ABSTRACT
For years it was believed—and unfortunately the idea still lives on in popular culture—that the foetus and the baby, and the child in his first years of life, developed according to the laws of nature, the nature of homo sapiens, governed by genetics. After the first two years of life, the progressive importance of upbringing was considered, deemed as having the greatest impact between the ages of seven and fifteen. The development of all those skills called the "mind" was conceptualised this way, as well as what was called, to differentiate it, "psyche", by distinguishing affectivity from mere cognition, and from "character". The mind depends on the brain, as an expression/performance of its functioning, but experience, as it is processed by the quality of the work of the individual brain, modifies it. The mind is the expression of the functioning of the brain which is progressively constructed through the brain's processing of the internal and external sensory afferences.
