This article is extracted from TIME Magazine (February 24, 1997), I read it and felt the need to share it with all great parents out there...
Wiring the Brain
At birth, a baby's brain contains 100 billions neurons, roughly as many nerve cells as there are stars in the Milky Way. Also in place are a trillion glial cells, named afterthe Greek word for glue, which form a kind of honeycomb that protects and nourishes the neurons.
Neurobiologist Carla Shatz of University of California, Berkeley, says:
"what the brain has done is lay our circuits that are its best guess about what's required for vision, for language, for whatever".
During the first few years of life, the brain undergoes a series of extraordinary changes, Starting shortly after birth, a baby's brain, in a display of biological exuberance, produces trillions more connections between neurons than it can possibly use. Then, through a process that resembles Darwinian competition, the brain eliminates connections, or synapses, that are seldom or never used. The excess synapses in a child's brain undergo a draconian pruning, starting around the age of 10 or earlier, leaving behind a mind whose patterns of emotion and thought are, for better or worse, unique.
Deprived of a stimulating environment, a child's brain suffers. Studies have found that children who don't play much or are rarely touched develop brains 20% to 30% smaller than normal for their age.
Wiring Vision
What's Going On: Babies can see at birth, not in fine-grained detail.They have not yet acquired the knack of focusing both eyes on a single object or developed more sophisticated visual skills like depth preception. They also lack hand-eye coordination.
What Parents Can Do: There is no need to buy high-contrast black-and-white toys to stimulate vision. But regular eye exams, startingas early as two weeks of age, can detect problems that, if left uncorrected, can cause a weak or unused eye to lose its functional connections to the brain.
Window of Learning: Unless it is exercised early on, the visual system will not develop.
Wiring Feelings
What's Going On: Among the first circuits the brain constructs are those that govern the emotions. Beginning around two months of age, the distress and contentment experienced by newborns start to evolve into more complex feelings: joy and sadness, ency and empathy, pride and shame.
What Parents Can Do: Loving care provides a baby's brain with teh right kind of emotional stimulation. Neglecting a baby can produce brain-wave patterns that dampen happy feelings. Abuse can produce heightened anxiety and abnormal stress responese.
Window of Learning: Emotions develop in layers, each more complex than the last.
Wiring Language
What's Going On: Even before birth, an infant is tuning into the melody of its mother's voice. Over the next six years, its brain will set up the circuitry needed to decipher-and re-produce-the lyrics. A six-month-old can recognize the vowel sounds that are the basic building blocks of speech.
What Parents Can Do: Talking to a baby alot, researchers have found, siginificantly speeds up the process of learning new words. The high-pitched, singsong speech style known as Parentese helps babies connect objects with words.
Window of Learning: Language skills are sharpest early on but grow throughout life.
Wiring Movement
What's Going On: At birth babies can move their limbs, but in a jerky, uncontrolled fashion. Over the next four years, the brain progressively refines the circuits for reaching, grabbing, sitting, crawling, walking and running.
What Parents Can Do: Give babies as much freedom to explore as safety permits Just reaching for an object helps the brain develop hand-eye coordination. As soon as children are ready for them, activities like drawing and playing a violin or piano encourage the development of fine motor skills.
Window of Learning: Motor-skill development moves from gross to increasingly fine.
...Reading as an easy way to help a baby's brain grow
It's important that we take to heart what the neuro-scientists are telling us - without losing the heart of the reading experience. In today's high-tech world of E-mail and microchips, it is easy to forget the importance of human connections in our daily activities. Technology has brought many welcome conveniences t our lives. But it has the potential to create feelings of distance, detachment and isolation among us.
Reading to a child while touching, hugging and holding him or her can be a wonderful antidote to the impersonal tendencies of the information age - for both the adult and the child. While critical to building brains, reading is equally important to building trusting and close relationships. That's why reading should not be viewed solely as an intellectual proposition, particularly in the era in which we now live.
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