Neurodevelopment and Experience

Professor Pat Levitt likens the brain to a rosebush, where the developing nervous system needs pruning and maintenance to function optimally.

The rosebush analogy, when referring to the brain, reflects the developmental process. We think about a rosebush as growing over a period of time and we can actually enhance its beauty and it’s growth by pruning and trimming parts of the bush to promote the growth of other parts of the bush, and we get even better flowers. The developing nervous system goes through a similar process, where we overproduce parts such as nerve connections and then through a normal process we actually prune some of those back. That actually is a good thing because we want to promote the stability of the nerve connections that are going to function at their absolute best.