Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

  In his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" Abraham Maslow attempted to formulate a needs-based framework of human motivation. Later on, he extended the idea, and the full theory, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, was expressed in his book Motivation and Personality in 1954.

Maslow studied only exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglas. He didn't study mentally ill and neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy."
In spite of the perpetual cycle of human wars, murder, deceit, etc, Maslow believed that humans tend toward growth and love, and that violence is not natural for human nature. Humans only get violent when their needs are thwarted. He did not believe that humans use violence, lie, cheat or steal simply because they enjoy doing it.

 As you can see in the picture above, Maslow categorized human needs into five levels:

1. Physiological needs - These are the basic survival needs such as food, water, air, shelter, constant body temperature, etc.
   They usually tend to be satisfied with most people, but when unmet they become predominant.
   This is the strongest level on the pyramid because if these needs go unmet, the individual can easily die.
   
2. Safety needs -The second level, safety needs, is the need to feel secure at work, home, etc.
   These needs are also usually met except in times of emergency, natural disaster, rioting, or other immediate dangers.
   This does not only mean personal security, it also applies to job security, financial security, and general health.
3. Love needs - This third level deals with feelings of love and belongingness.
   The individual seeks to overcome feelings of loneliness and alienation and to become a part of the group. These feelings can be achieved through relationships, such as friends, family, and romance. The individual needs to love and be loved.
4. Esteem needs - This is the need to be respected and to have respect for oneself. It is a desire to be accepted and valued by others.
   This establishes confidence in oneself and motivates the individual to succeed.
   The individual needs to be recognized for his or her accomplishments and deprivation of this need can lead to an inferiority complex and poor performance.
5. Self-actualization -The fifth and top need on the pyramid is self-actualization-the need to realize and reach one’s fullest potential.
   This need, unlike the others, is not driven by a lack of the need but by the desire for personal growth.
   This is also the hardest need to meet, as it requires the most effort and the means of fulfilling it are not always known to the individual.

 The basis of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is that we are motivated by unsatisfied needs, and that lower needs need to be satisfied before higher needs can be addressed. The hierarchy is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid, with the most primary needs at the bottom, and the need for self-actualization at the top. Although, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of the pyramid and even sometimes called Maslow's pyramid of needs, Maslow himself never used a pyramid to describe his theory.

A Cognitive Test: How Many F's Can You Find?

Read the following sentence:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS
OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

Now count how many F's does that sentence contain. Count them ONLY ONCE. Then see below:


























The sentence contains 6 F's. However, most of the people only find 3 of them. If you spotted 4, you're above average intelligence. To see 5 is quite rare. If you caught 6, you might be a genius. There is no catch or a trick. Most people forget the F's in of''s because the human brain tends to see them as Vs instead of F's.

Feral Children and What They Tell Us About Ourselves

  Most of us, if not all, have heard about Mowgli - the boy who was raised in the jungle by a pack of wolves. Fortunately, Mowgli is just a fictional character from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book stories. However, a great deal of similar cases have occurred in real life as well and children like Mowgli are called feral children.

  A feral child (colloquially, also know as wild child, wolf girl, gazelle boy, monkey boy) is a child who has been isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has grown up with little or no human contact, care, love, or exposure to social behavior and language.

  Just like Mowgli, some feral children are thought to have been raised by animals. Some have allegedly survived on their own in the wild and some have been confined by people (often by their own parents). There have been over one hundred reported cases of feral children.

  Besides Mowgli, there are numerous other legendary and fictional feral children. As it was extremely difficult for Mowgli to fit into human society, he is one of the most realistic fictional feral children. Others, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan, J.M Barrie's Peter Pan and many others, were portrayed less factually. They were depicted as being extraordinarily strong, intelligent, and as having better moral standards than "normal" human beings. In reality, feral children are rarely that fortunate.

  What characterizes feral children? How does being isolated from human contact from a young age affect a child's development?

Feral children often lack even the most basic social skills. They have extreme difficulties or are unable to learn simple yet pivotal tasks like using the toilet or getting dressed. They are often cognitively impaired and learning a human language proves to be severely challenging or even impossible.

The fact that feral children have acute difficulties or an inability to grasp the concept of language proves the validity of critical period hypothesis, which states that the first few years of a child's life are crucial for learning a first language and if the child is not surrounded with a language during this period, he or she will never achieve a full comprehension of any language.

What do feral children show us about ourselves?

What we know about feral children makes us ask a question about ourselves - are we a product of our genes or a product of our experiences?

A five-year-old Russian girl was discovered to be living among a herd of cows. Just like the cows, she used mooing to communicate. She could not speak a human language, she was unable to feed herself, and she only drank milk from a saucepan. Besides her, there have been several other cases of feral children found living with animals and most exhibited behavior identical to the animals that reared them, instead of the humans that bore them. Most never learned to speak and many died shortly after their reintroduction to human society. In the few cases where the child did learn to speak, it was because they were separated from humans at an older age, after they already obtained a grasp on language.

These children show us that the few first years in a child's life are crucial to the child's lifelong growth and development, bringing up the nature vs nurture argument that has been a topic of debate for decades. We cannot say that who we are, how we behave, how we communicate, and how our brain develops has nothing to do with our genes, but feral children show that our nature alone does not make us human. The genes we are born with and the experiences we have combined makes us human.


If you are interested in reading more about different cases of feral children, here's a good article to being with - Feral Children (Mowgli Syndrome)