Human brain development (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 04, 2014, 20:33 (3431 days ago)

It requires a great deal of glucose energy to grow a complex human brain. Therefore babies stay small and grow slowly to allow the brain to develop as fully as possible before the body is increased to adult size. Our growth pattern is not like that of the apes or chimps for that reason:-http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2014/12/02/human-children-stay-small-long/#5465-"So human growth rate negatively shadows increased energy use in the child's brain. An interesting fact - but does it tell us more? Neanderthals and other earlier species of humans developed brains as big as ours. Why did they not survive? Bad luck? Competition from our species? Or has an overlooked advantage arisen in our evolution that puts us apart? Neanderthals grew up faster than us, and this suggests, given the link between a child brain's energy guzzling and slowed growth, a new story.-
"Bigger brains may be smarter brains but they might be even smarter if their connections got to be better refined in brain development. Neuro-maturation involves an exuberance of synapses - the connectors between neurons. This initial excess lets the developing brain refine down connections, to “wire” itself in the most effective and efficient manner. Connectome research, which studies this process - both theoretically and empirically - links better efficiency of connectivity to improved cognitive ability.-"Synapses are the primary energy consumers within the brain and it is their exuberance that causes the child's brain to use so much extra energy. We cannot directly see how long this period lasted in earlier humans but we can indirectly from their pattern of growth. Since this was faster than in us we can infer that they lacked - in spite of having brains as large as ours - the extended period of connectivity refinement that we have. This means they also lacked our extraordinary capacity for complex cognitions.-"This not only resulted in us displacing them but also the creation of civilization and the complex lives we each now live."