Walking Hand In Hand- Of Roots & Synapses

When you look at a picture of the synaptic connections of an embryo, and then at a map of the synaptic connections of a two year old and then again at those of a ten year old, they don't look at all like the same species let alone the same being.


Drawings of basal dendrites; a, newborn; b, 3 months; c, 6 months; d, 15 months; e, 24 months; f, adult (from Schade & van Groenigen 1961).



The embryo's neurons wander isolated and alone. They are disconnected. It looks, to me, an interested amateur, like dry sticks scattered on the sand. I have always been fascinated by the intersection of science and art. I understand through metaphor. But in the Cy Twombly scatterings of the embryo's mind I saw not metaphor but actual alien-ness. This is what my child is right now at 17 weeks. And it isn't human.

The mind of a two year old though is an abandoned backyard of weeds and vines. It looks like a conversation in a San Francisco restaurant sounds: vibrant and ever evolving but loud, echoey and disoriented. The neurons that were so close together deep in the womb are still connected, but they can live billions of neurons away now, linked by a hash of long distance connections. The springtime efflorescence of the mind is at its most wildly plastic. But this too is not human. Yet.

By the time a child is ten years old, the scouring is well under way. Things have been tidied up. Synaptic connections that have not been used wither away. A door closes. Behind is the period of near limitless plasticity. But ahead is mastery, rootedness and creation within limits. It is the cull after the wilderness of the neural springtime that ultimately makes us human.

That's where I come in. Because by... sorry, we. Where me and my wife come in. Because by October, I'll be a father. And that child, whoever he/she is, will need to be rooted in this earth and to other people. And we'll be doing it.

And how exactly is that done? How does a child become engaged in life? And how exactly does this brain of ours map that world and re-weave human experience in a fabric of axons and dendrites and synapses?

Let's find out.