Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

This month, a National Geographic article explores “Baby Brains,” looking at the factors that hinder or help infants’ neurological development.

“Peering inside children’s brains with new imaging tools, scientists are untangling the mystery of how a child goes from being barely able to see when just born to being able to talk, ride a tricycle, draw, and invent an imaginary friend by the age of five,” the article explains. “The more scientists find out about how children acquire the capacity for language, numbers, and emotional understanding during this period, the more they realize that the baby brain is an incredible learning machine. Its future—to a great extent—is in our hands.”

The article adds: “The amount of brain activity in the earliest years affects how much there is later in life.” A picture of the EEG scans of eight-year-olds shows “that institutionalized children who were not moved to a nurturing foster care environment before they were two years old have less activity than those who were.” Again, early nurturing was essential for building brains. 

Research on Babies’ Brains

“In the late 1980s, when the crack cocaine epidemic was ravaging America’s cities, Hallam Hurt, a neonatologist in Philadelphia, worried about the damage being done to children born to addicted mothers,” the article says. “She and her colleagues, studying children from low-income families, compared four-year-olds who’d been exposed to the drug with those who hadn’t.”

Surprisingly, they didn’t find any differences between the two groups. What they did discover was one disappointing commonality: “in both groups the children’s IQs were much lower than average.”

“The revelation prompted the researchers to turn their focus from what differentiated the two groups toward what they had in common: being raised in poverty. To understand the children’s environment, the researchers visited their homes with a checklist. They asked if the parents had at least ten books at home for the children, a record player with songs for them, and toys to help them learn numbers. They noted whether the parents spoke to the children in an affectionate voice, spent time answering their questions, and hugged, kissed, and praised them.”

The findings:

– children who received more attention and nurturing at home tended to have higher IQs

– children who were more cognitively stimulated performed better on language tasks, and,

– children who were nurtured more warmly did better on memory tasks

“Many years later, when the kids had entered their teens, the researchers took MRI images of their brains and then matched them up with the records of how warmly nurtured the children had been at both four and eight years old. They found a strong link between nurturing at age four and the size of the hippocampus—a part of the brain associated with memory—but found no correlation between nurturing at age eight and the hippocampus.”

In other words, it’s critically important for children to live in emotionally supportive environments when they are very young.

Another study used near-infrared spectroscopy to take images of “the brains of babies while they heard audio sequences.” In some sequences, “the sounds were repeated in an ABB structure, such as mu-ba-ba; in others, an ABC structure, such as mu-ba-ge. The researchers found that brain regions responsible for speech and audio processing responded more strongly to the ABB sequences. In a later study they found that the newborn brain was also able to distinguish between audio sequences with an AAB pattern and those with an ABB pattern. Not only could babies discern repetition, they also were sensitive to where it occurred in the sequence.”

The significance of this finding: “the order of sounds is the bedrock upon which words and grammar are built,” researcher Judit Gervain says, adding, “Positional information is key to language… If something is at the beginning or at the end makes a big difference: ‘John killed the bear’ is very different from ‘The bear killed John.’”

“That the baby brain responds from day one to the sequence in which sounds are arranged suggests that the algorithms for language learning are part of the neural fabric infants are born with. ‘For a long time we had this linear view. First, babies are learning sounds, then they are understanding words, then many words together,’ Gervain says. ‘But from recent results, we know that almost everything starts to develop from the get-go. Babies are starting to learn grammatical rules from the beginning.’”

Parental Training Programs

Efforts are being made to turn the research findings into practical tools for parents.

At a “parental training program led by neuroscientist Helen Neville at the University of Oregon in Eugene,” parents take classes where they learn tips for reducing the stress of daily child care.

Parents also learn “to emphasize positive reinforcement, expressing praise for specific accomplishments,” and “children receive training in attention and self-control in a 40-minute session every week.”

“At the end of the eight weeks the researchers evaluate the kids on language, nonverbal IQ, and attention. Through a questionnaire given to the parents, they also assess how the kids are doing behaviorally. In a paper published in July 2013, Neville and her colleagues reported that kids in Head Start who received the intervention showed significantly higher increases on these measures than those who did not. Parents reported experiencing much lower stress in managing their children. ‘When you change parenting and stress level goes down, that leads to increased emotional regulation and better cognition for the kids,’ Neville says.”

Other baby brain stories are also in the news. A recent Hechinger Report headline reads, “How do you make a baby smart? Word by word, a Chicago project says.” The article discusses “the Thirty Million Words Project, which aims to prevent the achievement gap from starting with the power of parent-child talk –– beginning at day one.”

And in some cases, very young children appear to have an advantage over adults, according to a PRI (Public Radio International) story that quotes Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who says:

“In some circumstances, very young children — 3- and 4-year-olds, even 18-month-olds — seem to be solving some kinds of problems better than adults are.”

Gopnik adds: “They unconsciously use a lot of the same kinds of techniques that very powerful machine learning algorithms use, and that scientists use. [In fact], there’s no program in the world that’s even in the same ballpark as every 2-year-old in terms of being able to learn.”

The article continues, “Research in this area has been slow, Gopnik admits, in part because traditional testing doesn’t work on kids too young to speak and write… But researchers in her lab have set up experiments in children’s ‘language’ — seeing how they problem-solve with toys instead of words. The kids have proven to be up to the challenge, sometimes solving puzzles and completing tasks better than their elders.”

For parents, early educators, and policy-makers the unifying theme of all this research is clear: early influences have a huge impact on babies’ brains; and the richer these influences are the more powerful babies’ brains can be — giving children the strong early start they need to increase their chances for lifelong success.