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I missed the fact that Leslie Smith’s response was directed at my brief remarks about stages and strategies on June 27. My response may be a bit late.?To me, his remarks sound like he read my book (which I gave him about 25 years ago), and like he knows something about my ideas.? Apparently, he has decided that stages weren’t that important to Piaget, and that what Piaget thought later was more important than the work he did to delineate stages or levels of cognitive organization.? Barbel Inhelder was kind enough to read my book—A Piagetian Model of Character Structure. When I visited her about two years after Piaget’s death, she was the one who explained to me that Piaget did not regard Preconceptual/Symbolic cognition and Intuitive cognition as demarcating stages.?As a consequence thereafter, I referred to the two types of cognition as marking phases, not stages.?My point is that Inhelder seemed to think there was still some merit in thinking in terms of cognitive-developmental stages.? Whether Piaget thought stages were important or not, and whether he recanted later in life, are not important.?The fact is he found that in his own children and in other children, over and over, under ordinary circumstances, as children grew older their cognition changed in a somewhat orderly way. He accounted for some of the changes/adaptations by schemes assimilating and accommodating as the child interacted with the world—a process which I believe may readily be translated into modern understandings of modifications of brain circuitry. However, for major reorganizations of cognition, Piaget invoked special mechanisms--for example, interiorization of an action symbol or reflexive abstraction.? I too think that assimilation and accommodation won’t do the trick alone. I have looked to brain maturation to induce or at least to assist major reorganizations of cognition.?There could be several types of maturational changes that play roles.?One of the ones that we know quite a bit about is myelination.? Complete myelination of a neural tract stabilizes transmission of information from one part of the brain to another. I have proposed how complete myelination of specific sensory tracts would assist the construction of major reorganizations of cognition.? My paper—Maturation of Peripheral Sensory Systems and Cognitive Reorganization: Just Coincidence?--that I gave at the JPS meeting in Amsterdam is on my Webpage www.devmindbrain.com linked to the WRITINGS button.?It is a very condensed version of my proposal, and does not include any reference to the role of complete myelination of tracts of the Corpus Callosum and their role in right-left brain dominance. Now, Piaget would have no reason to expect that 30 years after he was dead I would make such a proposal.?Also as part of my proposal, I suggest that the turning points that enable the major reorganizations of cognition that he found differ from his.?If it turns out that my hypotheses ares correct (and it is technically possible to see if they are), then I think that he would be pleased.?If there is anything that he did not want, it was that for his work to form a cult. Additionally, Les appears to have invoked Piaget’s allowance for regression in order to dismiss my assertion and my findings that most ordinary adults, when processing matters that matter to them, tend to use a cognitive organization that is structurally the same as one of the phases that delineate the Preoperational Period rather than a more advanced organization, and that the style of their early caregiving plays a role in the type of organization they use.?Actually, Piaget, who read excerpts of my early book, thought it was interesting.?Had I had some empirical support for my clinical findings at that time, maybe he would have blessed it. I am very sympathetic to efforts to integrate disciplinary domains, which Commons attempts to do, and which I have tried to do; that is, I have tried to integrate psychodynamic psychiatry and neuroscience with Piaget’s work.?Further, Commons’s and Ross’s use of fractals to address any biological phenomenon is intuitively appealing to me, although I can’t claim that I fully understand their work at this point.?&AuthorName=aj malerstein