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Overview
What defines who we are? Is it our genes, or is it the environment that we live in? Author Sue Gerhardt has researched this question for a long time and found that both factors play a role. However, she also discovered something new: what makes us who we are comes from how young children develop when they’re between two years old and three years old.
In a nutshell, babies have highly “plastic” brains. This means that the way they are treated as infants creates neurological patterns that stay with them for life. If they’re loved and cared for, their brains respond in positive ways; if they’re neglected or abused, their brains respond negatively. In other words, it’s not nature versus nurture – it’s both. Social experience and biology interact to create people who behave differently from one another.
In this article, we’ll explore the science behind cognitive development and find out why it’s important for parents to make sure their children are developing properly. We’ll discuss how stress can impair the development of babies and toddlers, as well as what a Romanian orphanage has to do with cognitive development.
Big Idea #1: The brain evolved in stages, and the social brain developed last.
English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said that a tiger stays the same whether or not it’s in a group with thousands of other tigers.
Humans are different from other animals. We have a social brain, which is what Coleridge was referring to when he said we’re changed by our relationships with others. The social brain developed last in the evolutionary process and it’s responsible for empathy and the ability to read social cues. This is why we refer to “the brain” as though there were only one organ involved, but that isn’t exactly accurate; humans actually have three brains: reptilian, mammalian, and primate. Each of these brains reflects a different stage in our evolution.
The first stage was the development of a reptilian brain. This allowed for basic emotions and instincts, like survival, to form. The second stage saw the development of a mammalian brain. It added more complex emotions that helped nurture offspring. The third and final stage came with the development of a cerebral cortex in the outer layers of our brains, which is where we developed into social animals who are human beings now.
The social brain is activated when we control our emotions, follow social cues, and experience empathy. Instead of experiencing primal emotions like fear or anger, we can diversify them into more complex intermediary states. Metaphorically speaking, while most mammals see the world in black and white, our social brain allows us to see it in technicolor.
The brain of a newborn baby is not fully developed. It has systems to ensure survival, such as the nervous system and visual system that makes it possible for her to breathe and track movement. But there are some systems missing in the social brain, which develops only after birth.
Big Idea #2: How a baby’s brain develops is determined by the quality of social interaction they experience.
All parents know that babies are frustrating. They can be fussy, and won’t eat the food you’re trying to feed them. But yelling at or disciplining a baby won’t help because they don’t have the brain capacity to control their behavior.
Babies can’t consider their mothers’ emotions and make decisions based on them, because the part of the brain responsible for complex emotions doesn’t develop until after birth. Furthermore, this development process isn’t as straightforward as you might think.
