Brain complexity: baby brains under study (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, January 16, 2018, 19:49 (2503 days ago) @ David Turell

Newborn baby brains are totally a blank slate. How they learn touch is studied as it is the first sensation they ex perience:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-01-sight-babies-brains-foundations.html

"Touch is the first of the five senses to develop, yet scientists know far less about the baby's brain response to touch than to, say, the sight of mom's face, or the sound of her voice.

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"University of Washington researchers provide one of the first looks inside the infant's brain to show where the sense of touch is processed—not just when a baby feels a touch to the hand or foot, but when the baby sees an adult's hand or foot being touched, as well.

"The evidence of activity in the somatosensory cortex for both "felt touch" and "observed touch" shows that 7-month-old infants have already made a basic connection between "self" and "other," which researchers say lays the groundwork for imitating and learning from the behavior of other people, and for empathizing with them.

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"'Long before babies acquire spoken language, touch is a crucial channel of communication between caregivers and babies," said the study's primary author, Andrew Meltzoff

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"The data showed that, when the hand was touched, the hand area of the somatosensory cortex was activated in all 14 infants tested; when the foot was touched, activation occurred in the foot area of the brains of all of the infants but one.

"A different group of infants provided data for the "observed touch" experiment, in which they also were seated in the MEG but watched separate videos of an adult hand and an adult foot being touched by a small rod. Researchers discovered that the infants' own somatosensory cortex (the "touch center" in the baby brain) also became activated when the babies simply observed someone else being touched.

"There was a weaker response to "observed touch" than to "felt touch," which was expected, Meltzoff said. The same is true of adults: A touch to your own hand is going to generate greater brain activity in the somatosensory cortex than merely seeing the touch to someone else's hand.

"The key, Meltzoff pointed out, is that the same part of the infant's brain registered both kinds of touch, indicating a baby's capacity for recognizing the similarity between their own body parts and those they see in other people.

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"As parents know, babies watch and imitate what adults do. Imitation is a powerful learning mechanism for infants, but in order to imitate, infants have to perceive how body parts correspond. In other words, they need to reproduce the same movement with the same part when they imitate what their parent is doing. Scientists have wondered how infants make this connection. "Before they have words for the body parts, babies recognize that their hand is like your hand, and their foot is like your foot. The neural body map helps connect babies to other people: The recognition that another person is 'like me' may be one of the baby's first social insights," Meltzoff explained.

"With development, this "like-me" recognition eventually flowers into feeling empathy for someone else. If you see someone accidentally hit their thumb with a hammer, you rapidly, if perhaps imperceptibly, recoil by moving your hand. This is where a shared neural body map that connects self to other comes into play."

Comment: A very clear example of how the soul/self/consciousness/brain had to start from zero to learn every function of s/s/c/brain activity. A newborn baby does this over a 25- year period when the frontal lobe is fully developed. Note the importance of this point. A person's completeness requires the brain to be fully developed. The s/s/c can only use what the brain offers for use from the beginning of a new life. One can see that the first sapiens also had a partial blank slate which had to be experimented with and learned how to use it. The brilliant ones taught the slower learners over the 270,000 years, as dhw has pointed out.