Dr. Goh | What is resilience?

Resilience is the capacity of the individual or the brain or the body to recover from stress. And at the level of the nervous system, resilience means being, having the, the structures and the architecture in place to allow for the brain to recover from events or other experiences that might prove to be stressful in some way. And that process of recovery, and the learning that occurs in that process, is what allows the brain to continue to advance and to develop new and greater skills to promote lifelong health and learning.

When we think about the brain's organization and optimal organization to function at its best, we're really thinking about the quality of networks. So networks are groups of neurons that work in concert toward a particular function. The types of networks that help to foster flexible, dynamic, resilient functions are networks that are long range, so those networks that span many different brain regions and are interconnected with many other networks as well.

So in our environments, we are encountering multitude of stimuli all the time. One of the things we know that helps the brain to form flexible-- and in particular flexible-- long range connections is novelty and new stimulation and encountering different experiences in our environment.

Key Takeaways:

• Sharing novel experiences with your baby encourages their capacity for resilience