During the first fifteen years of life, the carving of these synaptic connections is where the drama unfolds.
From the day she was born, the child’s mind begins to reach out, aggressively, exuberantly. Beginning at the center of the brain, every neuron sends out thousands and thousands of signals. They are trying to talk to one another, to communicate, to make a connection. Imagine every one alive today simultaneously trying to get in touch with 150,000 other people and you will get some idea of the wonderful scale, complexity, and vitality of the young mind.
By the time the child reaches her third birthday the number of successful connections made is colossal—up to fifteen thousand synaptic connections for each of its one hundred billion neurons.
But this is too many. She is overloaded with the volume of information whirling around inside her head. She needs to make sense of it all. Her sense. So during the next ten years or so, her brain refines and focuses its network of connections. The stronger synaptic connections become stronger still. The weaker ones wither away. Dr. Harry Chugani, professor of neurology at Wayne State University Medical School, likens this pruning process to a highway system:
“Roads with the most traffic get widened. The ones that are rarely used fall into disrepair.”
Scientists are still arguing about what causes some mental highways to be used more regularly than others. Some contend that the child’s genetic inheritance predisposes her toward certain mental pathways. Others claim that the way she is raised has a significant effect on which pathways will survive the Darwinian pruning and which will die.
These views are not mutually exclusive. But whatever their nature- nurture bias, few disagree on the outcome of this mental pruning. By the time the child reaches her early teens, she has half as many synaptic connections as she did when she was three. Her brain has carved out a unique network of connections. She has some beautiful, frictionless, traffic-free, four-lane highways, where the connections are smooth and strong. And she has some barren wastelands, where no signal at all makes it across.
If she ends up with a four-lane highway for empathy, she will feel every emotion of those around her as though it were her own. By contrast, if she has a wasteland for empathy, she will be emotionally blind, forever saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person— not out of malice, but simply out of an inability to pick up the frequency of the emotional signals being sent. Likewise if she has a four-lane highway for confrontation, she will be that lucky person whose brain just hands her one perfect word after another during the heat of a debate. If she has a wasteland for confrontation, she will find that her brain always shuts her mouth down at the most critical moments.
These mental pathways are her filter. They produce the recurring pattern of behaviors that makes her unique. They tell her which stimuli to respond to and which to ignore. They define where she will excel and where she will struggle. They create all of her enthusiasms and all of her indifferences.
The carving of these pathways is the carving of her character. Neuroscience is telling us that beyond her mid-teens there is a limit to how much of her character she can recarve.
This does not mean that she cannot change. As we will describe later, she can learn new skills and new knowledge. She can alter her values. She can develop a greater sense of self-awareness and a greater capacity for self-regulation. And if she does indeed have a wasteland for confrontation, then with enough training, coaching, and encouragement, she can probably be helped to build a thin path so that she is at least able to cope with confrontation. But it does mean that in terms of these mental pathways, no amount of training, coaching, or encouragement will enable her to turn her barren wastelands into frictionless four-lane highways.
Neuroscience confirms what great managers know. Her filter, and the recurring patterns of behavior that it creates, is enduring. In the most important ways she is permanently, wonderfully, unique.
So are you. And, of course, so are the people you hire.
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