When There's No Going Back

The brain uses more energy severing ties than it does creating them. Glucose usage in the child's brain is not highest when the neural spines are formed or dendritic connections are made, it is highest during the cull.

As a proto-father, this terrifies me. I understand the wisdom of a strategy of over-production and then re-trenchment. I know it isn't a strategy as such. No one planned it, right? But it still feels like the forces that impact brain development have a brain of their own.

Because it feels like an adversary.

I understand from all I've read that living with a baby's infinitely plastic and hyperconnected brain your whole life wouldn't be so great. One writer described it as living in a world where every phone call went to twenty different places: it's totally awesome to get twenty different perspectives on line, but occasionally you just want to say hi to grandma without your big brother on the line calling you a fag. Or something.

Because, you do gain something with the loss of some of the connections-waiting-to-be-fired: focus, mastery and precision.

But it terrifies me, especially when I see these movies about child prodigies. There the kid is, center of the frame, playing the piano at age five, and the mother, coolly behind him almost out of the frame, knitting, deeply satisfied that they had created a diverse - yet focused - enough array of experiences that their child toys with what other children don't even notice.

What a responsibility! How do you not become a freak? How do you strategize on this? Do you start with the yuppie flash cards? Do you play music all the time? Speak in two different languages? What if Baby Yoga is the only reliable path to create a love of learning in modern babies. God help me.

Because I love life. I love the richness of new foods, and the mysterious smells of other people's apartments and the shine of light off oily leaves in the woods and the way sea water tastes in winter. And I want, more than anything, for my kid to love it too. And not the specific experience; i want them to love experience seeking. I want this little dude/tte to be a universal scientist, experimenting with everything, and not just the things that can be measured.

I want them ecstatic in love with the way wind feels when it blows through your hair and I want them to wonder if the wind in China feels the same way. And then I want them to go there and find out.

But I have a foot in both camps. Because prodigious mastery -while it has never been my strong point- is the whisper that silences a noisy room. I can weld better than probably 298 million Americans, but that's only because most people don't know how to weld. When a weld is beautifully done, with the puddles of hardened steel laid like a row of dimes and the metal anodized in silvery blues and honey yellows, it makes you, well me anyway, want to kiss life on the lips.

So what if my kid doesn't love the sight of a beautifully welded joint. But what if they can't see what is good and special about it at all because a synaptic connection was severed somewhere deep in the cerebral cortex when I was finishing a Monday New York Times crossword puzzle instead of rolling a nine-month old through Little Afghanistan in Fremont.

Because, who knows what will fire a synapse? There's something like 100 billion neurons. During what neuroscientists call "exuberant period"when brain plasticity is at its highest before age eight, the brian has twice as many synaptic connections as i have as I'm writing this now. And it haunts me. What don't I see? What do i never notice? What rich coincidence passes me by because a withered synapse was primed for a stimulation that came years too late?