Enrichment is especially important for children because by the age of ten, their brains begin trimming away the connections they don't use. And though adults can continue making connections throughout life, skills that require basic platforms, from playing the piano to learning a foreign language, become much more difficult after childhood. Now, if you think maybe you can create a little genius through super-enrichment, forget it. Children need time to let their brains sort out new input. There's a limit to how much stimulation they can take, and the best enrichment of all, say brain experts, is love.
Love makes the limbic system blossom in ways that can last a lifetime.
One recent study showed that men who said they felt loved as children tended to have fewer health problems by age sixty than men who said their parents were cold or overbearing. And then there are the extreme cases, like the children raised in the Waco, Texas compound run by David Koresh. They survived the fire, but their brains appear to be missing some of the connections for making decisions. He dominated the behavior of those children. About twenty percent of kids have a learning disability.