PSYC21H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Periventricular Leukomalacia, Peripheral Nervous System, Genetic Programming
Document Summary
Early brain development and plasticity changes in the brain are inexorably linked to changes in the environment. Not only do changes in the environment, including experience, alter the brain, but changes in the brain alter behaviour, which in turn can change the child"s interaction with the environment. Plasticity: the ability and extent to which the brain can be altered. Brain development is not predetermined; it is shaped through both genetics and the environment during the prenatal months as well as after birth and across the lifespan. Emerging from a thin layer of cells that occupy the outermost layer of the embryo comes what will be the highly complex brain, an organ that will continue to develop and change throughout the lifespan. Brain development is most dramatic prenatally, when enormous change occurs on the order of days, not simply in biology, but in the behaviors that can then be expressed.
