by Dr. David Fleischacker

During the 1990s, there was an explosion of studies funded and conducted on the brain.  These included looking at the brain at different stages of human development and one of those stages was pre-natal development of the brain.  Studies continue. This is absolutely fascinating.  The vast neural and synaptic explosion that happens not too long before birth in the third trimester and into early birth (it is more complex than this of course).  Literally, the brain develops millions of connections far beyond that which will be needed. 

These neural developments are found throughout a number of sections of the brain, and there are various timelines for these.  We have to remember that a young child has not seen all the colors of the world. It has been protected from most sounds as well, and touch and taste have been limited (all the what it does encounter in the womb is important!).  The brain is preparing for a vast encounter of both organic vibrancy and sensitive joy and excitement and attentiveness. 

The fact of these massive growths of synaptic connections and neural growths indicates the plasticity of the human person.  These parts of the brain are not hard-wired with certain instinctual capacities that allow us to walk or talk once we exit the womb.  In fact, when we exit, we have a vast potentiality for adapting and adjusting to a wide variety of environments.  And of course, because we are not hard-wired, we will need help.

This plasticity will become formed.  Over the first five years outside of the womb, a number of these neural connections and developments settle down. Many are lost, and those that are kept then come to be the neural matrix undergirding the organic and psychic life of a young child who is of a particular culture and time and family.  The plasticity provides the child with the incredible ability to learn with precision the dialectic of a language and the manners of a family. 

This matches the stage that Maria Montessori calls the “absorbent mind.”  By common sense, we all know that there are special capabilities that children have which we loose as we get older. Language is harder to learn at 40 than at 5.  We might have thought that this was a result of sheer effort, but it turns out to be more.  The brain was made to absorb the immediate environment during those first five years, and this includes language.  Now we are beginning to see that even the brain itself conspires in this efforts.  It sets the stage and makes it possible to absorb that world in all of its concrete details.

There are a number of points that will be worthy of blogs here.

1. There are particular attunements of children to other human beings, especially mother and father.  And….there are differences here between boys and girls. It is difficult but not impossible to find research on the gender differentiation.
2. The neural plasticity is not everything.  Obviously the environment is crucial because that plasticity is reduced into particular sets and groups of patterned neural habits through interacting with the environment. These connections  were made to be adapted to that environment.  But more important is that we have higher and lower orders of intelligibility here, and this is important to understand because we end up having multiple and mutually conditioned higher and lower levels of existence taking place–neural, sensate, and intellectual, moral and religious as well.  These levels each have their own unique properties and needs, and so they all need to be feed properly. More needs to be developed in these levels and how they unite at the different sensitive stages of development.
3. Maria’s principle about discovering the child combined with her creativity allowed her to feed all of these levels of the young absorbing child.  She would regularly say that this was also a making of the inner child. 
4. And interesting and parallel neural development takes place just before and during adolescence.  The fore-brain develops millions of new synaptic connections to the rest of the brain, and there are a number of vital changes in neural structures as well.  A young adolescent has a brain that like the infant, can undergo massive higher order intellectual and moral developments that are unique to this stage of development–I would tend to argue that this is designed so that the young man or woman will have an intense and natural thirst to find out about themselves and their place in the world (the fore-brain is sometimes called the executive brain because it is connected with making decisions and directing, guiding, and pulling alive the other parts of the brain).  Many of the disruptions we find in the West at this age I tend to think are because we do not provide an adequate mediation of the maturation of the young man and young woman.
5. There are interesting social elements to this brain development and the higher order emergent operations (sensate, intellectual, moral, religious).

For more information on brain development, the NIH posts a number of pieces.  Below are a few.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2989000/ 
2. http://www.dana.org/News/Details.aspx?id=43496 
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3055433/