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This is a complex article (link below) but concerns the important considerations about how does a severely abused young child build into its brain the correct ability to differentiate people from objects and animals if it is NOT treated as human?

Even though experts say, a young child before the age of two just IS and has not yet developed a Theory of Mind, this does not mean that all the underlying brain circuitry necessary for this ability to form after the age of two is not well in place long before that age.  If an infant and child before the age of two has been severely maltreated and does not have the benefit of a safe and secure attachment with an early caregiver, the faulty foundations within the brain will not easily – if ever – allow for an ‘ordinary’ Theory of Mind to form – at any age.

At age 58 I can clearly feel now what I believe is a major difference in the way my brain processes information from contact and experience with people from how I strongly suspect ‘ordinary’ people do.  I can become increasingly aware of HOW I operate in relation to people, but it is far too late for me to change the brain circuitry that formed during malevolent interactions with my mother and is the foundation for who and how I am in the world.

(I talked with a moose while I was visiting my brother last week in Alaska.  It came to graze under his deck and took a nap on my brother’s lawn.  Except for a very few special people in my life, I am far more comfortable conversing with a moose than I will ever be in the presence of humans.)

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Thinking About Actions:

The Neural Substrates of Person Knowledge

ABSTRACT:

“Despite an extensive literature on the neural substrates of semantic knowledge, how person-related information is represented in the brain has yet to be elucidated. Accordingly, in the present study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of person knowledge.

Focusing on the neural substrates of action knowledge, participants reported whether or not a common set of behaviors could be performed by people or dogs. While dogs and people are capable of performing many of the same actions (e.g. run, sit, bite), we surmised that the representation of this knowledge would be associated with distinct patterns of neural activity.  Specifically, person judgments were expected to activate cortical areas associated with theory of mind (ToM) reasoning. The results supported this prediction. Whereas action-related judgments about dogs were associated with activity in various regions, including the occipital and parahippocampal gyri; identical judgments about people yielded activity in areas of prefrontal cortex, notably the right middle and medial frontal gyri.

These findings suggest that person knowledge may be functionally dissociable from comparable information about other animals, with action-related judgments about people recruiting neural activity that is indicative of ToM reasoning.”

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Two other related article links:

Linking Form and Motion in the Primate Brain

And another related article:

The Representation of Object Concepts in the Brain

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