The self’s ingestion of culture can be tracked, in a startling form, in the brain of the growing baby. Despite the fact we’re born with almost as many neurons as we’ll ever need, the weight of a child’s brain increases by more than 30 per cent during its first fifteen months. If this rapid gain isn’t due to the generation of brain cells, then what is it? Most of it is the weight of new connections, or synapses, that are forming between those cells.
