Kolb – early brain development

Historically we thought the brain was little when you were born and just got bigger so it was a small version of the brain that we have. But that’s totally wrong, it’s a different brain. And what nature has done is to use what I’m going to call the Michelangelo solution which when he made the statue of David he started with a big pile of stone and chiselled away most of it and he said that David emerged from the stone. 

So our brain emerges from this infant brain which has more, about twice as many cells as we have and what we do is we post-natally get rid of and basically we have chisels which are hormones which are experiences and so on. So we get rid of cells, but neurons, but over the first two or three years we develop connections and we develop again twice as many connections as we need and then we start pruning them. And for some regions of the brain such as visual areas we prune really early starting by age three or four and we start getting rid of them. But for other regions such as the frontal lobe we don’t until we’re in adolescence.