post 1 module 6

Over the past few decades there have been several new epiphanies, findings and inventions in neuroscience, and how to apply it to teaching strategies in the classroom. Technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging and computerized axial tomography has given us access to knowledge about what parts of the brain control certain thoughts and mental processing and behavioral reactions. At the start of birth, children go through critical periods and sensitive periods, critical relating to cognitive experiences and sensitive referring to environmental influences. If you get someone to learn an idea or concept through more than one neural passageway, they are more likely to recall that idea/concept later on than if they learned it through only on passageway.
The concept of neural pruning surprised me a lot. But it did make sense after reading about it more in the text. But at first, the concept didn’t make much sense. Of course before knowing this, I assumed that as the child gets older from birth, more and more neural synapses are formed and none would have been “pruned” out. I can’t relate the concept of neural pruning to my past schooling, but I can relate it to how I learned things naturally in my environment during my earlier childhood years. I learned the English language without and English classes, I learned how to complete the few chores I was assigned to do and became very good at those, and those particular chores are the easiest for me to perform even now as an adult, because of me learning those before any other chores. I understand the material in this text very much so, mostly because I learned it all before in the neuroscience units of my psychology classes, to where we got even more in detail about all of these concepts (but surprisingly enough I don’t remember neural pruning, good thing I’ve learned it now!).
The picture contains comparison of how many synaptic connections there are between neurons of different age groups: birth, 6 years old, and 14 years old. The picture represents the concept called neural pruning, to where during early brain development, the brain starts out with a whole lot of synaptic connections ready to take on anything the world could hand them, such as the ability to learn any language as mentioned in the book. But over the next few years of life, the neural synapses lessen to focus more on just the particular subjects the child is learning. A toddler’s brain is tons more active and fuller of energy than an adolescent or adult, and contains over twice as many neural synaptic connections, which is why little children can learn or “catch on” to things in what seems to be impossible ways.