European Early Childhood Education Research Journal

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Finding a place with meaning in a busy human

world: how does the story begin, and who helps?

Colwyn Trevarthen

To cite this article: Colwyn Trevarthen (2012) Finding a place with meaning in a busy human
world: how does the story begin, and who helps?, European Early Childhood Education Research
Journal, 20:3, 303-312, DOI: 10.1080/1350293X.2012.704757

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European Early Childhood Education Research Journal
Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2012, 303–312

EDITORIAL
Finding a place with meaning in a busy human world: how does
the story begin, and who helps?
John Dewey and Jerome Bruner, tell us that a young child’s experience should bring
them into meaningful experience with a culture and its customs, language and knowl-
edge. These are already alive in the social world the child comes into, a world perpe-
tually changing in obedience to two human instincts: private ambitions and feelings in
individuals, and social collaboration in work, beliefs and values. Learning begins, these
great educational reformers say, as an actively created experience, a story or many
stories created with the child as co-author.
In a complex modern ‘civilized’ and technical society the child’s grasp of meaning,
at least beyond infancy, benefits from the help of teachers – people trained to give more
than is available where learning must begin, with parents and grandparents at home, and
with neighbours. Schools provide lessons in approved speaking, reading and writing,
and calculating, all to help future communication and work. Teachers are also
trained to instruct about acceptable manners in a law-governed society, sometimes ‘cor-
recting’ standards and habits, or survival strategies, that a child learned in the home and
local community. But all these ‘lessons’ must, Dewey and Bruner say, accept that every
child wants to be an active partner in getting cultural knowledge and skills, showing, in
intense relationships, what Alfred North Whitehead called a ‘zest for learning,’ which is
led by intuitive aesthetic and moral sensibilities.
Even these advocates of reform, who have worked to liberate educational practice
from too rigid principles of instruction in what social leaders think is most important for
peace and prosperity, find the optimal balance between imaginative play of the learner
and disciplined work according to a curriculum difficult to judge. Bruner uses the
equivocal metaphor ‘scaffolding,’ as if the teacher is a builder. Differences of
opinion and advice are inevitable. According to the genetic epistemology of Piaget,
schooling should encourage discovery of object concepts by a ‘little scientist’ who
masters pragmatic circumstances by experience of action for his or her own ‘pleasure
in mastery,’ building rational ‘schemas’ of a physical reality separate from the inquisi-
tive mind. On the other hand, Mead and Vygotsky value the social influence, the
making of a self in relations with others, and the mastery of cultural tools by highly
cooperative, communicating young persons, sharing minds. Merleau-Ponty gave the
child the same powers of consciousness as a reflective adult who is deeply engaged
with all the phenomena of being alive in the world, in the mind and its reality, and
with feelings about how they are deeply implicated together. He sought an education
that respects this ‘lived engagement’ of the child with things and people.
For many contemporary psychologists, who have assimilated the ‘cognitive revolu-
tion,’ what bridges between individual thinkers about separate reality is mastery of a
‘theory of mind’ to ‘understand’ how other persons think, believe, and will do – it is
a special cognitive skill greatly aided by (if not entirely dependent on) language.
Some think the child learns by activity of a brain network ‘wired’ with instinctual

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304 Editorial

organs of information processing such as ‘executive functioning’ and ‘episodic

memory’ yet ‘plastic’ under the influence of emotion, perhaps with dedicated
modules evolved for assimilating language, art and technique.
There is indeed confusion in educational theory and advice for practice for the
modern preschool teacher. How are we to credit the agency of the child and its
sharing, given that there are so many erudite procedures that reject common sense or
‘folk psychology’? Science of child intelligence, especially its cognitive neuroscience
variety, has assumed supreme authority, with appeal to experimental methods of
obtaining sure evidence or proof of ‘models,’ using statistical tests of measures to
demonstrate reliability and validity. Increasingly the young child is conceived with
reference to evidence of activities in actively growing young brains that are excited
by controlled exposure to events and ‘information.’ Much of the body and inner life
of young learners remains obscure with this reductive doctrine.
One key weakness in the modern idea of the child has been the premise, shared by
authoritative philosophers, psychologists and medical scientists in the past hundred
years while human industry, mobility and commerce have flourished, that a baby is
born without conscious intentions, thoughts or emotions, and unable to express itself
with the mind of a person who can relate to other persons in productive, imaginative
and pleasurable dialogue or work. That belief has now been proved false by the
simple expedient of looking more closely, aided by film and television, at manifes-
tations of intimate and imitative companionship between very young infants and affec-
tionate parents. The results support ‘common sense’ or ‘folk psychology’ feelings of
what it is like to have active and sensuously articulate company with infants. Most
impressive, as the paediatrician Berry Brazelton and his allies have made clear, is
the power of even a newborn infant to solicit and transform the feelings and expressions
of humanness in their mothers and fathers (Brazelton 1979; Gomes-Pedro et al. 2002).
Here the roles of adult and child as teacher and learner are reversed.
In the light of what we now know about a newborn’s innate personality, there needs
to be a deep revision of assumptions about how education works with older, walking,
talking children who are, happily, still deemed too young for formal schooling by
instruction in reading, mathematics and ways of reasoning about both practical tasks
and good behaviour. How can this rather anarchic and inexperienced stage of childhood
be prepared for complexities of modern culture? We need to take Margaret Donaldson’s
concept of the emotionally supported ‘human sense’ the child naturally gains, and how
its imaginative ‘locus of concern’ expands with growing memory (Donaldson 1992),
and connect this ‘genetic humanism’ with the insights such as those the socio-linguist
and anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson gained when she studied carefully a ‘proto-
conversation’ between a nine-week-old and the mother. About this skilful start of
human learning, Bateson said:

Infant and mother may enter into such interactions because previous experience combined
with phylogenetic characteristics prepares them to do so. The particular kind of prep-
aration, as well as a comparison with other kinds of contexts in which rapid and
intense learning takes place, suggests that interactions of this sort have a very high poten-
tial not only for pleasure but also for learning. This is highly suggestive. The inadequacy
of linguistic performances in a child’s environment for the learning of language has been a
major issue in attempts to evaluate the level of innate knowledge needed for language
learning. However, the evidence from animal ethology strongly suggests the need for
study of specific ways in which the young organism is equipped to select from among
environmental stimuli and to match them selectively with phylogenetically given patterns.
 European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 305

A concept of structured receptivity or readiness to learn, as we are able to define it, casts a
totally different light on the value and usefulness of environmental input. Specifically, in
this case, we are suggesting that mother and child, long before speech, have the potential
for developing joint vocal performances (although these will clearly take different forms
in different cultures), which function as contexts for learning. (1979, 75–76)

In other words, the child is born a learner, and so is the mother, and they enjoy com-
municating their learning, motivating each other.
I saw the same intimacy of inventive communication in two-month-olds, and called
it ‘primary innate intersubjectivity’ (Trevarthen 1979). With Penelope Hubley and
other bright young colleagues I observed how developments in infants’ ‘readiness to
learn’ transformed the purpose and productivity of communication with mothers
through the first year and to the threshold of language, generating collaborative learning
of tasks and rituals in ‘secondary intersubjectivity’ (Hubley and Trevarthen 1979;
Trevarthen and Grant 1979; Trevarthen, Murray, and Hubley 1981). Infants and
mothers built a rich companionship in experience and playful discovery, quite distinct
from the attachment John Bowlby showed was essential for nourishment, support and
protection of the infant’s immature body with attention to feelings of safety and
comfort. Dan Stern, too, discovered how the dynamic vitality of the human moving
body and its motivating spirit in voice and gesture leads to discovery and participation
in an ‘interpersonal world’ (Stern 2000, 2010). This is the place where early education
takes place, where the child’s inborn adaptations for knowing and sharing have a
guiding role in what will work as learning and remembering with any teacher who is
willing to share pleasure and pride as well as information.
Another discovery of great significance for teaching and learning with infants is the
importance of complex moral emotions of ‘pride’ and ‘shame,’ and the role of humour
in regulating initiative and mastery of jokes, games and other collaborative practices, as
well as the experimental creation of elaborate meanings in shared tasks (Reddy 2008).
Teachers, I conclude, should respect and be keen to accept both the aesthetic and moral
feelings and sensibilities young children have with regard to what they attempt to do
and know, and their sense of humour, noticing how sensitive they are to the ways
other persons receive their efforts with admiration or disapproval.
One of my students, Ben Bradley, questioned the validity of information taken only
from mothers or other adults with their infants, and went on to demonstrate the rich
adaptations for communication, exploration of relationships and artful invention
among infant peers from before six months of age. He, with Jane Selby, recorded
how they engaged in groups with no adults present (Bradley and Selby 2004) and
how artful and witty their communications could be (Bradley 2009). They said, we
are born ‘sociable,’ not just for mothering. And Ben has continued to be interested
in what this implies for experience of children in preschools and childcare places,
how they develop independent sociability.
A further consideration raised by the recent phenomenological study of early
sharing of human experience in natural ways concerns the aesthetic artfulness of its
foundations (Dissanayake 2000). This artfulness expresses the use of an intricately
articulated human body that moves with economy and grace and with a wide spectrum
of power, guided by many senses, among which the master of all is the inside body
sense of ‘proprioception,’ which Charles Sherrington, its discoverer in animals,
described as the ‘felt me.’ In all the genuine and productive communications
between infants and toddlers with adults or peers there are pervasive principles of
306 Editorial

self-aware motor control of the body, which may be described as possessing the par-
ameters of inventive ‘musicality’ and ‘narration’ (Trevarthen and Malloch 2002;
Malloch and Trevarthen 2009). Human bodies move and test their feelings in poly-
rhythmic, melodious or poetic ways from before birth, and these expressions of self-
awareness are shaped in action and sensed in ways that move others powerfully.
Furthermore the dynamic creation of being in movement expresses, from the start,
inner vital time or measured sense of purposeful happenings and assessment of good
or bad consequences in narrative forms. These motivations are essential for all practical
learning and for social cooperation, as well as for learning language (Trevarthen and
Delafield-Butt 2012). Fact and reasons are, as Whitehead said, not enough.
Teachers need at least to sense intuitively the rhythmic vitality of children and how
they respond. Close observation of body movements with head turning, hand gestures,
face expressions and vocalizations of infants and adults expressing their impulses
reveals that they obey a scale of rhythmic intervals or a ‘biochronology’ which is orga-
nized over a great range, from just perceptible fractions of a second through the present
moment of a few seconds to longer imagined and remembered events that may fill a
lifetime. A proto-narrative format of tens of seconds with ‘introduction,’ ‘develop-
ment,’ ‘climax’ and ‘resolution’ is pervasive (Trevarthen and Delafield-Butt 2012);
it appears to form the frame of action on which propositional thought and linguistic
syntax may be shared and elaborated by the learning of contrived ritual and symbolic
forms of meaning. As has been suggested by those studying the evidence on human
evolution (Donald 2001; Mithen 2005; Brandt 2009; Cross and Morley 2009) and by
musicologists, especially those interested in the musicality of little children (Bjørkvold
1992), sharing of human ideas and experiences begins, and has begun in the distant
past, in non-verbal dramatic mimesis, dance, song and music, leading to verbal
poetry. The most formal and arbitrary elements of culture retain a foundation in this
uniquely human intersubjectivity of body mobility. These principles are important
for the evaluation of educational practice, including classroom discourse (Erickson
2009), and they are common to all languages. They link acquisition of cultural
habits and understanding to the sympathetic transmission of human impulses, interests
and emotions, and the tones and ‘attunements’ of adult-child communication (Stern
2010).
Experience of being alive in the world grows from the sensations of body move-
ment, and from anticipation about how the perception of action can be changed by
engagement with the matter of the world in different forms and places. Our minds
are made to act and accept the consequences with different pleasures and pains.
The articles in this collection cover many topics that the authors reveal important for
early education and child care. Several of them provide, in addition to new information
from original observations with different strategies, scholarly summaries of findings,
models and theoretical disagreements from the literature concerning how early learning
should be managed, led, equipped, measured and evaluated by adults. All attempt to
clarify what is presumed to be of benefit for the children, and tacitly for their prep-
aration to be well and do well in more structured roles later as adolescents and
adults, and perhaps as parents, too. The issue of who learns and who transmits experi-
ence has not gone away since John Dewey wrote so eloquently about it, and since
Maurice Merleau-Ponty used knowledge of the natural phenomena he observed in
childhood life, and in his own perceiving, to refute the assertions of Jean Piaget
about the primacy of rational individual learner handling reality, along with Sigmund
Freud’s hypothesis of the infant Ego requiring regulation of its primal erotic impulses.
 European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 307

The following issues interest me, as a ‘natural scientist’ or observer of infancy, with
regard to their implications for childhood learning – how their effects for the future self-
confidence or pride, imaginations and success in relationships and work in society of
the children may be properly appraised. What will count is how well teachers, and trai-
ners of teachers as well as leaders or administrators of early education services, perceive
the children as persons who are by nature imaginative, concerned and sociable, eager to
claim a place in the world of meaning and responsibility, and to be able to tell stories
about it.
Between the infant and the talkative and experienced child entering primary school
there is a transformation of the body, its movements, its expressive abilities and its
sociability. In the second year children everywhere are beginning to be extravagantly
agile, running about, speaking and using tricks and tools cleverly, wanting to master
themselves in feelings of moving, and enjoying shared play with what happens. Pro-
gress is very fast in these few years, with a remarkable flowering of temperament
around two, when pride in achievement involvement with mentors and peers and asser-
tion of independence of intentions and of rights and preferences is strong. This is a time
of bold discovery and of insecurity, of pride in knowing, and of shame at not being
understood, a time of artful creativity (Bjørkvold 1992; Trevarthen 2012). It is also a
time for making new friends and for challenging elders, as well as for greatly appreciat-
ing helpful play with both kinds of companion (Reddy 2008). Clearly there are devel-
opments in memory and imagination, in reasoning, and in aesthetic and moral feelings,
all of which can be talked about, as long as company is willing and sympathetic, willing
to accept the same new symbols. The brain is growing, but more obvious and real are
two kinds of growth of the whole childish person: in self-knowing and growing
(autonoesis), and in social understanding and participation (socio-noesis). The baby
who was looking for intimate encounters and support at birth is much more implicated
in culture and more aware of friendships, and ready to profit from an imaginative ‘pre-
school’ (see http://www.childscurriculum.org.uk/).
I believe it is important to understand how this imaginative person, say a two- to six-
year-old, is an actor hoping to find a home in a world with artefacts that can be known
and used according to the old and new ideas of a society, is a person who wants to
belong and be cherished, but also be an inventor. Having something to relate to that
is ancient and mythical is fascinating, with the senses that have evolved to appreciate
a natural environment rich in tastes and odours, sounds and tangibility as well as in
forms and events to be seen and identified. Human environments are built with
many tools, machines, practices and institutions, and these add to nature, or replace
it. One big question is how healthy and enriching is it to guide a modern young
child’s inquisitive skills to know and use what is artificial or prosthetic, with designed
functions and inevitable costs. For example, is it enough to have a playground with only
toys representing machines and jobs, or dolls to be looked after. A sand pit, or better a
beach beside the sea, has wider uses. What will exposure to e-technology with its arti-
ficial pictures of things, places and happenings, and its distanced and disembodied
signals of communication lead young ‘digital natives’ to expect and believe in as
they move in the world, or are driven or carried by plane in it, or find their company
in Facebook.
The various rich, open, descriptive, phenomenological, qualitative and hermeneutic
approaches of Sumsion and Goodfellow, Ho et al., Clark, Campbell-Barr, Klaar and
Öhman, and Melhuus mark a clear move away from experimental psychological
testing of intellectual or sensory-motor abilities to a more natural history or
308 Editorial

anthropology of experience approach that captures the imaginative vitality of both chil-
dren and caregivers, teachers or ‘leader practitioners,’ and their communicating
agencies immersed in experience.
Marjanovic-Umek et al. and Doyle et al. assess early education with focus on lit-
eracy and verbal report. Both bring out the powerful shaping of meaning and ‘belong-
ing’ of language and mastery of verbal conventions and explanations. In Slovenia the
crucial importance of literate understanding in preparing three- to six-year-olds for edu-
cation is accepted and given as a goal in a rich account in the former article, of the
development of story-making by the children who have been given a plot in pictures,
and the success of parenting is shown to depend upon the use of books to practice and
share the child’s growing narrative imagination. They advise assisting both parents and
teachers to read ‘appropriately’ and ‘converse about the content, encouraging storytell-
ing.’ Doyle and colleagues, emphasising the advantages of using different informants,
interrogated parents and teachers about the school readiness of youngsters from a dis-
advantaged community who were starting primary school, with questions about behav-
iour with others, self-confidence and participation. The parents gave higher ratings and
this is judged to be a bias, and less valid. I wonder if for these young apprentices in
shared experience, school and the role of the teacher may have inhibited the spon-
taneous expression of talents used by the children in their homes. Perhaps a different
picture would have emerged in a liberal recording of what the children themselves
thought about these questions.
This matter of the tensions between home culture and school culture comes to the
fore in the study by Ho, Gol-Guven, and Bagnato who measured socio-emotional com-
petence by focused qualitative observation of child and teacher behaviours in US Head
Start classrooms. While individual black and white teachers were able to be fair, under-
standing and emotionally supportive of both black and white children when their beha-
viours were challenging, using their training to manage the cooperative atmosphere of
the group and of engagements with troublemakers, a very different problem was
evident for the immigrant Bantu children. Differences in both language and interperso-
nal and cultural practices at home greatly inhibited the children’s participation in class
and the teachers’ engagement. A recommendation for language training may not be suf-
ficient to deal with this unfortunate consequence of a modern world economy in which
increasing numbers of needy people migrate away from their roots with their customs
and sense of place, planting their children in an alien and incomprehensible world.
Importantly, it was concluded the child behaviour, teacher behaviour and teacher–
child communication are all factors in the success of early participation in school.
There will have to be compensatory ways of relating to and sharing learning with
migrant children and their families, using the universal principles of sincere, intimate
and sympathetic communication, such as those identified by Karsten Hundeide’s Inter-
national Child Development Programme (Hundeide 1991; http://www.icdp.info/) as
effective worldwide for helping young people in trouble.
I am struck by the contrast in the situations, findings and conclusions from the two
studies of outdoor behaviour of preschool children. Bilton reports a study of ‘inter-
actions’ between teachers and children in timetabled play periods at four Local Auth-
ority ‘foundation stage’ play grounds in England, furnished with tricycles. The schools
adhere to the English statutory Early Years Foundation Stage framework. In intensive
observations, she looked for evidence of ‘sustained shared thinking,’ recording cat-
egories of interaction previously agreed with the teachers to be good for evaluating
interactions. The communication was poor. The teachers spoke more than the children
 European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 309

and most of their utterances were ‘domestic’ or regulating isolated actions; some were
judged to be encouraging of agency or discovery, and a few were genuine interactions
with the children. The occasional utterances of the children were more collaborative,
imaginative and discursive than those of the teachers. Clearly the situation, with limit-
ing mechanical and ‘recreational’ resources (the tricycles), and the teacher’s attitudes or
training, did not favour imagination, invention, shared discovery and story-making. In
contrast the behaviour and talk of the children and the subdued participation or mentor-
ing of adults in Melhuus study of a Norwegian outdoor ‘home’ for a group of toddlers
shows astonishing richness of shared invention and learning, principally between the
children. They, accustomed to spend nearly all their time in every season in this
outdoor kindergarten, were very busy exploiting the resources of a beautiful forest
world in which they lived and worked, using real tools, a saw and an axe, to do
useful tasks, preparing to make a fire to cook their meal, as well as making shelters
for small wild beasts they discover. The lesson of this comparison is obvious. Children
can be happier, more creative, more responsible and more talkative (and healthier)
away from toy gadgets and in a familiar and loved outdoor ‘home’ where they can
explore rich nature, land, plants and animals, and with relaxed adult support but
minimal teaching, making friends and expressing their individuality in peer sociability.
I leave readers more experienced than I am with preschool practice and administration
to conclude what should be done to support children’s minds in urban built worlds
where nature is thoroughly tamed and commercial needs dominate. It may be we can
facilitate language development and integration between cultures, as well as learning
of artful self-expression and scientific or practical thinking by allowing discovery by
peer communities in less tidy and protective places, with less curricular specification
of goals and attainments.
Klaar and Öhman in Sweden report detailed observations of how a 14-month-old boy
mastered walking on a slippery slope of ice beside a clay path, exploring the affordances
for moving successfully on the two surfaces, to walk up or slide down. This case study
reveals the same personal initiative that flourished among the youngsters in Norway.
Sumsion and Goodfellow illustrate the motivation for joint attention to a task by describ-
ing with pictures how a 14-month-old boy in the different world of a day-care centre in
Australia seeks contact with a peer and the teacher in relation to a cultural tool, a toy cash
machine. Charlie is clearly interested in making right use of it with teacher present and
taking hints from her; shifting his attention, trying to help, receiving some recognition
from the girl he tries to assist, being excluded, skilfully deploying nonverbal language
of gesture and attitude, making a narrative of his interest. These two vignettes illustrate,
respectively, the active thinking and enjoyment of a preschool child by himself in the
physical world, and how communication can be about use of the affordances of an
educational tool between children and with a teacher. We have much to learn about
enterprise from those too young to say much.
Speaking of the structures of practice and how to use them with advantage, two
topics very popular among our administrators of early education and the regulation of
their practices, as they respond to government policies that purport to correct for
inequalities in the richness and healthiness of childhood, ‘productivity’ and
‘budgets,’ are addressed by Clark and by Campbell-Barr, both in the UK. Clark
examined the difficulties new early years Accept change professionals had with
their ‘leadership’ role in management of practice, observing that ‘concepts of leader-
ship appropriate to the sector are still undeveloped in UK and beyond.’ Using the cul-
tural-historical activity theory of Engeström, developed out of Russian activity theory
310 Editorial

of Vygotsky, Leontiev and Luria to account for how work is generated in society, to
explain how activities with tools and instruments work in a group, he applies this to
ask how can one be a ‘leader’ in practice for child development, giving space for the
psychology of play so practices grow and develop. There was general agreement that
while emphasis on external accountability and achievement of excellence draws
attention to need for skilled and effective leaders, there are problems with being in
charge, and general agreement that it is more effective to lead from within – interpret-
ing leadership as seeking to have an influence, with consent. It is more satisfying and
more productive to be a collaborative leader, a catalyst for continued learning in
companionship.
Campbell-Barr interrogates the ‘folklore’ of ‘human capital’ theory ‘value for
money’ and ‘return on investment,’ abundantly cited by policymakers and by their
critics. First she reviews the history of efforts to improve the social status, prosperity
and productivity or of citizens in a ‘knowledge economy’ by giving young children
better quality education, and current policies in England to deliver free early years edu-
cation for three- to four-year-olds. Then she interviews key informants involved in
securing this delivery. The individuals approached this consultation approve of early
intervention with financial support for preschool services and know it benefits lives,
but there are three concerns. Assessments of benefit focus on cognition, literacy and
numeracy and do not attend properly to socio-emotional abilities or self-confidence
in relationships; the life course young individuals are evaluated without consideration
of the needs of their families or communities; and the staff called upon to deliver the
care and education are poorly paid, inadequately trained and consequently have
modest status.
To economists, such as Heckman, it is an important lesson from calculations of how
wealth is generated and distributed that investment in the industrial enterprise of uni-
versities brings much less future benefit to the prosperity and health of society than
assistance to families with young children and services to educate them before
school. Others concerned with lifelong cooperative work in business, as well as with
social disturbances and ill health among adolescents and young parents, underline
the problems that come if the very young lack proper nourishment and company that
will support ‘social skills’ (meaning satisfaction of motives for companionship and
shared initiative).
Bruce Perry brings clear evidence that nuclear families living with poverty and
stress in big cities or in isolated and impoverished small communities may not
provide conditions for growth of young brains (Perry and Szalavitz 2010; http://
www.childtrauma.org). Clearly a business/industrial model misses their needs. And
Early Education must mean more than protection, feeding, and instructions in skills
for productive work. It means dedicated and trained adults sharing adventurous, coop-
erative and pleasurable experience, which young humans appreciate from infancy
(Trevarthen 1996, 1998, 2004, 2011, 2012). Any human community, large or small,
primitive or civilized, that neglects to provide care and companionship to its infants
and toddlers, responding to their affections, imagination and ‘zest’ for both well-
being and learning, will have cumulating problems with its health and behaviour,
and with its economy, too. Training intelligence and ability to work for an income is
not enough. Even the youngest human beings have to be respected and accepted as
whole reasonable persons, with all their impulses, feelings and habits, and preferred
companions, as Comenius advised in the seventeenth century.
 European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 311

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Colwyn Trevarthen
University of Edinburgh
c.trevarthen@ed.ac.uk