16. Finger-licking good

Hands are human beings first toy and mouth the first organ of pleasure. You fall in love with the world at the first bite. The flavour of your dirty hands inside your mouth is what I call finger-licking good, thumb-licking I mean.

Our thumbs are special.

Shyam Prabhakar from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory had found out that a specific gene enhancer called HACNS1 might have been the magic ingredient that shaped our hands. HACNS1 is a DNA that controls the genes but is not a gene itself. It is the most rapidly evolving sequence of its kind in humans and is associated with our digit and limb pattern. This DNA gave us an elongate and fully opposable thumb, which in turn gave us the ability to make stone tools or hold this book (or digital device). 

The ability to grasp things, and with such precision, had a dramatic effect on our cognitive abilities. While our brain controls what we do, what we do changes it too. The advanced use of their hands by the hominids required hand-eye coordination, fine motor skill development, and the processing of large volumes of information. The more these hominids used their hands, the more complex and bigger their brains became. 

Babies are mouth-oriented; it really is their window to this new world. Through the mouth they get their first lessons of the globe around them. Putting things in the mouth may irritate parents but it helps the child develop her brain. There are mouth-toys developed exactly for that purpose. They come in all shape, size and texture. It also prepares them for solid food and helps them move on from nipples to spoons to cups.

Anything within the reach of Hridhima first goes into her mouth. Now that she has learned to grasp stuff we have to be careful of not keeping things with choking hazard near her. Whenever she sees something bright she tries to crawl towards it. If the object is far away, she needs breaks in-between. During the break she sucks her thumb for a brief while to get revitalized, and then she is off again. When she finally reaches the object, if it is too big to hold, then she touches it and then puts her thumb in her mouth, touches it again and puts her thumb back in her mouth. I guess she wonders why all big things tastes like thumb.

This wonderful development stage is called as the oral stage by Freud. In case you don’t like it and want your child to grow up fast, think about the next stage; Freud calls it the anal stage!