Science Reveals Material Biology Behind Brain Blossoming

If the human brain reaches full size at the age of six, why don't children display the same mental powers as adults? They obviously can't be as knowledgeable as adults, but why can't they think and reason as well? We know that the brain must develop over time, but it's been unclear exactly how and how this development would improve mental skills.

Bradley Schlaggar and his colleague Steven Petersen at Washington University, St Louis, have found that it has to do with two different networks of short-range vs. long-range connections between brain cells. Children have lots of fast short-range connections bound into a single network and this appears to make it harder for them to make long-range plans with short-term sacrifices. Adults, in contrast, have lots of long-range connections in two different networks which make such trade-offs easier.

Dr Petersen and his colleagues identified 39 regions of the brain that were active when university students applied themselves to ten different tasks, each with varying levels of surprise built in. Whether the students were listening to repetitive sounds and trying to predict when the next tone would come, or pushing the correct button if pairs of words were matched or mismatched in their meanings, some consistent synchronisation emerged. Seven of the 39 regions looked busy when the brain was pursuing a successful strategy and maintaining a consistent effort. Eleven other parts chipped in when that strategy slipped up and some innovation was needed for the student to complete the task. Dr Petersen postulated that the first seven regions form one network, which he calls the “cingulo-opercular network”, and the second 11 form another, the “frontoparietal network”.

Dr Schlaggar next wondered how the connections within these two networks might develop. So he turned to a second group, made up of children and teenagers, and asked them to think about whatever they liked while he scanned the blood flow inside the same 39 regions of their brains and calculated which parts were acting in unison.

What he found came as a shock. In the 49 children, aged seven to nine, the two networks were always bound into a single web; in the 43 adolescents, some of those connections had been undone; and in his 47 adult volunteers, aged over 21, the brain regions fired as two distinct networks. Moreover, the web of activity inside the children's heads depicted the cingulo-opercular (sustaining) network as being clamped inside the frontoparietal (rapidly adapting) one, suggesting why it is that youngsters grab one biscuit now rather than wait for two later. Both studies were published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: The Economist

Research results like these may be very interesting, but what do they have to do with atheism, theism, and religion? If religious theists are right and our mental faculties are all ultimately based upon a supernatural and immaterial soul, then there's no reason why we should arrive at results like these. Perhaps a soul has to develop in order for children's mental faculties to develop, but there's no reason for the brain itself to change in a predictable manner alongside — and if the brain does change, there's no reason for it to change in predictable, consistent ways for different people.

On the other hand, if our mental faculties are all ultimately based on our natural, material brain, then results like these are only to be expected — not in detail, perhaps, but we should expect to learn something along these lines. We should expect to see predictable, consistent changes in the physical brain structure which track with differences in mental functioning. Indeed, discovering facts like make it more and more difficult for believers in the supernatural to defend their position. The more scientists are able to show how the brain is responsible for the mind the less there is for any alleged soul to do.

K-Daddy asks an obvious question: if who we are is rooted in a soul, why we do even have brains?

If God gave us a soul that can think, feel, and store memories exactly as we did when we were alive, why did he give us brains that do precisely the same thing? It does not make sense to create a huge, wasteful, vulnerable organ to manufacture consciousness when we have an invulnerable, eternal soul within us to do it already. So much for intelligent design. ...

The fact that we need such a huge, wasteful organ to manufacture consciousness lends proof to the argument that the brain is solely responsible for consciousness.

If God created man, he made us look the way we would look if he did not exist. If the Christian God exists, heaven exists, and therefore my soul exists. If my soul exists, I would not need a brain because my brain would only replicate functions taken care of by my soul (seems a little redundant doesn’t it?) Since I have a brain, I must not have a soul within me to manufacture consciousness, which means there is no heaven, which means there is no Christian God.

When people didn't understand how human biology worked generally and the function of the brain in particular, reaching to "explanations" like souls would have made sense. Today, though, thinking that souls are responsible for thought or memory is rather like thinking demons cause sickness. As with disease, we don't understand yet every detail of how the brain produces thought, consciousness, and memory, but it's abundantly clear that the brain is behind it all and that consciousness is fundamentally a material, natural feature of the universe.