The Brain Never Works Alone

Understanding the principle

The brain develops, regulates, learns and produces behaviour as part of an integrated system that includes the body, development, relationships, experience and environment. A useful Neurobiological Architects formulation keeps all six of these domains in view, while remembering that they are only separated on paper to make them easier to think about. In the child, they are always interacting.

This is why one explanation is rarely enough. A child who becomes distressed before school may be sleeping poorly, facing a crowded and noisy entrance, struggling with rapid verbal instructions, missing a familiar adult and remembering a difficult first lesson, all at once. Each factor on its own might be manageable. Together they can exceed what the child is able to cope with, which is why behaviour can look inconsistent and why the same child can be quite different in different places.

In practice, we examine interactions rather than searching for a single cause. When a child copes at home but not at school, or with one adult but not another, we ask what is different about those conditions instead of deciding which account is correct. We also avoid the opposite error of making everything so complicated that nothing can be done. The aim is a clearer picture of the whole child, not an endless list of possibilities.