Our brain is so delicate and complex that it is better to protect it from negative influences at any age. However, there are two periods in childhood when the risks are especially high, neurophysiologists say.
The structure of the brain has always occupied people, but only with the development of magnetic resonance imaging did we get the opportunity to “look inside” the cranium and observe the work of one of the most important organs of our body. Physician and neurophysiologist Tara Swart of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), working on the problem of negative effects on the brain, argues that the child’s brain deserves especially careful treatment in the period from one to two and in adolescence1.
From one to two years: learn to walk and talk
What is special about the second year of life? The brain of a small child does a fantastic amount of work on the assimilation of a huge amount of information, and the second year of life is especially difficult in this sense. “Recognizing speech and then trying to start speaking on your own is a complex task that the brain has to solve,” emphasizes Tara Suart. She recalls that the acquisition of a foreign language by adults is often accompanied by serious emotional overload and a sense of exhaustion. A child in the second year of life has to simultaneously cope with another most difficult task. He is learning to walk – and from the point of view of brain activity, this is also more than serious. In the brain, there is an intensive process of formation of neural connections responsible for new activities.
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As a result, any negative impact can cause serious disorders of neurological and mental development. By influences, Tara Suart understands both physical – whether it be a concussion or a serious illness, and emotional traumas – rough treatment, violence, separation from parents. At the same time, the child himself, who has experienced something similar, is not able to later remember what happened to him and find the causes of his problems (we more or less clearly remember ourselves from about 4-5 years of age).
The neurophysiologist refers to numerous studies conducted by American psychologists in Romania since the 1980s and 90s.2. After the fall of the Ceausescu regime, the country experienced a severe economic crisis. Many parents in harsh conditions refused even healthy children simply because they did not see the opportunity to feed them, so about 100 children ended up in orphanages in Romania, who were relatively well off materially. However, the psychological trauma they endured, including parting with their parents and the lack of care and love in government educational institutions, had a serious impact on their future lives. “There is a lot of evidence: having matured, orphanage inmates find it difficult to keep a good job, not knowing how to build relationships with colleagues. To an even greater extent, this applies to personal relationships, notes Tara Suart. “Their brain scans show changes in the limbic structure, a complex of areas primarily responsible for emotional development.”
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Teens: weeding the garden
Tara Suart calls adolescence the second period of risk. The intensity of the processes occurring in the brain of a teenager is quite comparable with the brain activity of very young children. First of all, the brain conducts a “revision” of neural connections, removing unnecessary chains that have not been used for a long time. This process can be roughly likened to weeding a garden: it is necessary to remove unnecessary, weedy plants in order to allow the useful and necessary to fully develop. Similarly, the brain gets rid of unused neural connections to enable us to make the best use of the remaining ones.
During adolescence, the load on the frontal lobes and prefrontal cortex of the brain increases dramatically – areas responsible for the overall control of mental activity, the ability to understand complex mental concepts, set goals and determine how to achieve them. “Adolescents for the first time become interested in, for example, politics, other social processes, improve their communication skills,” explains Tara Suart. Is it any wonder, for example, that teenagers often complain of lack of sleep. They objectively need more time for sleep so that the brain can fully recover. And any traumatic impact at this age can also lead to various problems in psychological and emotional development.
1 For more details, see the information portal Quarz, QZ.com
2 For example, R. Vanderwert et. al. “Timing of intervention affects brain electrical activity in children exposed to severe psychosocial neglect.” Online publication on the scientific portal PLoS One from July 1, 2010.