GAFG and Developmental Plasticity

The human brain, immune system, microbiome and stress-response system do not arrive in the world as finished mechanisms. They are remarkably plastic, particularly during the first years of life, and they keep adjusting to the environment in which the child develops. This may be one of the less appreciated foundations of human adaptability, and perhaps also of talent, character and individual differences.

Evolution cannot not know in advance whether a child grows up in a desert, northern coast, in a tropical forest, in the mountains or in a large modern city. Rather than programming every possible response into the genome, it produced an organism that can take information from its surroundings and adjust its development accordingly.

This is the central idea behind developmental plasticity and, more specifically, the Predictive Adaptive Response (PAR) hypothesis. Early environmental cues can influence the development of a phenotype that is better suited to the conditions the organism is likely to encounter later in life. When the predicted and actual environments differ substantially, however, the resulting mismatch can also have negative consequences.

The brain learns the world before the child can describe it

A newborn’s brain is not a blank slate. Its basic architecture is already present, but the early years involve enormous amounts of synaptic formation, strengthening and pruning. Connections that are repeatedly activated can become stronger, while others are gradually reduced. Experience therefore does not simply add information to an already completed brain; it helps shape the system that will process information later. A child repeatedly exposed to a particular language, set of sounds, faces, movements or physical environment becomes increasingly specialised in that particular world.

The same principle extends beyond the brain. The newborn’s immune system must learn an extraordinarily difficult distinction: what should be tolerated and what should be attacked. From birth the organism meets food, microorganisms, animals, other people and countless environmental molecules, and the microbiome plays a major part in this learning. The microorganisms colonising the infant’s body interact with the developing immune system and help shape its maturation. Ziad Al Nabhani and Gérard Eberl describe how a lack of early microbial exposure, or exposure to a poorly diverse or disturbed microbiota, can lead to what they call “pathological imprinting” and a greater susceptibility to inflammatory disease later in life. Writing about allergy, Harald Renz and Chrysanthi Skevaki add that “lifestyle changes owing to modernization have an important role.” Caesarean births, early antibiotics, a Western diet and changes in indoor and outdoor activity patterns all affect how diverse the microbiota becomes.

The relationship between early stress and developmental plasticity may also involve the microbiome. Sarah Hartman, Kristina Sayler and Jay Belsky have examined the possibility that prenatal stress influences postnatal plasticity partly through changes in the infant’s intestinal microbiota. They are careful about it, though. Mothers who are depressed during pregnancy are less likely to breastfeed, and tend to do so for a shorter time, so differences in breastfeeding could explain part of the effect. For now this is a promising line of research and not an established pathway.

The developing organism is, in a sense, asking: what kind of world is this? A child does not consciously make such a calculation. Yet the organism continuously receives information about whether the environment is predictable or unstable, safe or threatening, resource-rich or constrained, and repeated experiences can influence over time how its biological systems are calibrated. Development in a stable environment may therefore proceed differently from development under persistent unpredictability or threat. As Bateson and Gluckman point out in their book on plasticity and robustness, small changes in the early environment can have large effects, even when these are not visible straight away. The point is not that the environment can create any human characteristic it wishes, but that biological development responds to environmental information.

From environment to cognitive development

This raises a question about human abilities. Imagine a child growing up where water must be conserved, distances estimated accurately, tools repaired again and again and scarce resources carefully shared out. Everyday life keeps presenting problems of planning, spatial judgement, prioritisation and the assessment of consequences.

Another child might grow up surrounded by music, where rhythm, melody and intonation are heard every day. Another might grow up in a workshop, constantly observing materials, proportions, movement and the relationship between hand and eye. Such environments cannot manufacture talent from nothing. Genes provide predispositions and constraints. But repeated exposure and practice can amplify small initial differences.

A child who finds a particular activity slightly easier may return to it more often. Repetition improves performance, improved performance increases motivation, and motivation produces more experience. Over the years a small initial difference can become a very large difference in ability. What later appears to be an entirely innate talent may be the result of an interaction between predisposition, opportunity, experience and sustained practice.

Culture adds another layer

Parents transmit much more than genes. They transmit habits, skills, expectations, values and ways of solving problems. A pastoralist does not need to teach a child a formal theory of spatial cognition. Years spent moving through the same landscape, estimating distances, observing animals and reading weather patterns can pass on complex practical knowledge through everyday experience.

The same applies to craftspeople, musicians, sailors, farmers, traders and many other occupational or cultural communities. A particular way of interacting with the world can become part of the ordinary developmental environment of successive generations.

This does not mean that a culture genetically produces a particular type of person. It means that developmental plasticity and cultural transmission can operate together, with each generation entering an environment already shaped by those who came before.

And now the environment is technological

There is, however, a new element in the developmental environment of the contemporary child: technology. For most of human history the environments that shaped the developing mind were primarily natural, social and cultural. Today a growing part of that environment is designed by humans and mediated by algorithms, screens and artificial intelligence. This raises a question that goes beyond whether technology is “good” or “bad.” If the developing mind adapts to repeated experience, then the technological environment itself becomes part of the developmental environment.

In his 2013 foundational work, Quantum Buddhism…, prof. Anis H. Bajrektarević writes – while exploring the matter-consciousness bridge, the following: “Our crisis is not environmental, financial or politico-economic. Deep and structural, this is a crisis of thought, of courage, of our ideas, which runs us into a deep moral recession.”

Some of the concerns are physical. Birgitta Dresp-Langley, in her review of children’s health in the digital age, expects the growing time that ever younger children spend online and indoors to put their development and general health at risk. She names early childhood myopia, disturbed circadian rhythms, sleep loss, depression and, ultimately, addiction as the main risks, all “initiated by a lack of exposure to healthy outdoor light conditions.”

This points to a further question that deserves research. If the early environment tells the developing organism what kind of world to expect, then conditions during pregnancy may matter as well as those after birth. A mother who spends little time outdoors may receive less daylight and possibly less vitamin D, and it is fair to ask whether the fetus could be affected by this. Whatever the answer turns out to be, the environment built around the young child should be arranged with these questions in mind: not many screens around, and a use of technology in early childhood that is considered and ethical.

Two widely read books suggest that the effects reach attention and relationships too. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr draws on research showing that heavy media multitaskers are more easily distracted and less able to keep their concentration on one task, and he concludes that the Net makes us smarter “only if we define intelligence by the Net’s own standards.” In Alone Together, Sherry Turkle, who has watched three decades of children with computer toys, describes how children came to see robots as “alive enough” for particular purposes, such as being a friend or a companion. These are the interpretations of individual authors and not settled findings, but they show why the conversation is needed.

This was one of the premises behind GAFG’s Technology, Mind & Health programme in 2025: technological advancement is a question not only of what machines can do, but also of what technological environments do to human cognition, mental balance, social relations and human development. In her contribution to the programme’s eBook, Dr. Kat Zarychta argues that technologies should be evaluated for their impact on human cognition, behavioural health and social relationships and not for efficiency alone, and that we must “resist the temptation to adopt systems simply because they are powerful or fashionable.”

The GAFG programme deliberately approached the issue from both sides. Technology can generate disruption, but it can also strengthen human capacities when designed and governed responsibly. Its central proposition was that technological impact on humanity is not predetermined; it depends on the choices made in designing, governing and integrating technology into society.

If experience helps build the mind, then the design of experience becomes a form of developmental governance. A child repeatedly exposed to rapid digital stimulation, algorithmic recommendation, artificial social interaction or constant connectivity is not simply learning how to use a device. That child is also developing habits of attention, expectation, interaction and reward within a particular technological environment. The question is not whether we should return to a pre-technological world. We cannot. The more consequential question is what kind of technological environment we choose to build around the developing human.

Three processes should be kept separate

At this point it is important to distinguish three different mechanisms.

First, there is developmental plasticity: the adjustment of an individual during its lifetime.

Second, there is cultural transmission: knowledge, practices and behavioural patterns passed from one generation to another.

Third, there is natural selection: genetic differences becoming more or less common over many generations because they affect survival or reproductive success.

These processes can interact, but they should not be confused. It would be premature to conclude that a population living for centuries in a particular environment must therefore have evolved genetically superior abilities in areas associated with that environment. Demonstrating such selection in complex human cognitive traits is extremely difficult, because biology, development and culture are deeply intertwined.

Today a fourth consideration deserves attention: technological mediation. Technology increasingly modifies the environment through which culture, information and social experience reach the developing individual. The wider conceptual framework also touches upon epigenetics, the growing scientific interest in how environmental and behavioural factors interact with biological processes.

The real evolutionary advantage may be adaptability itself

Perhaps the most important feature of the newborn is not how perfectly prepared it is for a particular world, but how incompletely specified it is.

The brain can strengthen some connections and eliminate others. The immune system can learn what to tolerate and what to attack. The microbiome develops in interaction with the surrounding world. Stress-response systems adjust to recurring patterns of experience. Motor skills adapt to the physical environment, while attention gradually learns what matters in that particular setting.

The price of flexibility is a long period of dependence and development, but its reward is extraordinary: the same human species can live in deserts, mountains, forests, islands, cities and polar environments, and develop radically different cultures, skills and ways of thinking. The child does not arrive with a final answer to the question of what kind of person it will become. Nature provides something more powerful: the capacity to observe the world into which it has arrived, learn its regularities, and build much of itself in response.

The challenge of the technological age is to remember that this process works both ways. We shape our technologies, but our technologies increasingly shape the environments in which minds develop. That places a particular responsibility on the generations that design them. If the developing human is biologically and cognitively responsive to its surroundings, then technological design is not simply a matter of convenience, efficiency or commercial success. It is also, indirectly, a matter of human development. Perhaps the deepest question is no longer what kind of world we will leave to the next generation, but what kind of minds we are creating through the world we are building today.

Continuing the conversation on 10 December 2026

This is why GAFG places Technology–Mind–(Mental) Health among its strategic areas of work. If technology is becoming part of the environment in which minds develop, its effects on cognition, mental balance, human relations and well-being cannot be treated as a side effect of technological progress.

The inaugural Technology, Mind & Health summit in December 2025 was a success, and GAFG has decided to hold both the summit and its youth essay competition every year. The competition gives a voice to the youngest generation, inviting underage participants and young adolescents to reflect on their own concerns about technology, cognition, mental health, human interaction and social connectedness.

The follow-up flagship event takes place on 10 December 2026 and will continue the interdisciplinary dialogue on how technology can remain an instrument of human development rather than become a substitute for human agency.

Deren Elif Akin of the Rome-based Sapienza University. Since October 2026, she is the Rome-based GAFG Information Officer.

Selected bibliography
Al Nabhani, Z. and Eberl, G. (2020). “Imprinting of the immune system by the microbiota early in life.” Mucosal Immunology, 13, 183–189.

Bateson, P. and Gluckman, P. (2011). Plasticity, Robustness, Development and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bateson, P., Gluckman, P. and Hanson, M. (2014). “The biology of developmental plasticity and the Predictive Adaptive Response hypothesis.” The Journal of Physiology, 592(11), 2357–2368.

Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W. W. Norton.

Dresp-Langley, B. (2020). “Children’s health in the digital age.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(9), 3240.

Global Academy for Future Governance (2025). Technology, Mind & Health: Global Reflections on Mental Balance, Human Development, and Governance in the Digital Era. Geneva/Vienna: GAFG. Edited by B. Dresp-Langley and A. H. Bajrektarevic.

Bajrektarević, A. H. (2013). Geopolitics of quantum Buddhism: Our pre-hydrocarbon Tao future (No breakthrough at the Rio+20 Summit). E-Learning and Digital Media, 10(3), 216–225.

Hartman, S., Sayler, K. and Belsky, J. (2019). “Prenatal stress enhances postnatal plasticity: The role of microbiota.” Developmental Psychobiology, 61(5), 729–738.

Renz, H. and Skevaki, C. (2021). “Early life microbial exposures and allergy risks: opportunities for prevention.” Nature Reviews Immunology, 21, 177–191.

Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.

Zarychta, K. “The Sovereignty of the Mind in the Age of Algorithms.” In: Global Academy for Future Governance (2025), Technology, Mind & Health.