overproduction of neurons in development of brain

Just taking a look at the sheer volume and disorder of the two-year-old’s synapses versus her six-year-old counterpart’s gives us a whole new sense of our toddler’s behavior. Watch a quick and helpful video from the Harvard University Center on the Developing Child to see how this works. In other words, children use their experiences to help them either strengthen or prune these overproduced and disorganized sets of synapses so that, in time, the brain becomes a more organized and efficient machine. The preschool years and those that follow are, thus, spent on synaptic pruning-the shedding of pathways that are underused and enhancing those used often. That 15,000 is approximately double the number in adult brains (Gopnick, et. As they experience the world, the number of synapses will grow from 2,500 per neuron to 15,000 per neuron by age two or three.

In the first two years of life, the focus is not on acquiring more neurons, but on rapidly developing synaptic connections and pathways.īabies and toddlers produce synapses like mad, creating more than they will need. In fact, babies have nearly all of the neurons they will ever have in their brains at birth. The black dots we see are neurons and the lines between them the are synapses.Īs this shows, my canvas and sponge friends are not totally wrong, but it no longer feels right to see the young brain as either blank or empty. The image above contains a set of scans of brain tissue at various ages. Synaptic pruning: The process through which the brain abandons connections that are not emphasized by experience.Synaptic overproduction: In the early months of life, humans produce an excess of synapses.We pass information through these pathways, enabling us to understand and respond to our world. Synapse: Synapses are connections through which two nerve cells pass a chemical or electrical impulse.Neuron: Our brains contain neurons or nerve cells that act as conduits to information, both incoming and outgoing.

Overproduction of neurons in development of brain