- Strength of legs and ability to co-ordinate
vision and balance
- Experience or not of crawling
- Previous experience e.g. have we been held upright,
rocked, bounced, allowed to kick freely during care routines?
- Own capacity for exploration, interest and curiosity
So our experiences if repeated often enough will
influence the way in which the parts of the brain that deal with
movement, balance, vision will be reflected in the pattern of
wiring that eventually emerges. This same combination of a similar
framework and individual experience applies to our emotional and
thinking world too. How our carers react to us will influence
the kind of pathways that are laid down governing how, what, when
we feel both about others and, most importantly, ourselves. As
we go through this developmental series, I will keep returning
to the links with the brain and experience but now let’s turn
to finding out about the structure and pathways in a bit more
detail
• How do our brains work?
I said above that we share a great deal of our brains
with other animals and this is because our brains are the result
of thousands if not millions of years of evolution. In order to
help us think about this, researchers have divided our brain essentially
into three parts. First of all, there is the oldest part of our
brain, which is the brain stem, which extends from the back of
the brain into the spinal cord. This part of our brain is often
referred to as the ‘reptilian brain’ and has been largely unchanged
by evolution. This structure, fully developed at birth, contains
areas, which control breathing, temperature, heart rate, sleep
functions, stress responses and consciousness. Above this there
are structures comprising the middle part of the brain, which
is often called the mammalian brain because it has almost ‘the
same chemical systems and structure as in other mammals’ (Sunderland,
2006, P.19). These structures deal with our emotions, memory and
include the gateway for the processing of all our bodily senses
(except smell) from both internal and external stimuli. Finally,
at the top of the evolutionary tree, comes the cortex, which has
six layers and is divided into four lobes – frontal, parietal,
temporal and occipital, each of which has special functions.
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