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Phase 1: Synaptic Blooming (Formatting the Brain)
During pregnancy and the first year of life, the brain builds connections at an astronomical rate. A newborn is born with roughly 85 to 100 billion neurons. However, they have relatively few connections (synapses) between them. In the first year or two, the brain goes into overdrive, creating thousands of new connections per neuron.
By age 2 or 3, a toddler’s brain has roughly twice as many synapses as a fully grown adult brain. It is not a blank slate; it is intentionally overloaded with potential pathways.
Phase 2: Synaptic Pruning (“Use It or Lose It”)
Around age 2, the brain transitions from aggressively expanding to ruthlessly refining its network. This is an activity-dependent process. When a child interacts with their environment, specific pathways fire repeatedly. For example, hearing a native language over and over strengthens the auditory pathways for those exact sounds.
Pathways that are rarely or never used grow weak, get flagged by the immune system and are cleared away by specialized cells called microglia. This is why it is essential to attend to the needs of young child. Their brains are being altered based on a “use it or lose it” causality from Mother Nature. The goal is efficiency. A hyper-connected toddler brain is chaotic. Pruning eliminates the “traffic jams,” turning random dirt roads into lightning-fast neural highways. By adulthood, the brain will have eliminated roughly 40% to 50% of the connections it had at its peak.
Research in psychology and neuroscience confirm the effects of how pruning influences future behavior. A sad, but typical example is how abuse and/or neglect during early childhood literally shapes the way a brain-mind complex can perceive love. The neural pathways for love must be built early on, or else a child grows up with a mindset that is not programmed to receive love as it is intended.
How our needs are met affects the brain-mind complex, especially during the formative years of childhood.
While pruning begins heavily around age 2, it does not finish after a year or two. It happens in waves across different brain regions and lasts into your late 20’s.
Why This Matters: The Window of Adaptability
This “over-build and cut-back” strategy gives human babies incredible flexibility. It allows an infant’s brain to perfectly adapt to any language, culture, or climate they are born into. However, it also means that early environmental enrichment, stable relationships and healthy stimulation are vital for locking in crucial lifelong cognitive structures.
Brain cells that wire together, fire together.
The mind can redesign the brain due to neuroplasticity.
Every experience, including a psychological trauma at a tender age, affects the neural structures, architectures, scaffolding and activity patterns that influence future behaviors. For example, the neural activity of a young brain who gets their needs met will develop a neural pathway to feelings of safety, security and trust in their environment. Patterns in the brain activity become patterns in our life activity. Their future is “set up” to be fulfilling when they know what fulfillment feels like. Imagine what happens in the young brain who only gets their needs met after suffering. They will develop a neural pathway to feelings of insecurity, fear and mistrust of their environment. One brain expects their needs to be met and they develop patience, calm and self-soothing mental activity. The other brain doesn’t know what to expect because life has been unpredictable. They develop impatience, irritation and self-aggravating mental activity. They don’t know how to soothe themselves in a healthy way and lack the skill for delayed gratification.
Neural pathways in the brain have a direct effect on how we navigate the pathways of life. Patterns in the brain reveal themselves as habits and routines in our daily lives. What we expect from life affects how we perceive and what we receive from life.
Remember the early days of MSDOS and how you had to format a disk with “drives” before you could put anything onto the disk? This is a very simplistic analogy, but formatting a disk for a computer is like formatting the brain with neural assemblies prepared to receive and store information. When I was learning how to use MSDOS and the early computers, I had to learn how to format disks with drives in order to store my data. Without a drive installed (structured like the scaffolding of architecture), there was literally no way for me to store info on that disk.
The brain sort of works that way.
Freud might appreciate the association of “drive” with the formatting and structuring of the brain.
While Freud began his career as a neurologist and tried to map mental processes to neural structures in his unpublished 1895 manuscript, Project for a Scientific Psychology, he ultimately abandoned this biological approach. He realized that the technology of his era was insufficient to link specific neural tissues to complex psychological phenomena. Sigmund Freud did not say that internal drives structure the physical brain. Instead, Freud argued that internal drives structure the human psyche or mind.
When Freud introduced his famous Structural Model (consisting of the Id, Ego and Superego) in 1923, he explicitly stated these were functional, dynamic systems of the mind, not physical regions or partitions of the brain. The Id the realm of unconscious, biological internal drives (like the pleasure principle, sexual urges and aggression). The Ego and Superego are structural systems that develop to manage, repress, or satisfy those drives in accordance with reality and societal morals.
However, there is a modern intersection: neuropsychoanalysis.
Though Freud did not claim that drives physically wire the brain, modern neuroscientists like Mark Solms and disciplines like neuropsychoanalysis have picked up where Freud left off. Modern neuroscience actually supports a version of this concept through neuroplasticity. Our “drive circuits” are subcortical brain structures (like the hypothalamus and the mesocorticolimbic dopamine seeking system) that generate basic emotional and survival drives. The wiring of the cortex is flexible. The firing of these deep, internal drive networks actively shapes and structures the neural connections in the higher cortex during childhood development as the brain learns how to satisfy its biological needs.
Ultimately, while Freud believed drives structured our personalities and mental frameworks, it is modern neuroscience—not Freud himself—that confirms internal drives physically shape the structural wiring of the brain.