Baby Brain

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

10 facts about the baby's brain

Infant - from birth to one year old. Most babies are hairless, plump and babbling. What's going on in their brains? Some facts about how their brains work, based on research by scientists.

1. Human children are born too early.

If it were not for the size of the female pelvis, babies would continue to develop in the womb for much longer, as comparative biologists suggest. To remain upright, the human / female pelvis must remain relatively narrow. To pass through Mom's birth canal, a newborn's brain is one-quarter the size of an adult's.

Some pediatricians refer to the first three months of a baby's life as the "fourth trimester" of pregnancy to emphasize how needy they are and at the same time lack social skills. For example, the first social smile usually does not appear until the infant is 10-14 weeks old.

Some evolutionary biologists have suggested that newborns are socially inept and make annoying crying to keep the parent from getting too attached while the baby is at increased risk of dying. Of course, crying also draws the attention to the baby that he needs to survive.

2. Parental reactions develop the child's brain

In order to develop, the child's brain uses the responses of its parents to his sounds. The newborn's prefrontal cortex - the so-called "executive" area of the brain - has little control, so trying to discipline or worry about what the baby has done is pointless at this stage. Instead, newborns learn hunger, loneliness, discomfort and fatigue, and what it means to get rid of these troubles (which, by the way, are perceived globally and catastrophically by the infant). Experts believe that parents can help with this process by responding quickly to the child's needs.

Not that the child could be kept from crying. In fact, all babies, no matter how responsive their parents are, have their crying peak around 46 weeks of gestation. (Most babies are born between 38 and 42 weeks of age.)

Experts such as the neuroanthropologist and author of The Evolution of Childhood (Belknap, 2010) Melvin Conner believe that some early moaning is related to physical development, noting that crying peaks in different cultures at the same time after conception, regardless of from when the child enters the world. That is, a premature baby born at 34 weeks will peak crying at about 12 weeks, while a full-term baby born at 40 weeks will cry most at about 6 weeks.

3. The importance of imitation

When babies mimic the facial expressions of their parents or caregivers, it triggers emotions in themselves. Imitation helps infants develop their basic innate understanding of emotional communication and explains why parents tend to make exaggerated happy and sad faces for their babies, making it easier for them to imitate. Baby babbling is another seemingly instinctive response that researchers have found is critical to a child's development. Its musicality and exaggerated slow structure highlight the most important components of the language, helping the child to learn words.

4. The child's brain is growing by leaps and bounds

At birth, the brains of humans, monkeys and Neanderthals are much more similar to each other than in adulthood.

After birth, the human brain grows rapidly, more than doubling in size and reaching 60 percent of adult size by the first year of life. By kindergarten, the brain reaches its full size, but completes its formation by the age of 20. Further, the brain always changes, for the better or for the worse.

Some scientists suggest that changes in the developing brain of an infant on a rapid scale reflect those changes that were formed during the stages of evolution, that is, phylogenesis is rapidly repeated during ontogeny.

5. Flashlight and flashlight

Children's brains have many more neural connections than adults' brains. They also have fewer inhibitory neurotransmitters. As a result, such researchers suggested that the child's perception of reality is more blurred (less focused) than that of adults. They are vaguely aware of almost everything, but they do not yet know what is worth isolating and what really matters. Researchers compare a child's perception to a flashlight scattering light around a room, while an adult's perception is more like a flashlight, consciously focusing on certain things, but ignoring background details.

As babies get older, their brains go through a “pruning” process whereby their neural networks are strategically shaped and tuned based on their experiences. It helps them to put things in order in their worlds, but it also makes it difficult for them to think outside the box, which is what drives innovation and breakthroughs.

Creative people have retained some ability to think like babies.

6. The babbling of a toddler signals his learning.

However, even in the light of a diffused flashlight (see item 5), babies can focus for a moment. And when they do, they usually make a sound to communicate their interest. In particular, babbling - meaningless syllables that babies utter - is an “acoustic version of a frown,” signaling to adults that they are ready to learn. Some parents may not pay attention to this signal, but talking with the child promotes his brain development. Dialogue is the best option when the parent answers in the pauses, between the sounds of the baby.

7. Don't be too helpful a parent

But some parents are too empathic and respond to every baby's sound. The point is also not to overdo it, because when babies observe a response from a parent 100% of the time, they get bored and turn away. Worse, their training is very subtle and they won't be engaged in dialogue for a long time if they don't get the response they expect.

By acting instinctively, parents respond to 50-60 percent of the child's vocalization. The researchers found that speech development can be accelerated if babies respond 80% of the time. However, more than this, the learning rate decreases.

Parents also naturally raise the bar for language development by responding to sounds that the child has heard many times (eg, "a"), but repeating a new sound that approaches a word (eg, "ma," then "mom"). Thus, the child begins to compile the sound statistics of his language.

8. Instructional videos are useless

While babies can cry from birth with the intonations of their mother tongue, recent research highlights that social responses to a child's needs are fundamental to a toddler's ability to fully learn a language.

Babies divide the world between the things that do not respond to them and the things that do not respond to them, babies are not taught anything. Educational videos / TV / radio do not respond in any way to the reactions of the child, therefore, they are recognized by researchers as useless for the development of the infant brain, and the best that a parent can do for this is simply to play with the baby.

9. The infant's brain can be overwhelmed.

Children have a very low ability to concert their attention, they switch it from one thing to another, this can cause overexcitation. Therefore, sometimes they need something that will help them calm down: dimming the light, swaying, lullaby sung by their mother, sometimes swaddling arms and legs, which they can scare themselves with, since they have not yet learned how to control them. The ability to calm down and have long, deep sleep, especially at night, can improve your baby's skills.

10. Not very good hearing

Babies don't hear very well, the researchers said, so maybe crying doesn't bother them as much as their parents.

In general, children cannot distinguish voices from background noise as well as adults. Thus, underdeveloped auditory pathways may explain why babies sleep peacefully in crowded places or near a roaring vacuum cleaner, and why they do not respond to mom's call to leave the playground.

For the same reason, constantly playing music or the television in the background can make it difficult for babies to distinguish voices around them and catch speech. (Babies cannot learn to talk on television or radio; see # 8.)

Although children often love music, researchers believe that music should be a purposeful activity rather than background noise.