It’s not the physical side that makes the crucial difference. It’s a person’s resolve, intention, patience, hope, and diligence. Super brain rests on the credo of connecting the mind and brain in a new way. A discouraged child relates to his brain differently than an encouraged child, and their brains must respond differently, too. But clearly stimulation is secondary to how the child feels, which is mental and psychological. For any brain to operate well, it needs stimulation. Discouragement is holistic, encompassing brain, psyche, emotions, behavior, and opportunities later in life. Useful skills are not developed, and the parts of the brain that fall into disuse atrophy. A discouraged child, we can surmise, aborts this process. So the first years of life are spent winnowing out the unused connections and growing the ones that will lead to new skills.
It’s not hard to see how this cycle of behavior affects the brain. We now know that babies are born with 90 percent of their brains formed and millions of connections that are surplus. Other children mark him as slow or stupid, an outsider. School has turned into a stifling prison rather than an enriching place. He makes no more effort to keep up in class. So he enters the final phase, which is sullen silence. Acting out leads to disapproval and punishment. The disruptions can be aggressive, but eventually the child realizes that nothing good is happening. Every child needs attention, even if it is negative. The next phase is acting out, making disruptive noises or pranks to attract attention. The child stops trying as hard as the children who meet with success and encouragement. When these efforts fail, for whatever reason, discouragement sets in. First the child attempts to keep up with other children. Such students existed in every classroom that all of us attended, usually sitting in the back row. We feel that without a new relationship, the brain cannot be asked to do new, unexpected things. Not enough weight is given to how a person relates to the brain.
Yet in so saying, we are as naïve as newspaper reporters waiting eagerly to tell the world that Einstein possessed a freakish brain- we still emphasize the physical. (So astounding is the brain’s ability to make new connections that a fetus on the verge of being born is forming 250,000 new brain cells per minute, leading to millions of new synaptic connections per minute.) It’s now known that the brain can form new axons and dendrites up to the last years of life, which gives us tremendous hope for preventing senility, for example, and preserving our mental capacity indefinitely. You can’t see genes at work, but you can observe neurons growing new axons and dendrites, the threadlike extensions that allow one brain cell to connect with another. Both represent dramatic advances in knowledge. That era was just on the verge of exploring genes, and advanced theories about how new synaptic connections are formed lay decades in the future.
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