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Imagine that you have been working extra hours and one night you come home late to find that your dog has chewed up your favorite pair of shoes. You might tell yourself that he is upset at you for not being there and thus took revenge by purposely ruining your things. It is not uncommon for people to ascribe emotions and motivations to their pets; we are so used to being aware and self-conscious that it seems natural to assume pets think the same way we do (6). However, this is probably a gross misestimation of your dog’s mental processes.

A few weeks ago I was doing a project on maternal separation anxiety for another course when I came upon a very interesting article that outlined a study conducted with premature infants in neonatal intensive care units (NICU) and their mothers. All mothers participated in kangaroo care, an intervention program for hospital bound infants where mothers and infants have skin-to-skin contact, whereas only half listened to soothing music concurrently. Those mother-infant dyads listening to music reaped great benefits: the mothers’ separation anxiety when leaving her child, as well as general trait anxiety, decreased while the infants had more quiet sleep and cried less (1). Music seemed to help sooth both the mother and child during a very anxious time.

            The book Born on a Blue Day, by Daniel Tammet is the autobiography of a man afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome, an autistic spectrum disorder.  Daniel Tammet is best known for his savant abilities in the field of mathematics.   His most famous feat was his memorization of pi to more than 22,000 digits.  One of the main factors allowing Daniel Tammet amazing mathematical skills is his ability to synesthetically “see” numbers and to visualize mathematical equations in ways that the majority of the population can only imagine.

I am a self-proclaimed convert. Not only did I come into college with a plan to avoid technology, but I also came supplied with an over active fear of computers and all the things that go along with them. In the eyes of academia I was the perfect student to continue the tradition of clinging to my ignorance of all things new, while memorizing dead languages I would probably never use once I received my diaploma. I lacked a facebook account and had a talent for avoiding communication through email, preferring instead to correspond with my high school friends the old-fashioned way, using paper and ink. This semester, two of my classes somehow found a way to change everything.

While there are many surprising insights in Daniel J. Siegel’s The Developing Mind, I was most intrigued by how information from the brain and body combine as output to the mind. Merging class discussion with the material in this book offers two ways in which the internal processes of the brain combine with stimulus input from the body to give rise to a picture in the mind. The way discussed in class is that input from the body is supplemented by the brain before it reaches the mind, such as the filling in of the blind spots in the eye. A different way that was touched on in the book is the idea that the brain generates output to the mind that is supplemented by input from the body, such as when it looks to