The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog by Bruce Perry Read Free Book Online

aspect of what your senses are taking in, you’d be overwhelmed and would probably crash. As you learn anything, in fact, your brain is constantly checking current experience against stored templates—essentially memory—of previous, similar situations and sensations, asking “Is this new?” and “Is this something I need to attend to?”
    So as you move down the road, your brain’s motor vestibular system is telling you that you are in a certain position. But your brain is probably not making new memories about that. Your brain has stored in it previous sitting experiences in cars, and the pattern of neural activity associated with that doesn’t need to change. There’s nothing new. You’ve been there, done that, it’s familiar. This is also why you can drive over large stretches of familiar highways without remembering almost anything at all that you did during the drive.
    This is important because all of that previously stored experience has laid down the neural networks, the memory “template,” that you now use to make sense out of any new incoming information. These templates are formed throughout the brain at many different levels, and because information comes in first to the lower, more primitive areas, many are not even accessible to conscious awareness. For example, young Tina almost certainly wasn’t aware of the template that guided her interactions with men, and shaped her behavior with me when we first met. Further, all of us have probably had the experience of physically jumping up before we even figured out what it was that startled us in the first place. This happens because our brain’s stress-response systems
carry information about potential threats and are primed to respond to them as quickly as possible, which often means before the cortex can consider what action to take. If, like Tina, we have had highly stressful experiences, reminders of those situations can be similarly powerful and provoke reactions that are similarly driven by unconscious processes.
    What this also means is that early experiences will necessarily have a far greater impact than later ones. The brain tries to make sense of the world by looking for patterns. When it links coherent, consistently connected patterns together again, it tags them as “normal” or “expected” and stops paying conscious attention. So, for example, the very first time you were placed in a sitting position as an infant, you did pay attention to the novel sensations emanating from your buttocks. Your brain learned to sense the pressure associated with sitting normally, you began to sense how to balance your weight to sit upright via your motor vestibular system and, eventually, you learned to sit. Now, when you sit, unless it’s uncomfortable or the seat is unusually textured or shaped or you have some kind of balance disorder, you pay little attention to staying upright or the pressure the seat puts on your rear. When you are driving, it’s something you rarely attend to at all.
    What you do scan the road for is novelty, things that are out of place, such as a truck barreling down the wrong side of the freeway. This is why we offload perceptions of things we consider normal: so that we can rapidly react to things that are aberrant and require immediate attention. Neural systems have evolved to be especially sensitive to novelty, since new experiences usually signal either danger or opportunity.
    One of the most important characteristics of both memory, neural tissue and of development, then, is that they all change with patterned, repetitive activity. So, the systems in your brain that get repeatedly activated will change and the systems in your brain that don’t get activated won’t change. This “use-dependent” development is one of the most important properties of neural tissue. It seems like a simple concept, but it has enormous and wide-ranging