My father, a practicing pediatric neurologist, was also a scientist. As a child, I remember my father peering at hundreds of micrographs of neuronal connections. Billions of these small connections form between neurons in the developing brain. Over the years he counted many, many synapses in post-mortem brain samples. A US immigrant who grew up in wartime Germany, he quietly shouldered his own childhood experiences. And he gained lasting fame – among neuroscientists and others – by discovering something fundamental. Brain synaptic connections increase dramatically during early human development, as anyone might expect. But Peter – Dad – Dr. Huttenlocher – discovered that, by the millions, these connections are also selectively removed as we learn and develop. This process, now referred to as synaptic pruning, is the process of refinement that mediates our skills, our abilities and our memories [1].