Introducing the brain: newborn brain well organized (Introduction)

by David Turell @, Monday, March 02, 2020, 23:52 (1487 days ago) @ David Turell

fMRI's of very young babies shnw how organized these regions of the baby brains are a s early s six days:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-03-earliest-newborns-visual-cortex-reveals.html

"Within hours of birth, a baby's gaze is drawn to faces. Now, brain scans of newborns reveal the neurobiology underlying this behavior, showing that as young as six days old a baby's brain appears hardwired for the specialized tasks of seeing faces and seeing places.

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"'We've shown that a baby's brain is more adult-like than many people might assume," adds Frederik Kamps, who led the study as a Ph.D. candidate at Emory. "Much of the scaffolding for the human visual cortex is already in place, along with the patterns of brain activity, although the patterns are not as strong compared to those of adults."

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"For decades, scientists have known that the adult visual cortex contains two regions that work in concert to process faces and another two regions that work together to process places. More recent work shows that the visual cortex of young children is differentiated into these face and place networks. And in a 2017 paper, Dilks and colleagues found that this neural differentiation is in place in babies as young as four months.

"For the current PNAS paper, the average age of the newborn participants was 27 days. "We needed to get closer to the date of birth in order to better understand if we are born with this differentiation in our brains or if it's molded by experience," Dilks says.

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"The results showed the two regions of the visual cortex associated with face processing fired in sync in the infants, as did the two networks associated with places. The infant patterns were similar to those of the adult participants, although not quite as strong. "That finding suggest that there is room for these networks to keep getting fine-tuned as infants mature into adulthood," Kamps says.

"'We can see that the face networks and the place networks of the brain are hooked up and talking to each other within days of birth," Dilks says. "They are essentially awaiting the relevant information.'"

Comment: This sort of planned design to immediately handle visual information as it appears strongly suggests it was designed this way to facilitate development.


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