How the Brain Grows can be Influenced by How It’s Used

How the Brain Grows can be Influenced by How It’s Used
Children can be born into a mind boggling array of living situations. They may be bundled into bearskin blankets in the arctic cold, or they may be carried skin to skin in slings through tropical jungles.

They may hear one of hundreds of language with countless dialects.

Those native tongues may be expressed in ways that are loud, harsh and drunken, or in voices that are soft lilting and friendly.

A bay may be sheltered purposely from life’s cruel realities or tossed out to “sink or swim” on a beggar’s barrio.

From the start, a child’s brain begins to adapt to the place and spaces into which it has landed.

No single, specific blueprint for brain growth could cover what’s required to survive in all possible environments.

The brain starts with only a general mandate: “grow connections as needed.” Brains are built to change in this manner in order to stay alive.

Survival depends upon continually adapting to new input and changing conditions.

This survival instinct is unconscious but powerful. The rapid speed with which a young brain adapt allows for a baby to gain maximum advantage within whatever climate culture or family system she happens to be born.

During early development, for more connection are formed than will eventually be needed – trillion more! The brain of atypical two year old, for example, has almost twice the number of connections that your brain has.

Daily routines such a feeding, batching and paying strengthen particular synapses, while those connections that are no reinforced by repetition eventually wither away.

This natural process is called neural planning.
How the Brain Grows can be Influenced by How It’s Used