Inside an Infant's Active Brain
Allowing A Young Mind to Flourish with Abundant Mental Stimulation
Nov 27, 2008
Research is now revealing how experiences during the first years of life profoundly influence intelligence, creativity, language development-and even reading and math skills later in life.
Construction of the brain begins just weeks after conception, when fetal cells destined to become brain cells begin to multiply at the astonishing rate of about 250,000 per minute. The neurons begin their voyage to various regions of the brain to perform their assigned tasks.
One major change that occurs in a baby's brain is that it grows bigger. At birth a baby's brain weighs about 340 grams (about 12 ounces), and it continues to grow quite rapidly during the child's first few years. By the baby’s first birthday, the brain has already more than doubled in weight, to about 1,100 grams. Amazingly, by age five, brain weight will have reached about 90 percent of its eventual adult weight of 1,450 grams (almost 3 pounds). As the brain grows larger, changes take place in the infant’s ability to learn. Memory becomes more functional, language begins to develop, and thinking skills are continually being refined.
The brain is also responsible for making sense of sound by hearing speech over and over during infancy. The first months are critically important because that is when the auditory brain centres develop most efficiently.
The human brain can remember music (an average person can identify more than 1,000 songs), process music (pitch, rhythm and timbre are processed in different parts of the brain), learn to replicate music, and can identify songs -- even tiny fragments -- with incidents from our past. With age, most people find comfort in music because they were sung to as babies, sung to even in the womb.
Hearing Develops as the Brain is Stimulated by Sounds During Infancy
The ear’s job is to sense vibrations in the air and pass the sensory data to those parts of the brain most responsive to sound. These auditory brain centres process raw sound and make sense of it. This process is what is meant by “hearing.”
Auditory brain centres don’t start out with the ability to hear. Hearing develops only as the brain is stimulated by many sounds during infancy. Every time a sound stimulates the auditory brain centres, the brain develops thousands of new connections between cells, called synapses. The growing network of synapses enables the baby to make sense of sounds, especially the complex and detailed sounds of language. When the ears don’t function properly, the auditory brain centres don’t get the stimulation needed to build new synapses. Once sounds are recognized, brains can begin the complex task of assigning meaning to the sounds that are heard.
Helping a Young Mind Blossom
Parents should talk, sing and laugh with their child. Call attention to sounds around the room and give the child as much verbal stimulation as possible. Stimulate a child's natural number skills with puppets and counting games. Singing a song or blowing a bubble under a toddler's nose helps the mind to blossom. Remarkably, a baby can count, remember events, and solve problems even before speech is learned.
When children are allowed to flourish with abundant mental stimulation, the learning process can be an incredibly rewarding experience. Therefore, early impressions are critically important in the formation of character, personality and intelligence.
