The Wild Child

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Recommended: Interactions between humans and our environment

ground and their arms laid out to the side of their hips. Genie was not accustomed to that. She had rarely seen anyone walk or run. The way Genie would walk was very unique. She would stumble along in such an unbalanced manner, with her upper arms against her body and her forearms bent at a ninety degree angle with her fingers curled towards her palms. According to scientists, “she walked as if she was a bunny.” (REFERANCE)
She realistically didn’t know anything about the outside world. Imagine how many new sounds and colors she saw: the blue sky, the sound of cars passing or even the feeling of grass on her feet. Genie was in a new world with strange but delightful experiences that awaited her. She loved every minute of it but approached everything with extreme caution.
Being deprived from human contact was extremely costly to Genies wellbeing. One of the physiatrists J. Shirley, which worked with Genie, was an expert in social deprivation. “Solitary confinement is diabolically the most sever punishment and in my experience really quite dramatic symptoms develop in as little as a couple days, then when we try to expand this to 10 years.” (REFERANCE) You could visually and mentally see the affects that were caused by this social isolation.
Scientist wanted to know exactly how damaging this social deprivation can be. They decided to test certain brain levels to see how the isolation affected her brain functioning. The results were disheartening. A team of scientists wired her brain to electrical instruments that would measure the electrical activity in her brain while she slept. Doing this for four days they soon realized that she had an unusually high number of called sleep spindles. A sleep spindle is a burst of oscillatory bra...

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...swered questions about these feral children. Many questions will be answered in later years and many will remain a mystery. Because of these unfortunate cases we are allowed to see what it really means to be human. Many traits and movements that we have as humans are learned at a young age. Without this knowledge we tend to act like what we were raised by. James Law, a Professor of Language and Communication in City University, London elaborated on this concept very well. “Feral children are the natural experiment which we aren’t allowed to carry out. Part of the being a human is being brought up by humans. If you’re not brought up being a human, are you a human?” In some of these cases (concerning feral children) that’s what we are dealing with.
Despite their terrible upbringing and deprivation of human love and human contact they have lessons that they teach us.

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