As mentioned previously brains and skills are built over time. Meaning it takes time to build a brain and while it’s building it can easily be influenced. While the brain is developing there is a period of plasticity – based on the child early life experiences the brain architecture can be impacted easily. Therefore the early years of life matter tremendously because both early experiences and genes affect the architecture of the maturing brain. This means what the brain structure looks like really establishes either a solid or a weak foundation for all learning and behavior that will follow. The different regions of the brain primarily control different parents of the brain. For example, the working memory is controlled by the frontal part of the brain while the back of the brain part controls vision. One part does this and another part does that and the different parts mature and grow at a different rate. The working memory takes time to develop unlike the parts of the brain that deal with hearing and vision develop very early in life.
At birth, the brain has a number of neurons, after birth you don’t gain many, but what you gain is the connections between neurons as they start to interact with each other. For the first three years of life, all these connections are forming depending on what part of the brain, some connections occur quickly, and some take time, eventually, you will have a lot of connections between brain cells. As the years go by the number of connections goes down, meaning by the time you are a teenager you have fewer connections than when you were three years old. Does this mean a three-year-old is smarter than a teenager? I am not going to bother trying to answer it. Well actually no matter how crazy a teenager can act a three-year-old is not smarter than a teenager! It’s all about how experiences influence the brain. The cells have an inherent character to connect to each other and then what matters is that the connections that get used often are strengthened and stay in place. On the other hand, the connections that are not used often pretty much fade away and disappear. This leaves you with a very efficient brain. The pathways that you are using a lot are very well connected and effectively transfer messages to each other, so you become really good at doing all kinds of activities. This is the exact way how the experiences you have influenced the neural circuits, the more they are used the more likely they will stay instead of fade away.
For example, let’s take two children, one child having an adult caregiver to spend time with them reading to them, talking to them, getting to learn the child’s interests, and helping them articulate what they were interested in, paying attention to that child produce a real rich interaction. The neural circuits for reading, neural circuits for making associations, neural circuits for reasoning are getting used a lot and they will stay in that child and be accessible to them throughout their development. The second child who did not get such experience from their caregiver their brain is still growing like the first child, they are still making connections – there is nothing wrong with their brain, it’s just the circuits that they are using are different. They know exactly how to get attention, they may show it by throwing temper tantrums, crying, looking sad, but they know how to get attention. Because they missed such interaction between the adult caregiver in their lives, they are going to have some very well developed neural circuits, but they aren’t going to be the neural circuits that they need if they are going to do higher-order reasoning, in cognition, in thinking and solving problems. They will struggle in those areas not because something is wrong with their brain but because they have strengthened different neural circuits that have stayed throughout their development.
A child’s experiences during the earliest years of life have a lasting impact on the architecture of the developing brain. While genes provide the basic blueprint, however, experiences shape the process that determines whether a child’s brain will provide a strong or weak foundation for all future learning, behavior, and health. During this important period of brain development, the neurons send electrical signals to communicate with each other which results in circuits that become the basic foundation of brain architecture. These circuits and connections multiply at a rapid pace and being reinforced through repeated use. Our experiences and environment dictate which circuits and connections get more used. Connections that are used more grow stronger and more permanent, meanwhile unused connections are fadeaway through a normal process called pruning. Through this pruning, process neurons form strong circuits and connections for emotions, motor skills, language, memory, and behavioral control develop during this critical period of child development. Let me say this even though those skills originate in specific areas of the brain, yet the circuits are interconnected – you can’t have one type of skill without the other skills to support it. You see it’s like building a house, what comes first forms a foundation for all that comes later and every part of the house is connected.
S.G.
