July/August 2016
19
feature
A new parent’s first days with a newborn
can be a
flurry of doctor visits, troubleshooting feeding practices, and figuring
out how to get some precious sleep.
Finding ways to stimulate the baby’s brain may be a low priority
for most sleep-deprived parents, especially when—at least on the
surface—it appears the infant is not yet capable of learning anything.
The latest brain science, however, reveals that infants are power-
houses of learning. Between the age of 9 and 10 months, for example,
infants quickly become specialists in distinguishing the sounds of their
native language(s). This enables them to quickly grasp the language
and many customs of their culture, all in just the first few years of life.
Many of the discoveries of early learning and brain science are
happening at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning
& Brain Sciences (I-LABS). Patricia Kuhl, PhD and Andrew Meltzoff,
PhD co-directors of I-LABS, have been world leaders in their fields
for decades.
Realizing the growing need to communicate the science of early
learning to the public, Kuhl and Meltzoff created an outreach team
of PhD-level scientists. The team has—among other things—devel-
oped a free, online library of 20-minute “modules” meant to give
early learning professionals and other caregivers a background in
the latest findings in brain development, language learning, social-
emotional development, and other child development topics.
At I-LABS, Kuhl and Meltzoff have assembled a dream team of
scientists—including physicists, neuroscientists, developmental
psychologists, speech and hearing scientists, statisticians, and
software engineers—to accelerate the institute’s brain discoveries.
Here is a partial list of some of the institute’s recent findings:
A “stethoscope” for the baby brain
The I-LABS MEG Brain Imaging Facility on the UW campus is the
first magnetoencephalography (MEG) machine in the world specifi-
cally configured for babies.
Through this innovative machine, the institute is able to track infant
brain activity at the millisecond-to-millisecond time-scale to reveal
in real-time how the developing brain works.
Kuhl and Meltzoff call the MEG a “stethoscope for the mind” because
it is completely safe and silently “listens” in on brain activity. The
baby sits in an infant chair under the “helmet” of the brain scanner,
which contains sensors to detect tiny magnetic changes produced
by active brain cells.
Like EEG, MEG measures electromagnetic signature of neural
currents and has the same temporal resolution. But the advantage
of MEG is that its spatial resolution is more accurate than any other
methods of its kind.
What’s more, MEG—unlike brain technologies such as MRI—doesn’t
require people to stay perfectly still while in the brain scanner. This
is a significant step forward for infant brain research, which has
previously relied on brain scans while babies are asleep. At the
I-LABS MEG Brain Imaging Facility, awake, alert infants listen to
the sounds of language, or respond to their caregivers’ touch as
researchers record the network of brain activity unfolding in real time.
In clinical settings beyond I-LABS, MEG is typically used to find the
precise locations of seizures for patients with epilepsy and to locate
areas of critical brain function before the removal of brain tumors.
It’s also being studied for applications in identifying biomarkers for
Alzheimer’s disease, detecting mild traumatic brain injury, and in
understanding brain mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders
and Parkinson’s disease.
The I-LABS MEG focuses on basic research right now, and is not
yet open for use in patient populations.
Baby brains rehearse speech mechanics
Months before babies utter their first words, their brains rehearse
how to produce speech sounds. This finding was the surprising
result of an I-LABS MEG study, which was hailed a top scientific
finding of the year by Discover magazine.
The study, published in 2014 by the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, showed for the first time that in response to
language sounds, the brains of 7-month-old babies had increased
activation in areas that coordinate and plan the motor movements
for speech.
“Finding activation in motor areas of the brain when infants are simply
listening is significant, because it means the baby brain is engaged in
trying to talk back right from the start and suggests that 7-month-olds’
brains are already trying to figure out how to make the right move-
ments that will produce words,” said Kuhl, lead author of the paper.
1
This information reinforces the advice for parents to talk to their babies
from the moment of birth: Read to them, narrate what you’re doing.
The more they hear language, the more practice their brains get.
Parents can further encourage language development by responding
to babies’ coos and babbles and by expanding them. These back-
and-forth interactions support learning and communicate to infants
that they can be part of conversations from their earliest days.
Bilingualism gives babies practice in executive function
It’s not only speech development that benefits from hearing language.
One of the latest I-LABS MEG studies, published in spring 2016,
1.
http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/07/14/months-before-their-first-words-
babies-brains-rehearse-speech-mechanics/
