Anyone tried to entertain child It is known that sitting in stillness and silence is not the best way to maintain their participation, which represents a challenge for neurologists who want to study the developing brain.
However, with the help of some vigilant televisions, fathers and a lot of patience, researchers designed protocols that help them keep children awake and are still in a functional magnetic resonance machine. It is important to do this: It can reveal a clear reading of these brain scanning processes about unprecedented details about any parts of the brain active at an early age, which helps researchers answer questions about memory and perception and perception.
“The goal of this research is to try to understand the human mind, and a truly value perspective on this question is to understand how it developed,” said Dr. Nick Turk Brown, Professor of Psychology at Yale University.
Scholars The discovery of new parts of the brain remains stillAnd what happens in the developing mind was historically difficult to define neural science research. Most of the information we know about the infant brain is traditionally based on behavioral measures of the place that children or what they reach in experiments. Other data is saved from animal experiments or conditions in which people have been damaged in the brain to infer what is happening in the functional areas of the brain.
The use of a functional magnetic resonance machine is the gold standard for drawing brain function maps.
“The reason that makes you give you complete coverage in the brain … including really reaching the brain areas,” Yates told Salon in an interview on the phone. She added that this technology allows researchers access to more detailed information about some areas of the brain that can answer some of the main questions about the perception.
“We are excited because we will be able to start separating what is going on here.”
Yetz said that when the MRI in the 1990s, the researchers used it to look at the brains of infants, but these survey operations were usually performed when the children were asleep. This means that they were unable to study how the aspects of the brain were affected by vigilance, such as perception of various incentives.
But in 2002, a research team in France Job’s magnetic resonance images have been successfully taken It is awake to measure how their brains respond to the language. Another research team in Italy He conducted a similar experience in 2015, And the first Ticket Wake up in the United States has been deployed in 2017. In the near decade, the various research teams have begun to explore what is going on in the infant’s mind to better understand neurological development.
“This functional magnetic resonance is also in its cradle, and it is truly a handful of laboratories all over the world.” Yates said. ” “We are excited because we will be able to start separating what is going on here.”
At birth, the child’s brain is about a third of the adult brain. The size is almost doubled in the first year of life, making millions of nerve connections every second in the endless learning process.
However, the relatively infant’s brain size does not necessarily mean that it is not necessarily underdeveloped: it is surprising that the functional magnetic resonance showed that the brains of children in many ways are significantly similar to adult brains.
“When I started this work more than 10 years ago … I expected it to be a foreign natural view as many assumptions that we have and many things that apply to the adult brain will be applied.” “I have proven wrongly and repeatedly: in fact, the infant’s brain is very similar to the adult brain.”
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Although the functional magnetic resonance of the infants was useful in highlighting the brain areas that work in their childhood, one of the restrictions on these data is that activity in some areas of the brain does not necessarily translate into the same thing in infants as it does in adults.
Elis said: “It is something that we must be careful in this excessive field of explaining the similarity between infants and adults that it means something about their cognitive ability in itself.”
However, this research has changed the way researchers in the developing mind think in several ways. For example, neuroscientists often have intuition that earlier in development, the infant experience is limited to the most sensory processes such as vision, hearing and touch, but things that require to attribute the meaning or communicate two things that occur at a later time in development.
However, in a Ticket Saxe composed last month in the current trend magazine in psychological sciences, she and her colleagues found something challenging the previous assumptions on how the brains of infants evolved. Specifically, the areas of the human lobe shell were responsible for treating social environments are active when infants were exposed to faces. In adults, this region is also active with self -ideas, as when you see your phone number for a random phone number, Sachs explained.
“The first children may not be visual treatment, and only after that they are associated with the social sense,” Sachs told the salon in an interview over the phone. “These areas of the brain may be active because children respond to the social meaning of people and faces early as much as we can brainstorm.”
In one of the studies conducted by TURK-Browne, Elis and Yates composed in Nerve cells In 2021, the functional magnetic resonance data showed an activity in the optical crust of infants when presented with various visual signals, indicating that children are able to draw the world in front of them in their minds in a process called the retina early in the age of five months. This is impressive that their process is very similar to thinking about the adult brain The child’s vision is still developing in the first few months of life.
In another TicketThe research team found that parts of infants responsible for converting attention were activated in the anterior mural in infants who arrive at the age of three months.
“What is surprising is that these are some parts of the brain that are believed to be slower,” Tork Brown said in an interview over the phone. “Maybe I heard about this idea that our frontal lobe continues to develop through the adolescence period, and this is true, but what we have appeared is that some types of more rudimentary things such as how to transform our attention and control of our minds may be supported by the brain areas even in childhood.”
However, there are important differences between the brains of infants and adults. In one 2022 Ticket Posted by TURK-BROWNE, ELLIS and Yates, infants were offered to address events on the longest time scales of adults. This could be an important educational tool to help children absorb more information about their environment before issuing a ruling on it based on their previous experience.
For example, the infants can distinguish between the sounds made in different languages at birth, but in about six to 12 months, they start to do so Tight in the language that are most often It loses the ability to distinguish between the sounds made in other languages.
“We have found that adult mechanisms for statistical learning may be functional in children.”
“We haven’t been linked to learning yet, but it makes sense that it may be useful to start a big picture and then narrow it,” said Yates. “One of the things that occurs in childhood is this cognitive restrictions, as children in some respects have wider cognitive abilities than adults.”
It also seems that there is a difference in treating memories in childhood and puberty. After all, people do not remember their childhood, as the first memories are usually reported at the age of three or fourth.
Honorable is the structure of the brain responsible for memory, and helps us remember specific memories of the events that occurred at a specific time and place, in addition to a more general feeling of memory called statistical learning, where the brain discovers patterns in the environment. For example, when children begin to go to different types of restaurants, statistical learning helps them understand the types of foods that are served in a Mexican restaurant, a Thai restaurant, etc.
It has been proven that infants are good statistical learners. After all, this is the way they pick up the language, learn to get to know their family members and start understanding the fine details of their cultures. But it was not clear whether this type of memory also occurred in the hippocampus in infants, especially because the hippocampus doubles in size through childhood.
To investigate this question, the infant search team showed a series of random and structured images as they are connected to the functional magnetic resonance machine to see if these areas of the brain are active when children mention organized images over time. What they found is that these themselves of the brain were already active in three -month -old children.
“This is a sudden discovery because the alternative is that perhaps in infants, the rest of the brain, or another part of the brain, is important for this type of learning,” said Turk Brown. “But in reality, we found that adult mechanisms for statistical learning may be functional in children.”
This conclusion did not explain why we do not remember to be children, but it helped researchers narrow the questions they need to ask to find out. Memories were active in the same areas of the brain in infants as they were in adults, but these memories may not be stored in childhood. Or, memories can be stored in childhood but they are not possible for us later in life.
In another study, published in March in sciencesHe studied the fortified research team addicted to the MRI is able to store specific accidental memories – not only statistical patterns – early in 12 months of life. This indicates that the reason we do not remember our early years is linked to how they coded in the brain.
“There may be some of our early memories in our brain, at least for some of our lives, despite the fact that we cannot reach it,” said Turk Brown.
The TURK-Browne’s research laboratory is currently conducting studies to better understand the time that these memories take in the mind of the infant and their detail. This can help explain the separation between how to try memories as an adults and adults.
What they find can help to prove or refute many theories about the reason we do not remember to create children. It may be, for example, that the way in which infants test the world is different before they learn how to speak, and that describing things with words and language helps to form our memories with more longevity.
For example, a six -month -old child may remember to be at a birthday party and hear their family members speak, but if they cannot understand the words and have not yet learned about birthdays, they may not sort this memory with a kind of details that themselves will use the oldest to remember later.
“It is like a memory that exists, but you don’t know how to find it, like the indexing problem,” Elis said. “It seems as if I went to the library and then someone changed all numbers so that the book is not the place where they were used to.”
However, understanding why it can help us in a better understanding of things like early childhood experiences can be effective at a later time of life, even if it is not possible to call them explicitly, Yetz said. Elis said it could also help us in a better understanding of how memory conditions such as dementia or Alzheimer’s development.
“For patients with Alzheimer’s disease, the collapse that may occur in their brain can be repaired by implementing some of the changes that the infant’s brain is going through while gaining learning and memory,” Eli said. “It is completely speculative at this stage because we do not know what these changes are, but this is the possible hope in the future.”
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