Childhood Experiences Can Change The Brain, According To Science

Various schools have long emphasized the influence childhood experiences have throughout life. Today it is neuroscience that corroborates this fact and once again puts on the table the fundamental importance of those first years of life.

Isabel Pérez-Otaño, a researcher at the UMH-CSIC Institute of Neurosciences in Alicante, has said that childhood experiences mark the rest of life. Although there are aspects that can be modified over time, the truth is that those first experiences generate patterns that remain in the long term.

The expert explains that the early years up to adolescence  are a critical stage in brain development. However, childhood experiences are even more decisive, since the brain is like a computer without software . Each experience looks like the introduction of that software and will determine how it works.

Childhood experiences can change the brain

Isabel Pérez-Otaño points out that the essential properties of the brain are plasticity  and the ability to process information. Plasticity is at its best during the first years of life until puberty. That’s why childhood experiences, even those that don’t seem so relevant, shape the brain.

In other words, during the first years of life the brain  is more sensitive to being modified by any experience. You are born with many synaptic connections, that is, connections between neurons. At the beginning of life many more are formed and with time they only become refined, as new experiences are acquired.

If the experiences are repetitive, the connections are reinforced and maintained. Those that do not repeat themselves tend to make the synaptic connections they generated disappear. Therefore, although the genetic base is very important, the environment is also decisive. Any negative experience damages the personality much more if it is lived in the first years of life.

Bad childhood experiences

The mistreatment, the abuse or the partial or total abandonment are very negative experiences for a baby or a child. In neuroscience terms, all of this constitutes continuous exposure to stress. This is not negative if it constitutes a specific experience, since it allows the individual to construct adequate responses to face this adversity and overcome it.

On the other hand, if negative childhood experiences are repeated, things are very different. A pattern is created that in general will make a person more sensitive to stress in adult life, as well as less empathetic and with fewer social skills.

Dr. Isabel Pérez-Otaño tested her theory with a group of mice. He found that stress and deprivation negatively modified the brains of young mice. There are other studies that reached the same conclusion, as we will see shortly.

Stress and young brains

Researchers from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Pierre and Marie Curie University (both in Paris, France) carried out a study  with young mice exposed to stressful situations. Specifically, the rodents were located in an environment in which there was a dominant aggressor. At the same time, experiences were created in which the youngest had social defeats.

It was observed that the specimens that were subjected to this situation continuously developed chronic anxiety and an increase in social aversion. Those who were attacked later avoided social contact with their peers and also developed depression.

In another similar study, from Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA), adolescent mice were exposed to continuous stress. This caused them to show involvement in a gene that encodes a neurotransmitter associated with mental function and psychiatric illness. In other words, they became more prone to brain-associated disorders.

Caring for the child’s brain

All of the above leads to a fundamental conclusion: childhood experiences are decisive in the life of every human being. Deficiencies and experiences of stress during the first years make a person more vulnerable to mental disorders and limit their psychological development.

Children and adolescents need adults who can embrace and accept them in a loving way. Let them give you a hand to guide them and see their mistakes as a normal and healthy part of their development. Abuse, indifference or distance leaves traces that may never be erased.