Scientist in the Crib
She has 10x as many synapses as me.
Much of the human brain’s power derives from its massive synaptic interconnectivity. Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute observed that across species, synapses/neuron fan-out grows as a power law with brain mass. — from my little WIRED piece, Celebrate the Child-like Mind.
Genevieve is reading one of my favorite books, Alison Gopnik's Scientitst in the Crib: "Babies are just plain smarter than we are, at least if being smart means being able to learn something new.... They think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations and even do experiments…. In fact, scientists are successful precisely because they emulate what children do naturally."
Babies signal their interest in things by where they focus their gaze, and that shifts over time as their brain develops. This observable locus of attention is a gateway into their developing mind. At birth, much of the sensory cortex is bootstrapping the vision system, from the color space to distance vision and initially edge detection.
In a fetus, the initial inter-neuronal connections, or dendritic "wiring" of the brain, grow along chemical gradients, densely filling all available space, and exploring approximately 500 possible connections for each ultimate synapse formation. The massive number of inter-neuron connections in an adult brain could not be simply encoded in our DNA, even if the entire DNA sequence was dedicated to this one task. There are on the order of 100 trillion synaptic connections between 86 billion neurons in your brain.
This incredibly complex system is not 'installed' like an app from your DNA. It is grown, first through widespread connectivity sprouting from 'static storms' of positive electro-chemical feedback, and then through the pruning of many underused connections through continuous usage-based feedback.
For example, you have the adage “neurons that fire together, wire together” and the process of nearest neighbor associations in the vision system begin even before the rods and cones see light, and then continue after birth in a critical period of development.
At the age of 2 to 3 years old, humans hit their peak with over a quadrillion synaptic connections, 15x the adult brain, and twice the energy burn.
Scientist in the Crib
She has 10x as many synapses as me.
Much of the human brain’s power derives from its massive synaptic interconnectivity. Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute observed that across species, synapses/neuron fan-out grows as a power law with brain mass. — from my little WIRED piece, Celebrate the Child-like Mind.
Genevieve is reading one of my favorite books, Alison Gopnik's Scientitst in the Crib: "Babies are just plain smarter than we are, at least if being smart means being able to learn something new.... They think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations and even do experiments…. In fact, scientists are successful precisely because they emulate what children do naturally."
Babies signal their interest in things by where they focus their gaze, and that shifts over time as their brain develops. This observable locus of attention is a gateway into their developing mind. At birth, much of the sensory cortex is bootstrapping the vision system, from the color space to distance vision and initially edge detection.
In a fetus, the initial inter-neuronal connections, or dendritic "wiring" of the brain, grow along chemical gradients, densely filling all available space, and exploring approximately 500 possible connections for each ultimate synapse formation. The massive number of inter-neuron connections in an adult brain could not be simply encoded in our DNA, even if the entire DNA sequence was dedicated to this one task. There are on the order of 100 trillion synaptic connections between 86 billion neurons in your brain.
This incredibly complex system is not 'installed' like an app from your DNA. It is grown, first through widespread connectivity sprouting from 'static storms' of positive electro-chemical feedback, and then through the pruning of many underused connections through continuous usage-based feedback.
For example, you have the adage “neurons that fire together, wire together” and the process of nearest neighbor associations in the vision system begin even before the rods and cones see light, and then continue after birth in a critical period of development.
At the age of 2 to 3 years old, humans hit their peak with over a quadrillion synaptic connections, 15x the adult brain, and twice the energy burn.