Development of the Brain in 1st 2 Years of Life

Brain Development

What Kinds of Changes Are Occurring Within the Brain During the First 2 Years of Life?"

There are several kinds of changes that occur within the brain during the first 2 years of life (Bornstein & Lamb, 89). In fact, some developmental specialists believe that if first two years of life periods in brain development are not utilized, opportunities for brain development can never be regained because in later years the flexibility of using brain is lost. By the time a baby is born, she will have l00 billion brain cells, but these cells are not connected in circuits the way they will be, when the brain begins to mature. In the first two years of life, the brain rapidly forms connections between brain cells and ultimately a single cell can connect with as many as 15,000 other cells (Bruer, 75-81).

During the first year of life, the brain goes through a series of large changes. Starting just after birth, a baby's brain produces trillions more connections between neurons than it can possibly use. By the time a child is two years, the brain has formed about l000 trillion connections, more than it will ever need to use. So finally a pruning process occurs through which millions of neurons and their connections are eliminated. The parts of the brain that are stimulated and used will develop and those that are not used will be lost (Dawson & Fishcer, 126).

It's the baby's early experiences that determine which connections will be kept and which would not survive. It is theorized that when a connection is used it becomes permanent, but when it is not used it is unlikely to survive (Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 56-61). So the absence of experiences that will stimulate the brain during critical periods can have a lasting impact. Critical periods are times when the brain is most ripe for the learning and acquisition of new skills. Let us take an example of vision that requires a large number of nerve cells to fire for focusing the eyes on the object. If a child does not focus one eye appropriately during the critical period of visual development, the child will never achieve normal vision in that eye. This happens because the brain was not stimulated during the critical period of visual development (Dawson & Fishcer, 87).

Deprived of a stimulating environment, a child's brain suffers. Researchers have found that children who don't play much or are rarely touched develop brains 20% to 30% smaller than normal for their age. Laboratory animals also provide the evidence of it. Not only do young rats reared in toy-laden cages exhibit more complex behavior than rats confined to sterile, uninteresting boxes. Rich experiences, in other words, really do produce rich brains (Rogoff, 136-142).