When young children are learning, they have to both build and strengthen many connections in their brains. Take learning to walk. Children are born with the connections they need to flex and extend their leg muscles. But they don’t yet know the pattern of movements that will allow them to place one foot in front of the other. Step by step the connections between a child’s brain and their leg muscles grow stronger. As they learn the pattern of placing one foot in front of another, they form new connections. These connections allow them to walk in a fluid, continuous motion. The more and more experience they have, the stronger the connections in their brains. The stronger the connections in their brains, the less they have to concentrate on the motion. Walking becomes a practiced task that takes little conscious thought.
Our brains go through the same process for any task that we need to learn. Once we have learned to read, we don’t typically think about the individual shapes of the letters. With enough practice, we formed connections in our brains that allowed us to recognize words as units. But we DID have to do this when we were learning. Think about when you come across a word you don’t know. Where do you start? You have to string the letters together, piece by piece.
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- Axon
- output fiber of a neuron
- Cell body
- the neuron's processing center
- Dendrites
- input fibers of a neuron
- Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
- a non-invasive brain imaging technique used to determine which regions of the brain are active
- Neurons
- cells located in the brain and throughout the body that are specialized to communicate messages
- Pruning
- the process of removing excess synapses
- Sensitive period
- a time in development when the brain is especially ready to learn a skill
- Synapse
- connection point between neurons