Research has
provided strong evidence that the changes necessary to make the brain an
effective learning organism take place at early ages and if not completed by
then it may be too late for those changes to ever take place. These changes
seem to be stimulated by exposing young children to situations that catch the
interest of the child and arouse his or her curiosity. They include:
These learning
activities should go on for years and could include such mentally stimulating
activities as:
One of the more
interesting ways the research is conducted is by studying children who were
raised by animals or otherwise isolated from a mentally stimulating environment.
Dozens of such accounts have been recorded. Two such girls were discovered in
India running with a pack of wolves in the year 1920. The older girl was 8 and
the younger was about 2 but they were not sisters. A missionary brought them to
his orphanage and began teaching them the fine points of how to be human. The
younger girl died after only a year in the orphanage but she seemed to be
learning the language at about the same rate as any normal child her age. The
older girl, named Kamala, lived at the orphanage for 9 years. Over that time
the missionary was somewhat successful in changing Kamala’s outward behavior.
She was walking upright, eating normal food, housetrained and sleeping with the
other children but her speech still fell a long way short of normally reared
children. Later work by researchers who studied Reverend Singh’s diary
concluded that Kamala had the mental capability of a 3 year old and they
wondered if the deprived environment of her early years had left her
permanently stunted. The question was never answered because in 1929 Kamala
caught typhoid and died. Studies by other researchers has lent even more
credibility to the theory that certain changes in the brain of a newborn that
are necessary for the brain to continue supporting learning are best
accomplished by mental stimulation at a very early age.