And this parental lack of being enchanted by their babies, is definitely affecting babies: they used to call out to strangers; to try to sing the songs their parents sang; to verbalize incessantly; to gaze at adults and to break into beautiful smiles — even when they looked at strangers who smiled at them.

Now, many babies are becoming something you’d never think to say pre-2021 — charmless — because no one around them thinks that they are that charming.

Most often, the post-2021 babies I see are expressionless.

So what is happening now seems often to be a negative feedback loop. Their parents seem not to be that interested in them, so their faces and expressions and voices become flat and affectless, even depressed-seeming.

Have the mRNA injections made parents bored by their children and unable effectively to police the area for dangers to their offspring?

Have the injections ruined the hormonal context of sexual desire, a context which in the pre-2021 past used to align heterosexual women and men to one another, and drew gay men to men, and lesbian women to women, and in any event overall allowed for the reproduction of our species?

These are just questions.

And the studies — real studies, uncontaminated uncorrupted studies – need to be fully done.

But something is wrong.

Something is wrong with humans.

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here substack.com

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