Seven and a half lessons about the brain

The Publishing House "Mann, Ivanov and Ferber" represents a book of a professor of psychology at the University of Boston, Lisa Feldman Barrett "Seven and a half lessons about the brain. Why the brain is not arranged as we thought ”(translation by Pavel Shevtsov).

Seven short, exciting essays will reveal the door to the reader to the amazing world of the human mind. You will learn how the brain began to form, what is its structure and why it is important to understand how your brain interacts with the brain of other people and creates the reality in which you live. You will get acquainted with the most recent data obtained by specialists exploring the brain, and simultaneously free yourself from the influence of many myths, such as the “reptile brain” hypothesis, the theory of the struggle of reason and emotions and the distinction between innate and acquired qualities.

We offer to read a fragment of the book.

How the children's brain adapts to the world around

Have you ever noticed that the cubs of many animals can much more than babies? The newborn almost immediately begins to crawl without any help from the outside. The foals soon after the birth can walk, and the crumb of chimpanzees is able to hold on to the mother’s hair.

We, being babies, are quite helpless and cannot even control our own limbs. Many animals are born with a brain, better adapted to control their body. The brain of a newborn person is unfinished and reaches maturity only when the main neural ties are completely formed, and this happens by about 25 years.

Why did the evolution have ordered the “wiring” in the baby’s brain was formed only partly? So far, no one can answer this question (although many scientists have already expressed different opinions). But it is known in accordance with which “plan” our neural ties are formed in infancy and what advantages this process gives us.

When discussing these issues, researchers, as a rule, focus on the confrontation between nature and education: it is believed that some aspects of human behavior are programmed by genes even before his birth, while others are acquired during the development of generally accepted cultural norms. In fact, such a division does not exist. The development of specific features cannot be attributed only to heredity or only the environment, because these two factors are difficult and inextricably “intertwined”, like lovers passionately performing tango. It makes no sense to give them individual names like “nature” and “education”.

The way the infant genes will manifest themselves to a large extent depending on the environment. For example, the areas of the brain, most actively involved in obtaining information from the organs of vision, normally develop only on condition that the retina is regularly exposed to light. Thanks to a certain form of ears, the brain improves the ability to capture sounds around it. It is even more curious that the baby needs additional genes that enter his body from the environment. These microscopic guests penetrate the body in the form of bacteria and affect the brain, the essence of which scientists just begin to understand.

Neural ties in the baby’s brain are formed under the influence of those who care for it. Taking in our hands and Bayukah, we show him his face at close range, and his brain learns to memorize and recognize the features of different people.

Anyone who cares for a child fulfills the most important task - helps his brain form full neural ties

Showing the baby boxes and structures, we develop the ability to visually distinguish between the edges of objects. There are other actions that we help a small person to gradually adapt to social norms. For example, we hug him, talk when something important happens, look into his eyes. Thanks to all this, the baby in stages masters the foundations of the culture in which it grows, and its brain is gradually forming.

While the infant neurons receive information about the world around him, some of the nerve cells emit signals more often than others, thus creating the conditions for gradual changes. The brain of a newborn is becoming an increasingly complex system, and this happens thanks to two processes - we will call them tuning and pruning .

By setting, this refers to the strengthening of the connections between neurons, especially those that are used often or play an important role in the rational consumption and accumulation of biological resources (water, salt, glucose, etc.).

If you compare neurons with small trees again, then the setting in this case means that dendrites become more dense, and the axons resembling trunks increase like a bark, a layer of myelin, through which the pulse is rapidly transmitted. Well -tuned compounds are more effective in transmitting and processing information, so with greater probability they will be used again. Thus, the brain will most likely recreate the patterns they ask more than once. As neurobiologists like to say: "Neurons that work together are connected together."

Relations that are rarely used, weaken and die. This is how trimming occurs. This is the most important aspect of development, since there are much more neural connections in the newborn brain than it will really be needed. The human embryo embryo is twice as much as the adult is useful, and the neurons of the child are much more branched than adult neurons. Unused connections between neurons are beneficial at the initial stages, allowing the brain to adapt to different types of environment, but in the long run, they become a burden from the point of view of metabolism.

The brain, continuing to spend its energy on them, does not receive any benefit in return. However, cutting these unnecessary parts, our nervous network frees the space for training, that is, it gets the opportunity to establish connections between more useful neurons.

Setting up and pruning relationships occur constantly and continues all their lives. On branchy dendrites, new “shoots” appear, which our brain either tunes or removes. If any of the "shoots" is not set up, after a couple of days it disappears.

I will give three examples of settings and trimming, allowing you to see how the brain of an adult is formed from the brain of a newborn. The imperfect neural connections with which we are born for many months and years have been developing, guided by the "instructions" coming from the environment.

To begin with, remember how your body watches its “budget”. When a feeling of hunger appears, you open the refrigerator. Feeling fatigue, you go to bed. If it is cold, put on a coat, and experiencing stress, you begin to breathe deeply and, thus, calm down. None of these actions can perform a baby on his own. He is not able to even abide without outside help. And then the one who cares about him comes to the rescue. This person regulates everything that happens in the environment of the environment - he is fed, put to sleep at a certain time (or at least try!), Wrap the blankets and enclosed in arms. These actions help the brain of the newborn to maintain the budget of the body, so its internal systems work normally and it remains alive and healthy.

If a caring adult copes with his duties well, the child’s neural network itself sets up the necessary connections and removes the extra, maintaining the optimal budget. Gradually, the child’s brain begins to better and better control the work of the body, and the significance of outside help decreases. The child can already fall asleep on his own, and not just on the hands of an adult and knows how to put a piece of banana in his mouth, without smelling his face. The child will most likely be on your own sweater or prepare a breakfast for yourself only a few years later, but it all begins with the fact that the brain learns to control the body's budget.

The small brain is also affected by what a close adult does not. For example, if instead of letting the baby fall asleep on his own, lull him every night, he may not learn how to fall asleep without outside help. If the baby cries for a long time and this remains unattended, then information is “recorded” in his brain that the world around us is unreliable, dangerous, and proper control over the biological budget is lost.

However, at the age of one to three years, something changes. During this period, the brain learns to calm the body after outbreaks of irritation or anger and further rationalize the body’s budget without emotional bursts. When my daughter was small, I found that if she would provide her with a certain freedom of action, her brain used to independently calm her nerves. In general, if with a baby one or three years old not to nurse too much and not show excessive attention to every slightest need for his, but instead create conditions for his independent development, then the child’s body will learn to better control his body. To understand when young children need to help, and when they allow them to show independence, this is one of the most difficult tasks for any parent.

The second example of setting and pruning concerns concentration. Did it happen that, being in the crowd and not listening to the conversations that sound around, you suddenly paid attention to the voice that made your name? (Scientists call this “the effect of a cocktail party.”) Your adult brain is able to easily focus on something, ignoring everything else, since there are small accumulations of cells in the neural network, the main task of which is to focus on some details, perceiving them as important and not to spend attention on others. The brain constantly focuses attention, although you often do not realize this.

Sometimes, however, adults need help to concentrate, which is why anti -shift headphones are sold so well. And the brain of the newborn does not have a “spotlight”. There is something like a lantern covering a rather large part of the surrounding world. In infants, there are no neural ties that can turn their “flashlight” into a “spotlight” beam.

And here, adults caring for him should again help the baby. Their task is to direct the attention of the baby to interesting things. For example, mom takes a small toy dog, looks at her first, then at her baby, then again at the dog, thus telling the baby where you need to direct your eyes. Mom deliberately a chant says: “Look, what a sweet dog!” Mother's speech and switching the gaze show the child that a toy dog ​​is important, so he must study it.

Gradually, we teach the child to determine what is important in the reality surrounding him, and what is not. As a result, his brain forms an idea of ​​what is happening around in such a way as to determine what can affect the body's budget and what can be ignored. Scientists call such an idea of ​​the world a niche. The niche is formed in any animal in the process of developing the ability to perceive the world around him, perform the most appropriate actions and regulate the body's budget. In an adult, this niche has gigantic dimensions, and perhaps not a single living creature can compare with it. Your niche extends much further than what you see in this moment, and covers the events taking place around the world, in the past, present and future.

If you regularly practice the division of attention with the child, he begins to initiate this process after a few months-he looks at the adult, as if asking if there is now anything in his children's niche and how it is able to influence the budget of his body. That is how the child gets used to better and better focus on the important components of the surrounding space.

The third example of tuning and pruning concerns the development of sensory organs. During the first months of the baby’s life, many different sounds surround, including the sounds of conversations. With the help of his “flashlight”, he captures them all. In the course of the study, it turned out that the newborn is able to distinguish between a large number of words, including those that are infrequently conveyed to his ears. Over time, on the basis of sounds that the baby hears most often, neural connections are formed. He begins to perceive the usual sounds as part of his niche, and those that he rarely hears - as unimportant noises. Neural relations related to them in the future cease to be useful and removed.

Scientists believe that this type of pruning can be one of the reasons why it is easier for children to learn languages ​​than adults. In various languages, different sound sets are used. For example, in Greek and Spanish there are few vowels, and in Danish there are about 20 or more (depending on how to count). If, in childhood, others spoke to you in different languages, then your brain most likely tuned and removed neural connections so as to be able to distinguish between the sounds of all these languages. And if in the first years of your life you heard a speech only in your native language, then in order to recognize foreign words, you would have to reinstall the hearing, and this is not an easy task.

About the same happens with the ability to remember and recognize faces. Babs learn to distinguish between people who appear next to them. The brain remembers the features of their faces, making tuning and pruning in its neural network, then to see the difference between persons. But the fact is that the child, as a rule, grows among representatives of the same ethnic group, which means that the brain has the opportunity to capture faces with not very very different features. This, according to scientists, is one of the reasons why it is difficult for us to distinguish between the faces of representatives of a different nationality and remember them. Fortunately, this ability can be quickly restored if you “reconfigure” the brain, often starting to look at the faces of people dissimilar to each other. This is much easier than “re -ify” perception, learning to capture the sounds of a non -native language.

In the described examples, both the skill of recognition of the language and the skill of memorizing persons are associated with one of the senses. But the world around us transfers information to us through a few channels of perception. So, when we kiss someone, a whole range of sensations arises: we see the face of a person, hear his breath, feel his lips, their taste and smell, the beating of our heart. Our brain “collects” all these sensations, connects them among themselves and turns them into a single whole. Science calls this process sensory integration .

In the course of growing up the child, sensory integration is also accompanied by tuning and pruning. At first, the newborn is not able to recognize the face of his mother, because he does not understand what a person is, and the mechanism of visual perception is not yet developed. At the same time, the baby can hear how mother's voice sounds, and feel how breast milk smells. If you put a very young child on the stomach of the mother, he will begin to crawl to her chest, feeling this smell. Soon, the ability to recognize mother develops using different combinations of data that the baby receives from different senses. Every time mother appears nearby, the baby’s brain perceives it with the help of vision, smell, hearing, touch, taste, as well as sensations that arise inside the body of the child himself. “Absorbing” all this information, he remembers: now there is a person who is able to regulate my “biological budget” next to me. Thanks to sensory integration, the baby has a feeling of trust, and attachment arises on its basis.

Three sets and trimming examples show how significantly the social environment determines the physical processes under the influence of which the “wiring” of our brain is formed. Did you know that the educators were such effective electricians?