Episode #25
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[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Create Thriving Families podcast. I am Dr. Lisa Peterson. I am so happy to have you here with me today on this podcast. I want to get into, you know, we've just gone through a big series of podcasts on neural development during the first year of life, and this was kind of a dense series of podcasts all about everything that happens inside a baby's developing brain and nervous system during the first year of life, and everything that I have been working to try to tell mothers in my practice for the past 23 years.
I am a doctor of chiropractic. I have worked with mothers, babies, children of all ages , in my practice for the past 23 years. And [00:01:00] everything that I work to communicate to parents about their child's development, specifically during the first year of life, I have tried to package into this series of podcasts talking both about exactly what happens in the developing brain and nervous system of your baby, but also what you should be seeing and what you should be doing at home to support that development.
And a piece of what we talked about in this series of podcasts was the development of the right hemisphere of the brain and the importance of the right hemispheric development during this period of time, during the first, zero to 12 months of time. And as I was, , going through articles and books and everything that I was doing to prepare for that series of podcasts, I was really digging into articles that I knew and books that I knew [00:02:00] from before, but also, discovering new things that have been published and reading new books.
And I have been reading a book by, , there's a man that I referenced in pretty much every one of those podcasts. His name is Allan Schore. He's , the central figure, if you will, on right brain development. He works at the UCLA School of Medicine, and he also has a private practice that he's had for decades.
And He's published several hundred articles and books since the 1990s. His latest book was the one that I've been reading. It was published in 2025. It's called The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature. And reading through this book has really sparked my interest in trying to spend some time on the podcast talking more about the development of the right hemisphere of the brain and why that's important, [00:03:00] why it's essential during this first year of life, and a little bit more in depth than I have gone through with it in the first series of podcasts.
And so, the focus of this book that I'm reading is that the right hemisphere of the brain, the right side of the brain, develops earlier and faster than the left hemisphere of the brain during infancy. From about zero to 18 months, you know, the first year and a half to two years of life, the focus is really on and the development is really primarily in the right hemisphere of the brain.
And this development is shaped almost entirely through non-verbal right brain to right brain communication between the baby and their caregiver. So this, these are things like facial expression, eye gaze, tone of voice, touch, [00:04:00] the timing of emotional attunement and repair And in this book, it's summing up a lot of the research that he's done over the years and the other books that he's written.
But, he's talking about this early right brain to right brain intersubjectivity, as he calls it, which just means , it's dependent on two people playing a part, the baby and a caregiver. This, process of developing attachment, it doesn't just regulate emotion in the moment, in the here and now.
It's laying down the, the neurobiological foundation of what will become your baby's personality, their identity, and the capacity that your child is going to have for relationship. And this is not just during the time of childhood, but into adulthood.
And things as foundational and fundamental as our identity and our personality and the capacity that we [00:05:00] have in relationships. And if there's something that we can do that can make that part of our children's lives easier, I think this is something that's worth spending some time looking more into.
And so as I was reading this book, I really started to think that doing a, a little bit more of a deep dive into the building of the right hemisphere of the brain, talking more about what that means, what happens in the right hemisphere of the brain and which kind of things we can be doing at home, seeing at home, you know, supporting at home to build right hemisphere connectivity and right hemisphere maturation in the brain of our child is something that I think, is incredibly important.
And so I want to, [00:06:00] with this first episode get more into what happens in the right hemisphere of the brain, why does the right brain come first? And I wanna talk about, you know, what it is that's actually happening in this bonding with your baby that you're doing during the first year of life, what's happening in the structure of the, of the brain and the nervous system as a result of that, and a little bit about, you know, the specific neuroscience that I think can be really helpful for new mothers.
And I hope that by the end of this first episode, I have piqued your interest more into, why it's important to focus on this right brain to right brain connection that Allan Schore is, you know, has talked about in so many of his articles and in this book that I've been reading. And I hope that it will interest you to come back for the next episodes that are going to go [00:07:00] deeper into specifically what kind of things you can be doing at home and why those things are important for the right hemisphere of the brain.
And, you know, when we get into it, we, we've all, heard some version of the, you know, the, like, the left brain is logical, and the left brain does math, and the right brain is creative, and the right brain does art or some, you know, things like that. And it's, you know, these are the kind of things that you can, you know, it, it's a, it's an easy story to sort of comprehend.
And the truth of the matter is that, both sides of the brain, coordinate with each other for most of the functions of our nervous system. But There's a big difference in, you know, so none of us is only a left brain person or a right brain person. We all have both sides of our brain, but, but there's definitely a difference in how we build and the timing [00:08:00] of when we build each hemisphere of the brain, and we'll get a lot more into this.
But in the first year and a half to two years of life, the main focus in brain development is happening in the right hemisphere of the brain. And again, Allan Schore, who, he's a research psychologist and he's a psychoanalyst at UCLA, and he has spent 30 years pulling from all of the neuroscience, from attachment theory, from developmental psychology into something that's called interpersonal neurobiology, and that just means that we build the neurology and the biology that builds attachment and that builds the right hemisphere between people.
We couldn't sit in a room alone from the time that we were born and build our right hemisphere on our [00:09:00] own in the same way that we could build our right hemisphere of our brain with another person, and the reasons for that we'll get into. But, he's talked about this building of the right brain as something that is,, in, a developmental sequence.
But first, we work in the very beginning from this zero to 18 months or two years building the right hemisphere of the brain, and then from about the time we're two to three years old, we start building more of the left hemisphere and the connectivity in the left hemisphere of the brain. And again, we'll get into more of the specifics of how all of this happens, but you wanna think about the right hemisphere specializes in non-verbal, holistic, body-based kind of functions.
And so these are things like people's faces and tone of voice and physical sensation and emotional state. And the left [00:10:00] hemisphere specializes more in, processing that is verbal and sequential and logical, and these are things like language and putting things into categories and very linear cause-and-effect kind of thinking.
And both of those types of processing in the right brain and in the left brain matter across the course of our lifetime, but they do not develop at the same time. And so for the first year and a half of life to two years of life, the right hemisphere is doing the majority of the work And so, you know, your eight-month-old baby can't necessarily understand, all of the words that you're saying, but, but he can definitely read your tone and your facial expression and your, the tension in your body with, startling accuracy.
And that is the right brain, at work. That's what it looks like. And in this, in the same way, you know, a baby can be really [00:11:00] soothed by a calm voice and someone who holds them, tightly and in a way that's stable, and the way that it feels to be close to someone who has a regulated nervous system a long time before they can understand a, a word of the language that's being spoken to him.
And so a lot of people will, you know, they're looking for sort of... When they're looking at development, they're thinking about, you know, well, how many words are they saying? Or can, you know, do they know their colors, or do they know their, you know, do they know their, letters? Or, , a lot of people are looking for sort of left brain kinda milestones to see how fast or how well a baby is developing or a toddler is developing.
But that's not what's happening at the very beginning. Babies are, looking at and reading what's happening in your right brain to develop their own right brain for the majority of the first year and a half to [00:12:00] two years of their life. And so you can, when you're looking for things like this at home, you can think, you can be, you know, noticing how much your baby responds to your tone and your face.
And, even if you want to, and, and I think it's important to be talking to your baby and narrating everything that you're doing. And, and it's not that the, the words themselves are necessarily the most important part of it. The most important part of it is the connection that the tone of voice and the way that it feels in that narration of the day and talking to them and telling them what's happening is, affecting their nervous system.
And so, parents think that their main job is to be teaching their babies and teaching their children. But in the very beginning, that first year and a half to two years of life, being present and [00:13:00] thinking about the way connection between the two of you feels is much more important than how many new words and how many new colors and how many new letters and how, you know, all of the sort of things that you are thinking that's important for them to learn , during this time.
And so, like we've talked about, the right brain is, undergoing such a huge growth spurt and this is starting even before birth, and it's continuing through, like we said, about the first 18 months of life before then the left hemisphere goes into a, major growth spurt.
But, but in the very beginning, like we're talking about, there's a, there's an older, research article written by Allan Schore. It was published in 1997, and he laid out the evidence for the, this nonlinear development of the right hemisphere, this hemisphere that, [00:14:00] you know, develops in spurts rather than each hemisphere together developing in one smooth, steady climb.
But talking more about how each of the hemispheres has, has a specific time where they're doing more growth and more development. And so the question is: Why does the right hemisphere go first? Why isn't it the left hemisphere that goes first? And the answer is that that's because of what it's built to do.
The right hemisphere is deeply connected to the autonomic nervous system. This is the system that regulates heart rate and breathing and stress hormones and, and it's connected to the limbic system, which is where we process emotion. And so, you know, it... Put it another way, before your baby needs to think or to be able to use language or to be able to categorize things, your baby needs to survive, and they need to be able to regulate.
And [00:15:00] so the right hemisphere is structurally built for exactly that job. It reads threat and safety, and it reads caregivers' faces and voices, and it manages the body's internal state, and these are huge jobs during the first year of life, the first couple of years of life. And then again, the left hemisphere You can see the development in the left hemisphere by tracking how language really explodes from about, the two to three year point.
And this is also not a coincidence. Language is largely a left hemisphere speciality, and it comes more into maturity, , and becomes more quickly developed on the timeline that where the left hemisphere is maturing and growing faster. And so this is something that Alan [00:16:00] Shore is looking at, what happens during this window of time during our baby's first year and a half to two years of life is becoming the architecture that's building the brain.
And that's why these things are so important, because it's not something that they're using specifically only during that period of their lives. It's something that they're building that they're going to need and use for the rest of their life. And you can see this from, you know, if you've ever been around a one-year-old, you know, they are wildly attuned to your mood.
They look at your face when, you know, when the feeling in the room changes. They are checking in visually to see what you look like if they're put in an unfamiliar situation , and checking for the safety and the security on their parents or their caregiver's face long before they can, you know, say more than a word or two.
And so You know, a baby who is [00:17:00] upset can often be calmed not from, giving them an explanation for why they just, you know, need to calm down, but by using things like tone of voice and touch and a regulated adult nervous system. And so these things are, are all, the way that you can see and measure the development of the right hemisphere of your child's brain, seeing that there's a big difference in how quickly, for example, you can calm them, with, the tone of voice and your and your expression and the way that it feels to be close to you and, and all of these things.
You know, you can see that that's different in a six-month-old baby than it is in a one-month-old baby, and that's because of the development and the maturation that's happened in the right hemisphere of the brain. So, looking at these kind of things to reference, you know, how your baby is using your face as a reference point in an uncertain situation, this is called [00:18:00] social referencing, and it's the right brain to right brain communication that we're talking about.
Seeing whether your baby settles down faster using, the tone of voice and touch, that, those things are more effective and that it, helps to regulate quicker as your baby grows during that first year, year and a half of life. And, you know, trusting that w- the work, you know, what you're doing at home every day by, responding to your baby's emotional state is supporting their development in exactly the way that they need for this age.
When your baby is dysregulated, when you work to calm them through your tone of voice and, skin-to-skin contact or the way that you're touching them and, thinking about regulating your own nervous system because our babies are borrowing from our nervous system to find their regulation, that's the [00:19:00] work that is developing the right hemisphere of the brain, and you can't make it go faster.
The, right brain window isn't something that you can speed your way through and then get them, get that developed quicker so that you can start to move into the part that has to do with language and has to do with, more learning-based kind of things. This is something that is going to be happening during this window of time, and then the way that you can work to support it through the different things that you're doing will change, obviously, from having a baby who's two months old to having a baby who's 14 months old, and we'll talk about all of that more.
So, you know, if you get a little bit into the, one of Allan Schore's focused areas, you know, in both his articles and his, and his books, is that the right hemisphere of the brain is the origin of the self and how connection with other people builds [00:20:00] our identity. And, this sense of self is not something that a baby is born with.
We're not born and that part of us is finished. It's built literally through right brain to right brain communication with a parent or with a caregiver And, through his books and his articles, the argument is that this earliest sense of who I am, the, the embodied sense of being a person with an internal emotional life, this emerges through these repeated cycles of attunement with a caregiver's own right hemisphere.
And so, like we talked about before, your baby's sense of who they are is being co-built. It's being built in relationship with another person, not something that they can assemble on their own in isolation. [00:21:00] And so, when you look at your baby, and you're reading her cues, and you're responding, and, adjusting your, the tone of your voice and making changes to your body and your facial expressions, and the things that you're doing there is you're engaging your own right hemisphere in a sort of back and forth with your baby's right hemisphere.
And this is what Shore calls right brain to right brain communication. It's actually what's happening in that neurological exchange, and it can happen completely without any words. It's all non-verbal. And there's another paper that he wrote in, in 2022 where, you know, he's talking about this right brain to right brain communication as the mechanism through which something that he calls implicit self-knowledge is built.
And implicit means known [00:22:00] in the body, known emotionally, known without words, as opposed to explicit knowledge, which is the kind of knowledge that you could describe in words out loud. And so long before your baby can tell you who she is, she is building an implicit, felt, in the body sense of who she is, and that sense is being shaped and formed and molded by the quality of the connection she's experiencing with her parent, with her caregiver, with another individual And so this is why, both Allan Schore and a lot of the other researchers who look into this and have, you know, worked on explaining this right hemisphere development, they talk about attachment not as bonding in, like, the warm, fuzzy, , sense, but as [00:23:00] architecture building the structure of the brain.
This relationship between the baby and their caregiver or the baby and their mother or the baby and their, one of their parents isn't just emotionally important. It's the mechanism behind which you're building the framework , you're building the neurology. And so, , these things are important when you're looking at, for example, the way that you respond to your baby's bids for connection.
If your baby is looking at you, if they're reaching for you, if they're making a sound to try to get your attention, you know, this isn't, by responding to that, you're not entertaining your child. You are helping to build her sense of self. You're, you're building the neurology, you're building the foundation.
And, you know, a baby who is consistently met with an attuned response usually shows [00:24:00] more of a settled, curious engagement with the world. It's sort of an early expression of, "I am safe enough in this to explore my world." And that's really important because if that attunement and attachment and being met with an attuned response, if that gives your children the foundation that makes their brain think, "I'm safe enough to go out and to explore my world," this is not something that you need a really grand gesture to do.
This is built in ordinary, everyday moments, when you're feeding your baby, when you're changing their diaper, when you're looking at each other from across the, room. This is why, there doesn't have to be a structured activity happening with your baby during that, those first, you know, year to two years of life.
It, something always doesn't have to be happening. It's more important to be [00:25:00] attentive and responsive in the ordinary things that are happening throughout the day And so these moments of connection are helping to build the architecture of who your baby is going to become. And remembering, you know, that this sense of self that your baby is developing, it's not something that they arrive here with.
It's something that they have to build, and they have to build that in relationship moment by moment, and it starts immediately. It starts from the time that they're born. And so thinking of these things that, you know, moments where your baby is initiating connection with you are, your main job to be responding to, and your own capacity to be emotionally present and regulated during the day when you're with your baby.
This is that right brain to right brain exchange, literally. And [00:26:00] so, knowing that this is how it works and thinking about, if there are periods of time when you are physically present, but you are emotionally somewhere else, which is completely normal, and it's not something for any of us to feel guilty about.
But it is something to be aware of when it's happening and to notice that pattern if it's something that is happening frequently or, almost constantly. I've talked about this in a lot of other podcasts, but it is so important for mothers to be as aware and as
as strict as they can be in what they allow in their life in terms of stress factors. You know, there are things that happen in life that you just [00:27:00] cannot control that are stressful events that happen, and that is something none of-- all of us experience and none of us can do anything about other than try to respond in the moment.
But if there are things in your life that you know are causing you to be more physically present but emotionally absent in your life, it's really worth understanding what this can cost you, you know? Because That presence and that attunement and that being able to have the capacity to be in the moment with your child during the first...
not, and this is something I would argue is not just important during the first year and a half to two years of life, it's important throughout childhood for our kids. It's building their sense of self, building their sense of worth, building their, you know, they're building the whole foundation of how important am I as a person if I am being met by, the most important person or the [00:28:00] most important people in my life in a way that is attuned and present and, shows me and teaches my nervous system that I am, I'm important and I'm someone that they prioritize.
You know, these things are really, really important. And so again, if you're catching yourself in long stretches of time where you are physically present but emotionally absent, this is something to really have a think about. And so looking at these bids for connection from your baby as an invitation that is important to be answered and, you don't need to think that anything specific has to be happening.
You don't have to make that connection look like something specific. You just have to be responsive to whatever's happening in the moment. And if you notice that you are really depleted and you're really finding it hard to be present, [00:29:00] I think that that's, the first years of motherhood really are an exercise in asking for help when you need help and not being, you know, trying to think that you can be the hero who can do all of it.
If you are noticing that you need to spend some time building yourself up, this is not evidence that you're failing your baby. This is evidence that you're a normal human being who needs to spend some time filling up their own energy reserves, and so asking for the help and the space and the time to do that, because it's really important for your baby in the long run.
You can't give the same level of right brain to right brain connection if you have nothing to give. So this is also something that we've talked about in pretty much every single podcast that I've done, but taking the time to realize that you are the place that, needs to have the, the energy reserves and the emotional [00:30:00] capacity in addition to just the physical capacity that having a new baby requires.
And so asking for help when you see that you need it. And we talked about there's a very cultural aspect of, there's a whole generation of adults who were sort of raised on the idea that there's been a huge push for cognitive stimulation from down to in infants, you know, trying to teach them letters and numbers and using flashcards and brain-building kind of activities.
And none of those things are harmful in, in itself, but they're, you know, if you were looking at this through the developmental sequence that, among other people, Allan Schore has spent decades documenting, this is not, those kind of things, using flashcards and, there's a lot of digital products and tools that [00:31:00] parents are being sold these days as well that are, working on building cognitive stimulation.
And this is not the work that's building the right hemisphere of the brain in those first couple of years of life. And so, there was an interview that, Allan Schore did in two thousand and seventeen, and he was asked what he would want parents to understand. And what he said was, "The earliest development isn't primarily cognitive.
It's relational and emotional, and it's built through being attuned and, embodied interaction and being playful and, being emotionally and physically present for our children, not through instruction, not through trying to get them to learn something." And I think that that's so important to think about during those first couple of years of [00:32:00] life, that, being a good parent isn't about how early your child learns to read or how early your child learns colors.
It's, more about being a regulated, attuned, present right hemisphere for your baby's developing right hemisphere to be able to connect with. That's not a lesser goal than early academics. That's a, a hugely important goal for the entirety of how your baby will build their own identity and their own sense of self and their own foundation for all of the relationships that they will have in their life for the rest of their life.
And all of the studies that have been done on what the most important factor is in longevity and good health, you know, we all wanna think it's the specific kind of exercise or how people eat or how they... It's not. It always comes back to it's the quality of someone's relationships. [00:33:00] It's the quality of how people are able, how many people and how the quality of the relationships that people have around them is what determines if someone lives a long, healthy life.
And so developing the right hemisphere of the brain is hugely important to be aware of how you do it, how it happens, what kind of things support it, and what kind of things, do not necess- are not harmful, but do not necessarily support the development of the right hemisphere. And again, this, talking to your baby, reading to your baby, engaging, you know, doing different kind of language things, none of that is wrong.
And, your voice in itself is a really powerful channel into the right brain, and we'll talk about that more in some of the episodes that are coming up. But the goal is connection, and connection is what's doing the building of the right hemisphere. So, your [00:34:00] own you're, you know, giving yourself permission to think that the thing that usually promotes presence and attunement and being able to connect to another person, you can feel that in yourself even in, a connection with another adult.
The more you slow things down, the more you give yourself time to pause and to breathe and to be in the moment with another person, the easier it is to find that connection between people. The faster everything is going, the more stimulation that's happening in the environment or inside your own mind the harder it is to find that connection between people, and that's how it works with, with your baby as well.
It's okay to slow things down and think that what your, what your baby needs during this specific first couple of years of life is less about [00:35:00] buying new fancy toys and things that are supposed to be doing, something to develop the different parts of their brain, and more about slowing down, connecting with yourself, being present, being regulated, and having your energy built up as much as you can to be able to be in that moment and meeting what your child needs throughout the day.
And so if we think about, if we think about this premise of the right hemisphere being sort of the, the most important, function of early development, and that it's built through right brain to right brain connection rather than, you know, instruction on something, then an interesting question in all this is sort of how does that connection actually happen?
How does it work? And [00:36:00] Allan Schore, along with, several other researchers that we'll get into and, and talk more about, he talks about identifiable specific channels of how this connection actually is built. And looking into, what he calls in his work, the interpersonal neurobiology of intersubjectivity, which again, is such a mouthful and just means that, there has to be two nervous systems, the infant's nervous system and the caregiver's nervous system, and how those are coordinating with each other in real time.
And the research on exactly how that coordination happens is sort of, clustered around a few really specific observable channels. Facial expression , and eye contact or [00:37:00] eye gaze. You know, another is the tone of voice and the touch response. And another is the timing of this moment-to-moment attunement and , the repair between caregiver and baby.
You know, if someone is, if your baby is reaching out for contact and you are not there, or you are not responsive, or you are not, you know, how do you repair that attachment or repair that attunement? This is what actually builds resilience. It's not that there's never a misattunement or that you're, you're never unresponsive to your baby when they need you.
Sometimes life gets in the way, and you have to, you know, you're in the middle of, you're, you're in the shower and your hair is full of shampoo, and it's gonna take you a minute to get there. But it's in the way that if there is a rupture in that attachment or in that attunement or in your response to your baby, the way that it's [00:38:00] repaired.
And so all of these things are specific channels that, the research has looked at in terms of how things that you as a mother can do to be building the development of the right hemisphere of your baby. And so in the other episodes that are coming up, in episode two, I really wanna talk more about the face and the eyes, how this, mutual gaze and eye contact and facial mirroring, how these things organize your baby's developing right brain long before language and words.
In episode three, I wanna talk more about voice and touch and how tone of voice, not words specifically, and a really warm touch and contact between bodies is something that is, almost like a direct [00:39:00] message into your baby's nervous system and, exactly how you as a mother can use touch to help to regulate and to help to communicate with your baby's nervous system.
And in the last episode in this Right Brain series, episode four, I wanna talk more about rupture and repair and the fact that it's expected that we are going to not be attuned or aligned to every single bid for attention from our baby. It's the repair that we do that follows it, not this perfect attunement that actually builds resilience and, and helps our children to be more resilient in a world where not everything always happens perfectly.
And so it's not important to remember all of these channels and how it all works, but if you just hold on to the big idea [00:40:00] that I've been sort of building toward during this episode, that your baby's brain during this specific window is being built through connection. And over the next three episodes, we'll get more specifically into exactly what this connection looks like and how it works into your actual everyday life And I think that for a lot of you, you will see that you are already doing much of what we will be talking about in these next episodes.
But maybe will be helpful to understand more of the why behind these instincts that you as a mother probably already have. And some of these specific pieces may feel unfamiliar, or they may feel like they're things that you need to practice, and that's completely normal. That's what these episodes are for.
Because not all of us have received that [00:41:00] same right brain to right brain connection from our parents that we are necessarily, looking to have or develop or give to our children. And so for some of us, we had really good examples of this in our own lives, and for some of us, this feels not necessarily familiar and automatic, but is more something that we need to practice and work on.
And that is absolutely something that we, can do. These are things that can be learned and practiced. Each channel of how we can develop and communicate with the right hemisphere of the brain doesn't need to be done simultaneously. I'm splitting them into their own episodes sort of for a reason.
So if there's something that feels like it's already a part of your day and it's already an automatic, then maybe one of the other episodes will give you [00:42:00] more in terms of something to be aware of or to work on. So I am, again, incredibly grateful to everyone who spends their time with me listening to this podcast, and I really hope that you will Join me in these next episodes and listen to the series in order.
Each episode sort of builds on the foundational idea from this one, which is the right brain is built first, and it's built through connection. And then, looking the way that you have been doing it or the way that you are, hoping to do it if you are, pregnant and, not a mother just yet or if you have one or several children.
And so the important thing to think about is that no matter where you are, no matter if you have, children who are older or if you don't have children [00:43:00] yet or if you are right in the middle of that first year or two of life for your child, I think everybody can get something out of these episodes.
And so I am excited to, continue on this journey. I, if, you know, if you're interested in knowing more about the research and the people that have done the work behind what it is that I'm going through in these episodes, I will always link a reference list in the show notes with all of the researchers named in the episodes, and you can download that as a PDF.
I'm committed to citing my sources. And I also, want you to know that if there's something that you find interesting in this and you are, interested in knowing more, you can either go back through some of the podcast episodes or you can always follow me on Substack. I write about the neurology.
I write about development. I have articles there every single week, and we [00:44:00] go through workshops and we do all kinds of things going deeper on all of these issues there. That is free to subscribe, and I will link to that in the show notes as well. So thank you for being here today, and I will see you in the next one.
Until then, be well.
