Maybe You Aren’t Smarter Than A 5-Year-Old!

Experiences from early childhood program our brain connections for automatic judgements related to later situations

Dec 11, 2023

Try to imagine doing one thousand new things per second. If you are like me, you found this idea inconceivable. And yet, that is only a fraction of what the brain of a baby does spontaneously in the early years of life. According to the Harvard University Center on the Developing Child, during the first few years of a child’s life their brain will form more than 1 MILLION new neural connections EVERY SECOND! One million! That is a staggering number.1 The jury is still out about whether the brain actually creates new neurons (brain cells) with research showing both support and lack of support for new neuron growth.2

boy sitting on white cloth surrounded by toys

You may recall from last week’s newsletter, our brains remember things by connecting various “brain concept pockets” in unique ways that form the face of a friend, differentiate a cell phone from a checkbook, or help us make decisions based on prior experiences. The more of these connections we have the more resilient our brains are to injury and also the more of our mental capacity can be applied to a given situation.

Going back to the baby brain development topic, everything is new to a baby so any new experience will create new connections simply because there were none their previously. As the baby develops more connections, there will be less of a need to create new ones and the rate of new connection creation slows and some of the existing connections will become stronger with more use. This is a great argument for Pre-K education, by the way.

Now consider this second truly mind-blowing (pun intended) number: A single postsynaptic cell (the receiving side of a connection with another brain cell) may have as many as 10,000 connections to other cells! 10,000 connections from one brain cell! Think of this replicated with billions of brain cells and you can start to see the amazing complexity of the interconnections that form our brains.

I guess this is why the initial thought of Julia Roberts can create thoughts about her her movies, or Richard Gere or George Clooney, and why starting with Pretty Woman can create thoughts of her and/or Richard Gere. On the other hand, when I start with Richard Gere I think first of his movie An Officer and Gentleman and secondarily to Pretty Woman. Each concept connection has its own path and associated different strength levels too.

At the heart of each connection is a chemical process that happens at something called a synapse, the physical location where two neurons connect with each other. The more a synapse connection is used the stronger the synaptic chemical reaction, and the easier it is for that connection to become activated in the future. Once activated, it starts a stimulus chain reaction to other associated brain cells through their respective connections.

Repeating this activation process many times strengthens the earlier weak (side road) synaptic connections into the synaptic superhighways we talked about previously. If the superhighway is broken due to stroke or injury of some kind, then the secondary paths between points will start to be activated (sort of like using back roads when the interstate is closed down) and, over time, these secondary paths become stronger due to the same synaptic chemical reactions.

It has always been intriguing to me how an event, viewed by two different people, can evoke such different reactions. Take something simple like eating a food such as liver. For me, eating liver connotes times as a child when my parents would force us to eat liver which we, the kids, covered with as much ketchup as possible. The thought of eating liver today immediately evokes thoughts of ketchup and being forced to eat a food I did not like. I have met people who have fond memories of eating liver as a child because of the way it was lovingly prepared by their grandmother.

The act of eating liver does not change, but the memories triggered from the existing connections will trigger different reactions based on the linkages already in place.

Oddly enough, when I think of ketchup, I do not think of liver so the connection from liver to ketchup must be stronger than the connection from ketchup to liver. Ketchup, on the other hand, evokes thoughts of French Fries, and French Fries evoke equally strong thoughts of ketchup. Fries also evoke thoughts of mayonnaise left over from my time in Germany where they use mayonnaise instead of ketchup. (This combination tastes better than it sounds, by the way.)

It is useful to understand these underlying brain function characteristics because they form a type of filter for later understanding. As we have discussed, when something is presented to the brain it starts to activate the connections related to the priming experience. As these connections go, so goes the following interaction. We all learn from an early age to not ask the person in power for something if they are in a bad mood. The request doesn’t change, but the way it is interpreted by the person in a position to grant the request will be affected by their mood. Negative emotions may already be present in the person’s mind from the preceding event and those activated negative connections may act as a filter of sort that shades your secondary request in a more negative light, making it less likely that your request will be granted. On the other hand, if that same person has just experienced something positive their priming will be more positive, increasing the chances of your request being granted.

“Don’t ask Dad. He is in a bad mood. Ask Mom. She had a good day today.” Sound familiar?

How strange it is to think that we are making decisions as adults, which we believe are conscious, but may actually be the result of connections formed in the early years of our lives that are being triggered by a current chain of events.

I am not a psychologist, so I am going to avoid that part of this discussion, but the intersection of neuroplasticity, previous experiences, and the decisions we make today is definitely a viable management topic. More to come …

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