And if everyone has to rediscover it all for themselves, how is this ever going to become commonplace?
It's much worse than that. People are terrorized for doing something different from the norm.
Where do you find these publications to look at? How do you deal with contradictory publications? E.g. I looked up "step reflex" (mentioned below) on Google Books but it didn't turn up any books that looked like they would deal with using it in some form of training, which I presume is what you're getting at by mentioning it. That suggests to me this stuff is hard to find.
I had access to science journal search engines at my University. Try Google Scholar. But let me just tell you about the stepping reflex.
If you hold an infant with their feet just above the ground, they will on their own initiate steps. They lose this ability if you don't foster it early, so do it by the first month. I don't know why they do this, but it is an evolutionary imprint that all babies have.
Very gradually you can start putting them in contact with the ground, and as they step you move them forward. So they learn that stepping gets them moving. At the same time you can do exercises with them to strengthen their legs.
There is a nerve impulse we discovered that you can use for this. If a baby is lying on its back and you put your thumbs on their feet, with your fingers just above their knees, they will in response to light pressure above the knee push with their legs against your thumbs. We have never seen this published anywhere but it was what got us a much stronger stepping action than Zelazo's papers in
Science. You do the left, then right, then left, then right in alternating fashion and it is pretty amazing how quickly this builds up a very strong stepping action.
Look up walking in the newborn-zelazo. You can do more than twice as good as they did with this little trick. Once we learned this was possible, we discovered other little nerve impulses in different parts of the body we could use to strengthen different muscle groups.
This is the kind of thing we were publishing on our blog and I have completely forgotten a lot of it. The malicious creepy people were trying to say we wanted a bodybuilder baby when developing the intellectual capacity was the motivation, and developing abnormal human strength was not even remotely of interest to us. You want them able to sit up, roll from back to tummy, crawl, walk, etc. Not lift barbells.
Once they are strong enough to be on their feet we put my chin-up bar across the door at their waist level with their toys on top of a tub on the other side. They use the bar to keep upright by holding on with one or both hands. We surrounded them with pillows. You put a toy out of reach to the right or left of them and they figure out how to move over to it. This is called "cruising" in the literature. Even if they can't walk, but can go from a foot-rest to a shelf to the bed, etc. then they are developing their brain already. They have to figure out what path they are going to use getting from where they are to where they want to go. So once we learned "cruising" was a thing we needed to foster, we figured out how to get it going a lot earlier on our own.
We discovered that if I played guitar at the same time they would do this just about forever. If I did not play guitar, they wanted to quit after a little while.
My goodness, we had all kinds of data on spreadsheets on the blog. We timed them, counted steps, recorded all kinds of different exercises we were doing - all this data available to people but malicious predators were out there trying to make it sound like child abuse. We had videos of our happy, smiling and bubbling little boy but they want to conjure up an image of a wailing, whimpering torture victim.
Look at the professional educator above: pretending he is "sickened", lol. It takes no intelligence to frame someone in a negative light. A parent fosters the stepping reflex they learn about in scientific papers, saying they are doing it in order to promote the Dawn of Active Thought, and the malicious onlooker says you are trying to produce another Little Hercules. (That actually was a boy whose father was putting steroids in his breakfast cereal and DID turn him into a bodybuilding sensation as a child).
These negative attacks from the professional educator above are important to understand. He can't bother himself to read a professional paper that is linked to in this very thread. It isn't difficult at all, but it is too much effort for him. Saying that you are "sickened" takes a few seconds and makes you feel like you have put someone in their place. That is what a lot of people are going to do with you.
Just saying that you want your kid walking around assisted at two months old for a few minutes a day is going to have people just like him saying they are "sickened" by it. Well, he isn't sickened at all. This is just an abusive thing you can say to someone you don't like.
When they tell a story about you to someone else, they're going to lie about the context, even when you carefully explain it to them. You can bet this guy above is going to tell other people how overbearing we are, how we put our kids down, call them names and maltreat them. Black people call each other the n-word and it is a term of endearment, but if you have malicious intentions then you remove the framing and just say a guy uses the n-word when speaking about black people and you have him framed as a racist. That's what he is doing. Lots of people have pet names for their spouses that we can pretend are horrible put-downs when they are likewise terms of endearment. Explaining this to a person motivated by malice is of no use. They know already. But their intentions are bad, just like the people calling the cops on Free Range parents. They aren't trying to rescue kids. They want to see the family terrorized, and at the same time pretend they are rescuing them.
People with an ego problem also want to put you on the defensive. So they make a stupid accusation and try to get you blubbering in defense. The fact they do it at all means there is another stupid accusation coming on the heels of the one you defend yourself against.
Expect this.
But what about going well beyond the Asian level? If you can go "well beyond", even going Asian is leaving a great amount of potential on the table and we humans need to wring every bit of potential we can from our kids if we want to make a place for ourselves in the galaxy someday.
If we did it, anyone can. I can't tell you how important it is just to be willing to try. When you have a baby on your own you will see how handling them in different ways fosters reactions you would like to encourage. Nobody taught us about these nerve impulses we discovered. Just the fact we were looking for things to foster development meant anything we observed that seemed useful could be taken advantage of.
So when you have a baby, a lot will just come to you so long as your attitude is right. The insight that evolution has imprinted certain reflex-actions in children is something we were looking for in general, and that is probably the one thing that gave us such a huge head start, and something that isn't generally known, now that I think about it in retrospect. Once you find an impulse-generator above the knee, you know to look for the one in a parallel place (above the elbow) on the body. It helped having a martial arts background and eastern concepts like acupuncture/acupressure to work from.
Also, I'm curious: how does early motor development help to create development of the intellectual faculty? That is, scientifically, what is the mechanism?
The ability is already there. Once a baby realizes it can go places, it starts to think about where it wants to go and what it wants to do. If they are lying on their back in a bassinette that prevents them from going anywhere, there is no motivation for this and there is no learning.
Just imagine if people were kept in bassinettes until ten years old. You'd have idiot ten year olds. The first person to have their kid out of a bassinette at a younger age is going to have a smarter child. But that person is going to be accused of child abuse. People will manufacture all kinds of horrible images - but they could fall down! They could tumble down stairs! The family dog might chew them to pieces! Etc.
So how do you get the kids to enjoy drills? I know I did not like arithmetic drill, for example, when I was younger. What is needed to make it something likable that they'll want to keep coming back to and doing more and more of? You say develop a "love" for it so there must be a way to make it likable. What is that method?
Kids love what their parents show joy over. Kids love attaining competency.
If you think flashcards suck and hate doing them, your kids won't like doing them either. But ours ask for flashcards. They ask for math exercises.