Anyone who has ever walked past a school yard filled with elementary school children will notice the loud piercing shrill coming from the yard. This shrill can be witnessed anywhere on the planet from the United States to the Netherlands to Egypt to India to Hong Kong, and so on. Careful examination of the sounds exhibited by children find that the loudness of two dozen children at play (as experienced by a teacher) can exceed 100 dB covering a range of frequencies from 500 to 4000 Hz (Kemp et al. 2013), which overlaps with the sound frequencies of intelligent speech (DPA Microphones 2021). Chomsky (1965) would call this their Universal Grammar being programmed before adulthood. And we know that language is a major part of a child’s development for it determines what lifestyle awaits a child, for example, whether he/she grows up in a large metropolitan area or in the jungles of the Amazon (Everett 2005).
During childhood development, neurons are still being added to the brain at the level of the hippocampal formation, but this process slows down by the age of twelve, i.e., a pre-puberty (Sanai et al. 2011; Sorrells et al. 2018). The same seems to be true of other mammals (Charvet and Finlay 2018; La Rosa and Bonfanti 2018), even though much has been made about this process being extended into adulthood (e.g., Gould et al. 1999; Shors, Gould et al. 2001, 2002) but upon careful examination of these studies the transition from pre-adults to adulthood was not well controlled (Charvet and Finlay 2018; La Rosa and Bonfanti 2018). Thus, it will be presumed that mammals are different from some bird species in that the telencephalon (which includes the ‘neocortex’ and the hippocampus) does not undergo seasonal neurogenetic enhancement as happens in songbirds (Goldman and Nottebohm 1983). This means that once sexual maturity occurs for mammals, learning is mediated mainly by changes at the synaptic level (Hebb 1949; Kandel 2006).
As for the children in the school yard: while their high-pitched vocalizations continue, the brain is being programmed to associate their language with all the faces and objects encountered during play. As suggested by Tononi and colleagues (2008ab), the neocortex is being integrated at the synaptic level per child so that a unique pattern of innervation occurs within the association cortices (Blumenfeld-Katzir et al. 2011; Hosoda et al. 2013; Kalil et al. 2014; Kitamura et al. 2017). And this pattern is merged with the motor system via the cerebellum, which contains the efference-copy representation (Bell et al. 1997; De Zeeuw 2021; Gallistel et al. 2022; Giovannucci et al. 2017; Loyola et al. 2019; Shadmehr 2020; Tehovnik et al. 2021; Wang et al. 2023) that converts the declarative/conscious information of the neocortex to executable code to drive the muscles as a child screams, speaks, runs, and climbs with his or her mates. This same pattern of activity is prevalent amongst our warm-blooded relatives—all mammals and birds—as they are being initiated for adulthood (Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2024).
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