Baby Minds Brain-Building Games Your Baby Will Love

Your Baby's Amazing Brain Remember that feeling of excitement and exhilaration the day your baby was born? You examined her tiny face and gazed with amazement into her unaccustomed eyes wondering what she must be feeling in her first experience of the "outside" world. If you were like most new parents, while you believed she was the brightest, most beautiful baby ever born, you had to admit that she didn't yet seem to have much going on "upstairs." But as we are now learning, appearances can be deceiving. While you were smiling and saying hello, rubbing her tiny fingers and stroking her cheek, her brain cells were firing away, activating various regions of her brain like the lighting of a Christmas tree. Far from the passive little bundle she resembled, your baby was hard at work, actively constructing the foundations of her future intellectual and emotional self. Up until a few years ago, even infant researchers would have turned a skeptical eye on such a description. Now, however, with the help of incredible technology, scientists are able to actually observe physical activity in babies' brains. Dr. Harry Chugani, a pediatric neurobiologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, is one of the most experienced baby-brain watchers around. Using positron-emission tomography (PET) scanning, which displays various degrees of brain activity in an array of vivid colors, Dr. Chugani has been able to witness the bright red glow of brain-circuitry building in action. And what he is seeing supports the notion that, from the moment of birth, the environment into which a child is born begins to sculpt the brain in ways that will have long-lasting implications for its owner's future. Building a Brain Construction of this miracle organ we call our 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. Produced in the neural tube (which will eventually become the spinal cord), the neurons begin their journey to various regions of the brain, like dedicated soldiers, to perform their assigned tasks. By the time a baby makes her debut into the world, she will have an astronomical number of brain cells (or neurons) to begin her developmental journey toward adulthood. In fact, it is thought that all the neurons she will ever have are present at birth--a mind-boggling 100 to 200 billion. If newborns have all their neurons in place, why can't they read, write, or speak? The brain still must undergo substantial changes in order to meet the challenges that each child will face throughout her life. Only through brain growth and development does a child truly become a social, emotional, and intellectual being--one who is able to build new friendships, revel in the joy of a new puppy, and master the complexity of long division. One significant change that occurs in a young baby's brain is simply 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 her first birthday, her 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). These increases in brain weight result both from cells growing larger and from the development of miles and miles of interconnective pathways that allow cells to communicate with one another. And as a baby's brain grows larger, dramatic changes take place in her ability to learn. Her memory becomes more functional, her language begins to develop, and her thinking skills are being continually refined. The various structures of a baby's brain are also undergoing significant changes. Located atop the spinal cord and below the cerebral cortex, the subcortical structures are primarily responsible for basic biAcredolo, Linda is the author of 'Baby Minds Brain-Building Games Your Baby Will Love' with ISBN 9780553380309 and ISBN 0553380303.