The surprising neuroscience of Peekaboo and why it matters for adults

Learning about the science of today’s post has given me a lot of joy and I hope it does the same for you! It is one of the cutest, surprising, yet also insightful things I learned from scientist Peter Levine’s in his book “In an Unspoken Voice” and creator of Somatic Experiencing.

He shares that one of the earliest ways we build our emotional resilience as humans when we come into the world is through playing Peekaboo. 

Although peekaboo can of course be played in many ways, from a human nervous system perspective, we’ll look at the most basic version of Peekaboo:

• Establishing Eye contact: The game begins with an establishment and holding of eye contact with the baby human. This seems obvious but is an important part to playing Peekaboo. Many brain facts point toward the importance of an eye gazing connection between an infant and their caregiver. To the baby’s nervous system, knowing that there’s a safe, trusted connection with another developed, strong nervous system is a matter of survival. Experiencing it feels grounding, safe and creates a sense of relaxation and ease for the baby, but also for any human in general that is in eye contact with someone that meets them with a kind gaze. (Caveat alert: Read below)

• Breaking eye contact: The strong nervous system support of eye-gazing is broken. In the moment that this happens, the baby is overcome with a sense of shock and startle as well as a sense of fear. The eyes of the baby may dart around the room to re-establish the soothing and relaxing eye contact with the other person that was there just a moment ago. If this were to go on for too long of a period of time, say minutes, which is of course not the point of playing Peekaboo, it could become a traumatizing experience quickly to the baby. This is why at the start of peekaboo the time between breaking and re-establishing eye contact may be just a very few seconds and may be expanded over time as a rhythm and more safety is established. 

• Re-establishing eye contact: The final act of the game! The soothing eye contact is re-establish as the hands disappear and make way for the baby’s and the caregiver’s eyes to meet once again. To the baby’s nervous system this triggers a sense of relief and relaxation, which easily connects to joy and an expression of giggles and smiles. The world, shortly ago on the verge of danger, is whole, safe and connected again. 

Here’s a video featuring several examples of Peekaboo. The first 20 seconds in particular show the above sequence of the baby’s startle and relief response very well.

When I first read about this, I was quite scared and didn’t want to play Peekaboo anymore with any cute babies or toddlers I got to spend time with. And yet, even though that there’s a brief moment of fear, startle and shock that overcomes the baby, this is not dangerous at all. In fact, it’s quite the opposite, it can build the babies emotional resilience to touch into and be with difficult emotions and sensations to learn that they are ok and manageable. 

Caveat around eye contact: Many of us hold trauma in the eyes

Even though functionally making eye contact is soothing and helps us regulate and release stress, it’s not quite so simple. Many of us may also have had really difficult experiences just by making eye contact and no matter how kindly someone may be gazing at us, instead of being soothing and helpful it might trigger shame, anger or anxiety. In fact, I do most of my own emotional resilience sessions with people with audio only, to create more safety and less triggers.

If this is true for you, I understand how painful and limiting this can make our lives and I want to encourage you to trust your intuition not to engage in more eye contact than feels safe and comfortable for you. And also, I want you to know that this is something that can be fully healed and you can touch back into the beautiful and soothing eye gazing connection with other humans that contributes to make life wonderful. I want to write an article on this soon, for now, see my section on self-regulation in this article or feel free to reach out and we can work together on this in a session too. 

What exactly happens in the brain and nervous system during peekaboo 

Let’s take a look behind the scenes. Earlier I wrote that the reason Peekaboo is so important is because it builds the babies or toddlers emotional resilience. Since babies have no object permanence, when the caregiver’s face disappears the baby’s nervous system shifts ever so slightly toward a startle and possibly even a threat response during the phase where eye contact is broken. Physiologically we could observe a slight increase in heart rate, an arrest response of the head, meaning it goes still, followed by an orienting response where the baby is looking left and right, searching for the caregiver. We would also likely notice increased activity in the amygdala, the fear center in the brain during that time. 

Now, after the caregiver reappears, the baby’s nervous system, now feeling soothed and even overjoyed returns to feeling grounded, resting in what Levine calls “relaxed alertness”, playfully waiting for what’s going to happen next. 

As the pattern of disappearing face and reappearing face is repeated a number of times, a playful pattern emerges, where the baby’s trust in being “saved” with every reappearance of the face deepens and deepens. This means that the momentary startle and threat response of the nervous system has been experienced a number of times, however in a way that is safe and not as scary or traumatizing as it would have been if the adult had just left abruptly and not reappeared again. The baby’s brain may register an implicit experience like this: “Sometimes good things disappear for a while and sure enough, they then reappear again and I’m ok. Life is fun like that and I can trust in the disappearing and eventual reappearing of people that care about me.”

You might see very clearly how this becomes a fundamental and important basis for living a life of happiness and emotional resilience and wellbeing. 

Expanding peekaboo as we grow older

We can think of our developing childhood and even adulthood as an ever expanding game of Peekaboo. This may happen in an attuned way, so that we can build our emotional resilience through the phases of connection and disconnection or in a non-attuned way. I’ll talk about the non-attuned way in the last section.

As we grow older, the length of disappearing and reappearing support and connection is lengthened. In an ideal scenario, the emotional resilience of being with the startle, threat (anger, frustration) and eventually shut down (fear) response for longer can be experienced in a playful way, without being traumatizing. Say for example the first day of school or kindergarten. Here the connection with the main caregiver disappears for a whole day, which can be immensely scary and activating for the child at first and the reappearing happens at the end of the day and emotional resilience gets built further. This may be traumatizing too if this experience isn’t fully attended to and we’ll talk about this more in future posts. 

This can introduce us gently to the function of the human nervous system. Of course this ideal scenario is rarely what happens to us and often, we have experiences where the moments of disconnection go on far too long than what our young nervous systems can or could handle at the time. On top of that, when connection reappears it is often not the smiling, cooing person calling “peekaboo”, but maybe an angry or scared parent saying “where were you? I was looking everywhere for you!”. In this scenario, there is no re-establishing of safety and trust and the experience of disconnection may stay forever frozen as trauma. This is because the gentle, fun, or relieving reappearing of a caregiver never happened. Until maybe much later in a therapy session where this can be revisited and the compassionate response we were so yearning for in the supermarket, that haunted us for years or even decades can be reorganized. We can then show our fears and our tears and then recognize the same thing that the baby recognized when the face reappears: Things are still ok. 

Playing peekaboo as adults

Many of us had peekaboo-like experiences that were a lot less fun than those of babies. That’s because there was a crucial piece missing. 
We were in connection with ourselves and others through eye contact or another form of presence or awareness. Then eye contact or connection of some kind broke. And that was not the biggest problem, even though we often think of the moments when connection broke as the source of our pain. The problem was that things didn’t get repaired, no friendly face reappeared, held us, soothed us, when any number of disconnections happened, for example we:

• Fell down the stairs
• Had someone bully us at school 
• Broke our parents’ favorite vase when running around 
• Got hit by a car
• Had a difficult medical procedure
• Got sexually assaulted 
• Had someone hold us down or beat us up
• Witnessed someone else be beaten up or treated poorly 
• Had someone yell at us
• Got shot at in a war

Any of these experiences can turn into a tragic event where we never had the chance to find our inner “things are ok, even though X happened” again. If this rings true for you and you may even despair that since this happened so long ago you might be doomed, fear not. Luckily (and also unluckily in some ways!) our brain and bodies forget nothing. Neuroscience today knows that every experience that was incomplete and didn’t have an element of completion remains stored in our body up until the point where we rejoin it with our own inner sense of wellbeing, compassion and empathy. I’ll write an article on implicit memory soon that explores that.

Although this goes a bit beyond the scope of this article, how exactly that happens is in fact not so dissimilar from the baby’s peekaboo experience. In some shape or form the smiling, friendly face must reappear in relationship to that past difficult and disconnecting experience. This can be a therapist, a trusted friend in conversation, yourself in a meditation or journaling or other introspective exercise. As with my other articles I end here that it’s become my own calling to support people in doing my best to be that reappearing friendly face through my emotional resilience sessions. You can read more about that here. In doing so, or any of the other methods, you can directly build your emotional window of tolerance and hold a wider variety of human experiences with compassion in your body’s experience. 

Over to you! How does this resonate with you hearing about peekaboo and the human nervous system? I’d love to read your take on this in the comments if you get a chance!