Does neuroscience say early education will really make a child intelligent?
How do children’s brains develop?
The desire to make your own child a better person, or in other words, to improve their survival ability and make them more capable of passing on their genes, is a fate that we humans cannot easily rid ourselves of as creatures living on Earth.
In that case, how much do children’s brains change with education or their environment?
Comparing it to raising fruits and vegetables seems inappropriate, but to raise something well, knowledge about how the thing you are raising will change with natural progress is essential.
So, what are the basic mechanisms that our human brains develop by?
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny? Haeckel’s recapitulation theory
One hypothesis often mentioned in biology is Haeckel’s recapitulation theory. This theory holds that the history of the development of the individual reflects the history of evolution to date. A famous example is the development of a fetus, which changes as though it were following the history of evolution from fishes through reptiles to mammals. So, to what extent does the brain of a newborn baby follow phylogeny?
The brain in infancy, the brain in puberty
The paper I discuss today investigates the thickness of the cerebral cortex of 600 siblings, including twins, (average age: 11.1 years; range: 5–19 years) to see how the regions of the cerebral cortex changed with age and what age they were affected by genetics at.
The results showed that the primary somatosensory area and the primary motor area, which are the oldest regions of the brain in terms of evolution, were more easily affected by genetics from an early age, and that regions with a shorter evolutionary history, such as the frontal lobe and temporal lobe, which are involved in the use of language and tools and in memory, tended to be affected by genetics further into puberty and adolescence.
The intelligence quotient (IQ) has been reported as converging on the person’s proper ability as they age. In a similar way, regions relating to humans’ higher-level capacities may come under the effect of genetics further into adolescence.
I understand that these results cannot be generalized easily, but even if early education raises children’s capacity in infancy, they may return to where they would have been anyway during puberty and adolescence.
