One afternoon a few weeks ago, my five-year-old daughter (who is not even yet in Grade 1) came home and informed me that she needed to prepare a two-minute dance performance to a song of her choosing. And that she would have to perform this dance in front of her entire class. In eight days.
The stakes were high.
After some intense deliberation, we landed on “Don’t Stop Movin’” by S Club 7. (It was either that or be the fourth kid in the class to dance to “Golden.”)
With her critical (and at times, brutal) input, I came up with an eight-step routine for her to dance during the chorus. Once satisfied with my rendition of The Routine, she jumped off her discerning perch on the couch to join me and give the steps a go. The first attempt was a disaster. Tears ensued. (Like most kids, she hates not being able to do something perfectly on the first try. On second thought… this isn’t just specific to children.)
We tried again later that afternoon. Begrudgingly. Slowly. One step at a time. It still ended with her throwing her arms up and storming off in a frustrated huff, but we made it through without any tears. Hurrah!
But there were only six days left until the performance. Things were looking pretty dire.
With some super-over-the-top encouragement and a little extra motivation in the form of her designing her own dance outfit, I convinced her to give The Routine a go the next day. And the next.
By day four, she was reminding me how to do the Routine.
There I was, throwing my arms about with an internal monologue that was something like, “‘Don’t stop movin’’: Ok, my STOP hands are out. What comes next? Oh right, hands on hips and wiggle. Then the “DJ move.”” And next to me you had my five-year-old daughter just cruising through the steps like she’s Jessica Alba in Honey. She wasn’t thinking. She was just feeling the music.
How did she learn The Routine so much faster than me (even when I had a head start)?
It all comes back to dopamine.
Dopamine is the plasticity molecule. It has a hand in every single thing that gets stored in our subconscious, from benign motor skills like brushing our teeth, to complex knowledge like language or Newtonian physics.
Sometimes dopamine plays a direct role when it strikes an association deep into our mind with one quick spike. Other times it plays a more indirect (but no less vital) role by quietly keeping our brain in a state always capable of learning. The steady heartbeat of our baseline dopamine ensures this — all that is needed is the right number of repetitions. And the more we focus on learning something new, the more the brain rewards our effort by elevating our baseline, making it easier to penetrate our subconscious with new knowledge or skills.
How fast do we learn?
On any given day, we experience hundreds (if not thousands) of little dopamine spikes, our children included1.
Only a handful of those spikes are strong enough to penetrate our subconscious with new associations2 — the dessert that was far better than expected, the ‘I love you’ that came out of nowhere.
Kids, on the other hand, bound through their day under the onslaught of tens to hundreds of spikes, each one stamping a new association into place. “Clouds are made of water?!” “Oh boy, that clap of thunder was loud!”
Children’s superhuman plasticity abilities also carry across to repetitive learning, not just one-shot learning spikes. In a passive state, it can take hundreds of mundane repetitions for a habit to move into our subconscious. For children, it can be an order of magnitude less3.
When we focus our attention on a new skill or knowledge and raise our dopamine baseline, we might be lucky to add some bits of it to our subconscious after a handful (or two or three handfuls!) of repetitions. By comparison, a truly focused child could break through with just a couple.
We’re both human beings with brains clearly more than capable of plasticity. So why is it that kids experience more spikes, and need less repetition? What makes them superhuman little learning machines?
People love to say kids have a plasticity switch that’s permanently ON — which would imply adults are OFF. But plasticity isn’t a switch; it’s a dial, and ours is still very much on. Theirs is just turned all the way up.
We must practice. They just absorb.
Why kids are super-learners
Children have a number of different factors working for them that all add up to plasticity as a superpower.
One-shot learning superchargers
Novelty — The world is full of surprise, and dopamine spikes thrive on new and exciting things. For adults, a reward must be better than expected. For kids, the entire world is unexpected.
Potency — When a child does experience a dopamine spike, it is much more likely to penetrate the subconscious. It takes quite a bit more “oomph” to do so in an adult brain.
Repetition learning superchargers
Higher dopamine baseline — We adults can only raise ours through deliberate practice and focused attention. Children operate at a higher baseline by default. (Imagine how supercharged their learning becomes when they also focus their attention!)
Stickiness — We usually need to practice something at least once every day or two to make it start to “stick.” Kids, on the other hand, can go days between exposures and still have the skill stick with them.
They start with extra
The biggest plasticity supercharger of all? The sheer number of synaptic connections4. Children’s brains don’t start with nothing and grow connections. They start with extra and trim them, one by one. This forest of connections makes both kinds of learning easier: a single dopamine spike can stamp a wide, powerful pattern into place, while many repetitions make existing circuits faster and more efficient.
Paradoxically, children strengthen what already exists while we poor adults have to build from scratch5.
So when it suddenly felt as if my daughter had superhumanly morphed into Jessica Alba right in front of me, I wasn’t too far off the mark.
Each time she nailed a step in The Routine, she may well have experienced a powerful dopamine spike of achievement that helped carve those moves directly into her subconscious. (I like to think my gushing enthusiasm helped boost a few of those spikes.) And spike or no spike, each time she repeated a step, it rapidly pushed those moves closer and closer to the plasticity threshold, until they joined the others in her subconscious. With her naturally elevated dopamine baseline and fantastically sticky and connected brain, Mum didn’t stand a chance.
She had me in less than eight moves.
By the way, my daughter smashed her performance. Here she is nailing her “STOP hands.”
This whole idea actually started with a personal epiphany — the moment I realised dopamine isn’t about pleasure at all, but about learning, wiring and growth. It changed how I understand my own brain, and my children’s (… and my husband’s!).
If you’d like the deeper (but still totally digestible) dive into that realisation, you can read it here:
Dopamine is not what you think
As a mother of two, there isn’t a lot of time for vices. But I do have one. On the top shelf in our pantry, I keep a jar of maple-roasted walnuts and pecans. Whenever I feel a little peckish, I steal a quiet moment and slip into the pantry for a sweet nut or two.
Post-mortem and developmental imaging studies show that children (and adolescents) start life with higher densities of dopamine receptors (especially D1 and D2) than adults (Seeman et al. 1987), and that the system progressively down-regulates with age. We also know dopamine is a key modulator of synaptic plasticity — even small bursts can trigger long-term potentiation under the right conditions (Speranza et al. 2021). Based on these facts (plus what we know about how often children encounter novelty and surprise) it’s entirely plausible that children trigger dozens more plasticity-relevant dopamine events per day than adults. The rough numbers provided in this essay are therefore estimates based on what neuroscience can infer about dopamine dynamics in real-world settings, but their scale and direction do reflect the biology.
Seeman, P., Bzowej, N. H., Guan, H. C., Bergeron, C., Becker, L. E., Reynolds, G. P., Bird, E. D., & Riederer, P. (1987). Human brain dopamine receptors in children and aging adults. Synapse, 1(5), 399–404.
Speranza, L., Chambery, A., Di Domenico, M., Crispino, M., & Melone, M. A. B. (2021). Dopamine: The Neuromodulator of Long-Term Synaptic Plasticity. Cells, 10(4), 735.
People who encounter more novelty, unpredictability, or cognitively demanding situations tend to produce more dopamine spikes, which is why lived experience, personality, and environment all modulate these numbers.
We can’t measure repetition thresholds directly in real-world learning, but developmental neuroscience tells us two things clearly:
(1) children require far less stimulation to induce plasticity (Hensch 2004), and
(2) dopamine dramatically lowers the repetition threshold in both children and adults (Reynolds et al. 2001, Yagishita et al. 2014).
Based on these principles (and my own anecdotal experience as a mother), it is entirely plausible that the number of repetitions required for children is an order of magnitude lower.
Hensch, T. K. (2004). Critical Period Regulation. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27(1), 549–579.
Reynolds, J. N. J., Hyland, B. I., & Wickens, J. R. (2001). A cellular mechanism of reward-related learning. Nature, 413, 67–70.
Yagishita, S., Hayashi-Takagi, A., Ellis-Davies, G. C. R., Urakubo, H., Ishii, S., & Kasai, H. (2014). A critical time window for dopamine actions on the structural plasticity of dendritic spines. Science, 345(6204), 1616–1620.
Children have massively elevated synaptic formation and pruning rates, which accelerates stabilisation of existing neuronal circuits with few repetitions.
Huttenlocher, P. R., & Dabholkar, A. S. (1997). Regional differences in synaptogenesis in human cerebral cortex. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 387(2), 167–178.
To learn something new, adults often must grow new synapses, dendritic spines, axonal boutons, and structurally reshape microcircuits (Kolb and Gibb ,2011). This requires higher dopamine thresholds (via focused attention) and more repetitions, repeated at smaller intervals. This is the equivalent to adults “building from scratch” as opposed to children “shaping what is already there.”
Kolb, B., & Gibb, R. (2011). Brain plasticity and behaviour in the developing brain. Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 20(4), 265–276.