We Have Met The Enemy… And He Is Us

Warning: I’m going to jump all over the show today. Live with it.

When your umbilical cord was severed, and you’d only just entered this world, you had approximately 100 billion brain cells. At some point in the future (hopefully very distant), an old man in sturdy boots and a trench coat will throw dirt on you and there’ll be a whole lot less.

Apparently it’s like an expiring option. Our cells fizzle and die slowly during the course of our life and then much more rapidly until we’re gone. It’s basically Black and Scholes inside our skulls.

The thing is, based on the sheer number of neurons we arrive on this planet with, we should all be geniuses at birth. We’re not.

It takes a good number of years for us to figure out that we shouldn’t stick our bits in a toaster… or chew on barbed wire… or play with electricity in the bath while a 2 year old would have no problem thinking those are perfectly reasonable things to do. This is despite the fact that at age 2 our brains are about 80% of the size of a fully grown adult and about 85% by early childhood.

The reasons for this is due to the connections made between neurons – synapses.

When we’re only 2 years old, we’ve not made and strengthened these necessary connections in our brains. A child’s brain actually has twice as many synapses as an adult’s brain, and in a process called pruning, the neural connections that are used and reinforced most often — like those used for language — are strengthened, while the ones that are not utilized as much fade and die.

It’s not, therefore, entirely about the number of neurons, but rather how they’re trained to connect and the consistency of that training.

The more connections made with regularity, the more adept we become at whatever that connection provides. If it’s a series of connections allowing us to speak a language, then it’s no surprise that a 2-year old still struggles while a grown adult manages the task perfectly well while driving a complex machine down the freeway and munching on an apple.