Environment, Behavior, Culture, and the Brain

The Synaptic Self

Brain Basics: Know Your Brain | National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. (n.d.). https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/public-education/brain-basics/brain-basics-know-your-brain

Introduction to Brain Development

The brain is the organ of behavior. In humans, the cerebral cortex contains about 14 to 16 billion neurons. These neurons are the cells responsible for receiving sensory input from the external world, sending motor commands to our muscles, and transforming and relaying the electrical signals at every step in between. These neurons communicate with one another by long fibers known as axons. Explaining how external stimuli are represented in the brain is one of the challenges of neuroscience. Axons carry information to multiple parts of the brain or body and some target a specific recipient group of cells for cortical organization. These are known as cortical maps. These maps are primarily for the sensory and motor cortex. This sensory/motor cortical organization lays the biological foundation for how the brain represents the world. 

A cortical map refers specifically to a correspondence between responses in an anatomical-defined network of cortical neurons and some events external to the brain. These cortical maps are not fixed but are dynamically modified by our experience with the environment (neuroplasticity). Cortical maps provide important data as to how brain architecture and connectivity develop and maintain representations of the external environment. In part, they are shaped by the experiences in the environment with which we interact. It is essential to promote the practices of sensorial and motoric enrichment and stimulation early in the life of a child, because these sensory/motor maps lay the foundation for cognitive development, learning, prosocial behavior, and storing our knowledge of the world. Networks of brain regions collectively support behavior. Neuroplasticity is the ability of the cells in the neural networks in the brain to change throughout life in response to environmental experiences by reorganizing its cellular structure, functions, or connections. Without cell plasticity, the brain would be unable to develop from infancy and beyond. We would not be able to change our behavior based on personal experience or engage in the healthy practice of lifelong learning.

Genes and Environment in Brain Development

We used to think that genes were set in stone. Research has demonstrated that brain development is driven by continuing complex interactions of genetic and environmental influences. We now know that early environmental experiences can determine how genetic factors are turned on and off and whether some are expressed at all. The experiences that a child has early in life play a crucial role in the developing brain. This is critical! We need to ensure that children have healthy and growth-promoting early experiences in rich learning and prosocial environments. This will promote self-directed learning and cooperative behavior that facilitates their development into accomplished citizens.

Early Life Environments Can Influence Healthy/Unhealthy Brain Growth and Behavior

As a society, we need to focus on developing collective practices that ensure that every child's brain has a healthy start. This must go beyond nutrition and proper immunization. During pregnancy, the child’s brain can be affected by the acts and experiences of the person carrying the child. That includes behavior such as smoking, using drugs or alcohol, as well as being exposed to toxic and abusive situations. The context of the environment is critical. Chronically stressful environments and emotional traumas, like living with an abusive partner, can impact the fetus and modify the brain development of the child. We need to provide regular health care during pregnancy and beyond to prevent complications that can affect the baby's brain. Once the child is born, healthy brain growth in infancy continues to depend significantly on immersion in a healthy prosocial environment. This is the first opportunity we have as a collective society to give every child a chance in life.

Sensitive Periods: Windows of Opportunity

Lisa Barrett's 2020 book, 7 1/2 Lessons about the Brain, provides a lot of facts and accurately informs us that "Little Brains Wire Themselves in the World." She concludes, "It's up to us to create that world - including a social world rich with wiring instructions - to grow those brains healthy and whole." This is an awesome responsibility that we can not leave up to chance. It challenges us to create an environment that shapes the most critical practice of parenting. It is a challenge and an opportunity to create a learning environment that will give every child a fair chance in life. We now have the science to do so.

We have the capacity to learn and develop throughout life. That is the function of brain plasticity, the brain connectivity modification that occurs through environmental experience. We also know that there are windows of opportunity in the developing brain. That is, a specific span of time for the normal development of brain connectivity that supports certain types of functions and skills. This is important because these are the only times a child can fully lay the neural foundation to be able to effectively learn that specific skill, such as motor skills and language. Windows of opportunity are optimum periods for a specific function to fully and effectively develop. For example, the windows open at birth are for the development of sensory connections (vision, hearing, touching), for developing social attachments (interactions with caregivers), and for learning language. These windows close at different times. These windows are more effective if there are environmental stimuli that a child can interact with, and that promote actions that are reinforced. 

A dramatic example of what happens if such social stimuli are totally lacking is the case of the Victor of Aveyron. In the late 18th century, a 12-year-old male child was discovered living in the woods near the town of Aveyron in southern France. Five years of attempts to teach him to speak and read proved futile, suggesting that the windows of opportunity were permanently closed in his case. Most of these windows of opportunity make it easier for a child to learn certain abilities. If one misses a window, it does not mean that the child can't learn that skill. It will be more difficult and will require more effort. The first 5 years of life is the most critical window of opportunity to maximize brain development so that a child develops the proper brain connectivity that they will need for the lifelong journey of learning. Maximizing these windows of opportunity gives the child a healthy start in life.

Environmental Enrichment

Early studies of environmental enrichment (EE) were performed in lower animals, including rats. The findings consistently demonstrated that enriched environments facilitate brain connectivity and growth contributing to healthy brain development. Environments that facilitate brain stimulation with physical and social demands and challenges are known to affect the brain at the functional, anatomical, and molecular levels. At early stages of brain development, EE triggers a marked acceleration in the maturation of the visual system. Research has demonstrated that the home environment plays a significant role in giving the child a chance.

Environmental Poverty and Early-Life Adversity

Lipina and Posner in their 2012 article, The Impact of Poverty on the Developing Brain, in Frontiers in Neuroscience, document how low socioeconomic status and poverty conditions are risk factors associated with low educational attainment and reduced adult productivity. They proposed that the preschool period is important for preparing the child for a successful school experience. These experiences can shape brain networks. They noted, "Explicit and implicit training in attention at the preschool level may foster the learning of a wide variety of skills acquired in school including literacy and numeracy." They concluded that brain-oriented research shows the specific experiences needed as well as methods to measure whether the learning objectives have been achieved. We need to promote teaching and parenting with the brain in mind.

Brain development is also affected by early-life adversity. Violence and abuse at home have a significant impact on the emotional brain. The amygdala forms the core of the neural system for processing fearful and threatening stimuli. The amygdala learns to identify and detect threats and activates the appropriate fear-related reactions to threatening stimuli (anxiety). Being raised in an ever-present threatening environment shapes the neurobiology of social information processing. The decoding of emotional information, and the subsequent integration of this information into learned choices about behavior appropriate to particular contexts, is an integral part of everyday human behavior. There is a strong correlation between experiencing violence at home early in life and the person acting with violence in the future. We need to teach with the brain in mind.

Healthy parenting and implementing universal early childhood education involves the practice of teaching with the brain in mind. Our country needs to invest in these practices and be an active participant in the promotion of the evolution of our culture. A future essay will address the science and practice of teaching with the brain in mind, specifically related to parenting and education.

Behavior Analysis and Neuroscience

Joe Donahoe in his 2017 article, Behavior Analysis and Neuroscience: Complementary Disciplines, published in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior concluded, "A strong case can be made that the integration of behavior analysis and neuroscience portends a biobehavioral science whose implications for understanding complex behavior, including human behavior, are as profound as the earlier integration of the sciences of heredity and genetics for understanding complex structure." He also noted, "Skinner explicitly acknowledged the spatial gap between behavior and the variables of which it is a function" and argued that "this gap can be filled only by neuroscience, and the sooner, the better." 

We now have the integration of these complementary disciplines that provide us with a unitary science and technology to engineer an environment (culture) conducive to healthy brains for better learning to build a future together.

Our Social Context Shapes Our Synaptic Self: Adapting and Changing our Brain and Behavior to Drives our Fluid Culture

Joseph LeDoux in his 2002 book Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, challenged us to not only see ourselves as a product of our history interacting with the environment but to recognize our biology and how our interactions with the environment also shape our biological self. He identified the synapses, the spaces between the end of a nerve cell and another cell, as the biological conduit through which we do many things like think, feel, remember, imagine, love, anticipate, resolve engage in conflict…behave. They allow us to behave and function as a single, integrated individual. Synapses connect neurons in the brain to neurons in the rest of the body and from those neurons to the muscles. These connections are unique to the individual since the connections are based on personal environmental/interaction history. We are our synaptic selves.

The nervous system changes in response to environmental input. It adapts to the unfolding environmental demands. Neuroplasticity is the biological, chemical, and physical capacity of the brain to reorganize its structure and function in response to environmental input. It is a fluid and ongoing process responsible for new learning and storing new memories. These changes result in new neural pathways that with repeated environmental input are strengthened. If these pathways are used infrequently, they become weak and eventually die (synaptic pruning). Although traditionally associated with changes in childhood, recent research indicates that mature brains continue to show plasticity as a result of new learning. There is hope, you CAN teach an old dog new tricks. People who have not learned to be prosocial, under the right environmental conditions, can learn and behave in prosocial ways. Behavior changes gradually as a consequence of the new contingencies of reinforcement and so do the fluid synaptic brain connections. Thus, the synaptic self.

How Sociality Shapes the Brain and Behavior

Sociality is the degree to which individuals in a given population (society/culture) tend to associate with social groups and form cooperative societies. Historically, acting socially is a survival response to evolutionary pressures. The most fundamental contribution to shaping sociality is parental investment (time, energy, social capital) to benefit one's child. Humans are social animals. Properly raising a child demands significant social involvement. For most, it is quite rewarding. Being social has been demonstrated to be good for you and others, and improves your health and well-being.

Culture and biology have evolved together. There is an environmental and neural basis for the developmental origins of the social brain. The social brain includes empathy, morality, and justice. The synaptic self, which includes the social brain as the cornerstone, effectively navigates and negotiates complex social environments and relationships. The social brain is the neural basis of social knowledge and social behavior. It is shaped by an individual's unique environmental experience within the prevalent culture/context. It involves the same brain structures involved in perception, cognition, and behavior more generally, but specialization may be evident at the level of neural processing and behavior because of an individual's unique learning experience. Environmental context shapes all processes in your brain. Contextual cues are important for interpreting social situations. How one interprets a social situation depends on the neural social brain shaped by your own contextual/environmental experiences.

It is difficult to ignore the importance of social interactions in human society and how they shape the culture. They form the basis of our families, our friendships, our governments, and even our global trade and economy. How did we evolve and become social? Anthropologists have long believed that it was a gradual process, evolving from couples to clans to larger groups and communities. Recently, new evidence tends to indicate that primate/early human societies expanded in a burst, most likely because there was safety in numbers. There are advantages (gets selected) in being social in groups and now it goes beyond safety. Prosocial behavior is essential for our fluid synaptic self and our social growth and development, our well-being, and most important for the survival of our culture and most likely humanity as we know it.

Humans are unique in generating the cumulative cultural evolutionary process that gives rise to complex behavioral skills and technologies. A paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society by Michael Muthukrishna and others (January 2014) titled Sociality influences cultural complexity, demonstrated that both the size and social interconnectedness of a population contribute to the complexity of its cultural repertoire. They also found that some research models predicted that a loss of sociality or of the population will result in subsequent losses of useful skills/technologies. Sociality is powerful stuff! It contributes to the cement of society and the developing and maintaining a healthy brain.

Putnam and Garrett in their book, The Upswing, inform us, "Americans seem to have stopped believing that we are all in this together.” They assert, "we replaced cooperation with political polarization. We allowed our community and family ties to unravel to a marked extent." Robert Putnam, over his many years of writing and in his books, such as Bowling Alone (2020) as well as Better Together: Restoring the American Community (2004), has warned us that we are no longer working together to solve our problems and that our culture was evolving and changing toward I behavior.

Putnam argues that working together and building social capital have powerful effects on many aspects of society. Social capital enhances our culture. His data demonstrate, among many other things, that "the welfare of children is higher where social capital is higher" as well as there "is strong evidence of powerful health effects of social connectedness." Quite relevant today are the correlations of "crime strongly negatively predicted by social capital" and most important, "the strongest predictor of the murder rate is a low level of social capital. It is stronger than poverty; it's stronger than any other plausible measures." Let's look to the sciences for direction! Building social capital, operationally defined as "the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively" is critical. To put it simply, building healthy relationships, based on trust and reciprocity, contributes to everyone’s safety.

These days, prosocial behavior is hard to find. Unfortunately, we have not acted to do anything about it in an effective way. Putnam's warnings over the years have become fulfilled in the present day. Social capital has been declining in our country for too long.

To be blunt, our sociality has significantly declined, and that decline is driven by our bad behaviors. Consequently, our culture evolves and decays and so does the quality of our lives. We can also predict that many of our brains, unbeknownst to us, are changing as well.

Pass it on and see you next week!

Francisco I. Perez

Faris R. Kronfli

Henry S. Pennypacker

For those of you who are interested in delving deeper into these issues we suggest:

H. S. Pennypacker & Francisco I. Perez - Engineering the Upswing: A Blueprint for Reframing Our Culture - 2022. Sloan Publishing. It can be bought at The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies bookstore (behavior.org) or at Amazon. All proceeds benefit The Cambridge Center.