Brain development

Life is amazing!  We develop from microscopic cells into living, breathing animals that are capable of abstract thinking.  The brain is fascinating to me.  This one organ is what allows us to learn, speak, feel, and allows movement.  For the infant brain there are studies that are looking for the answer to how we learn even the most simple tasks such as grasping or walking.  We have seen one such study conducted by Esther Thelan that looked at how babies are able to learn to grasp and object that is put in front of them.  She was able to see that even though each baby started out taking different paths to reach the toy dangled in front of them they all began taking the same path in the end.  It was as though their brains were using trial and error to figure out the correct sequence to be able to grasp the toy.  Me typing right now is because my brain learned the correct sequence to have my thoughts and hands to communicate!  The reason that I can type over 100 words per minute is because I have had lots of practice and use this skill every day.  Nature allows us the ability to be able to learn and nurture allows us to be able to fine tune that skill.  Last week, during a weekly group, we had the girls watch a HBO special about teen drinking.  We started out talking about how these teens had made choices that put them in the situations that they were in.  The video was pretty graphic and I even had to turn my attention at one point.  What was interesting to me about this video was one boy who came in because he had drank a case of beer and ran his four wheeler into a tree.  He had swerved to avoid hitting a squirrel and hit the tree so hard that he split it in half with is head.  Don't get me wrong it was amazing that he survived but what really amazed me was that later he had to relearn every thing.  His brain had been thrown around in his skull causing swelling.  Several weeks later he was having to not only relearn how to eat and talk but to control his emotions and movements.  It was again his brain firing and firing to try and get the right sequence.  The sad part to this story was that we he was able to go home and seemed to be back to normal he continued the same things he was doing before his accident.  We are all continually learning throughout our lives yet the infant brain is like a clean slate.  Babies absorb so much information from the world around it yet it is their brains that help the process that information and make sense of the world around them.