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Name: What’s Going on in There?
Rating: 4.2 (44 reviews)
Author: Lise Eliot

Lise Eliot

How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life

4.2 (44 Bewertungen)

22 Min.

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Education & Upbringing

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What’s Going on in There?
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What’s in it for me? Delve into the minds of children.

When a baby is born, it’s a sweet little being, sleeping and dreaming through most of the day. Alas, none of us remember what the world looked like to us in our first years. Wouldn’t it be amazing to find out what was going on in our minds when we were little babies?

Modern research into child psychology and neuroscience can help us in this endeavor. As you'll see in these blinks, children's minds and their perception of the world are formed through an intricate interplay between nature and nurture, beginning even in the womb. So what does the world look like through the eyes of a toddler?

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why babies like garlic;
how babies end up practicing boxing; and
which stories babies enjoy listening to.

Genetic predisposition and childhood experiences influence an infant’s development.

Picture a ball rolling down a hill. Gravity is pulling the ball downward, but its path might be diverted or changed by a rock or two in its path. Human development works a little like this. The main direction of our development is determined by our genes, but other factors can change the direction of our development, too.

Just 18 weeks after fertilization, the building blocks of a human embryo’s brain are already formed, following a sequence determined by our genes. Our brains begin by first developing the components and capabilities essential to keep us alive, such as controlling our heart rate. More complex components, like those required for imagination and memory, form later on.

Genes also shape the way these different parts of the brain communicate with each other. Neurons connect when our genes cause chemical attractants to be released at the right place and the right time inside our brains.

But after birth, genes aren’t the only factors in human development. Between the ages of one and eight, children produce twice the number of neuronal connections required for healthy brain functionality. Because of this, efficient pathways for cognitive processes must be established, and for their brains to do this, children need nurture.

This need for nurture is critical – if children lack stimulation, the neuronal connections they need for healthy adult life will deteriorate rapidly. This has been known to psychiatrists since the 1940s, when René Spitz conducted an experiment comparing two groups of children.

Children in the first group had been raised by their mothers in prison, while those in the second group had been taken from their mothers and raised in a nearby nursery. Children who’d grown up in the prison developed normally, thanks to their mothers’ care.

But the children in the nursery, who had been growing up without human contact and intellectually stimulating play, suffered the consequences. Their neuronal connections degenerated, and many developed retardations that impeded their ability to walk and talk by the time they reached the age of three.

Pregnancy and birth are two highly influential stages in a child’s development.

Today, there’s no shortage of guidebooks filled with advice on what to do during pregnancy. Of course, all children and mothers are different, but these discussions are important. After all, pregnancy and birth are crucial stages in human development.

Mothers’ behavior during pregnancy can have lifelong consequences for their children. Regular consumption of alcohol can cause mental retardation in newborns, while over-the-counter drugs such as Aspirin can have devastating effects on unborn children, with the potential to cause internal bleeding, for example.

A child’s sense of touch is crucial for the development of the brain and learned behaviors.

Do babies enjoy the tickling and cheek-pinching as much as we do? Well, it turns out it’s actually good for them.

Stimulating an infant’s sense of touch is a necessary part of healthy development. Several studies show that preterm infants even benefit from daily massages, showing faster weight gain and better performance in visual recognition tests. Without this stimulation, the corresponding parts of a child’s brain will degenerate.

The senses of smell and taste develop early in infants, leading them toward safety and nutrition.

Have you ever had a cold and not been able to taste what you knew was a delicious meal? It can be extremely frustrating! Taste and smell are vital sensory functions for humans in general, and this begins in babies from their time in the womb.

Even as fetuses, babies can process information about their mother’s smell. This becomes crucial for their sense of orientation – babies use it to work out where their mothers’ arms are, as their body scent is most present under the armpits. An infant’s sense of smell also allows for self-soothing, which unwashed newborns practice by raising their hands to their mouths, comforting themselves with their own smell.

While children develop their sense of hearing in the womb, their vision develops more slowly.

Imagine watching a film where the images and sound aren’t synced – it’s very confusing or irritating, right? This is because our hearing and vision are deeply connected. But as infants, we rely far more on sound than we do on sight.

Babies enter the world with great hearing skills. While in the womb, fetuses listen closely and even form memories of the things they hear from the outside world. In one study, pregnant mothers were asked to read The Cat in the Hat out loud several times a day. They read the story to their babies shortly after birth, and the newborns responded by sucking more excitedly on their pacifiers as they listened.

Young babies love movement and rely on reflexes before building more complex motor skills.

If you’ve got a crying baby in your hands, the best way to calm it is rocking it gently in your arms. Babies also calm down enough to fall asleep when we push them around in carriages because they love the feeling of being in motion.

Experiences of motion satisfy a baby’s need for stimulation. They can handle motion well too, because they’re born with a well-developed sense of balance. This, in turn, allows babies to observe their environment from a very young age, as their brains are able to make sense of visual changes when they move their heads.

Temperament in children is often genetically determined, but is also shaped by childhood experiences.

Much of what we love in other people has to do with their charming personalities and little quirks. What parent wouldn’t want their child to grow up into a loveable person? Of course, while some things are determined genetically, other aspects of a human’s character can be shaped by childhood experiences.

All babies begin smiling at the sound of other people’s voices at around six months of age, and not only their parents’. This is called social smiling, and even blind babies develop this innate tendency around the same time. However, babies also exhibit stranger anxiety from six months of age, largely because they start moving around independently at that time, too.

Children have a knack for learning languages, but parents must help them learn new words and enjoy the learning process itself.

How is it that we learned our mother tongue so easily as kids, while learning new languages today is so hard? Well, babies have the upper hand here – they’re predisposed to learning languages.

Babies all around the world begin to understand the meaning of their first words at around nine months of age. In their second year, they begin to comprehend words more rapidly, and learn about eight words each day between two and six years of age.

A fun and stimulating home environment helps children develop their intellect at a healthy rate.

From psychology to preschool pedagogy, experts from all fields claim to have unlocked the secrets of intelligence in children. However, defining intelligence itself is a very challenging task. This is evident in the difficulty we have when it comes to measuring how “smart” children are.

Most scientists believe that a single factor called general intelligence influences most skills. IQ tests are designed to assess general intelligence but, of course, infants can’t take IQ tests. So how can we determine whether a child’s intellect is developing at a healthy rate?

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What’s Going on in There? (1999) delves into the cognitive and physiological development of young children. These blinks explain the most important milestones of a child’s development, exploring the shared influence of genes and parenting on children.

Bestes Zitat aus What’s Going on in There?

From the first cell development, brain development is a delicate dance between genes and environment.

—Lise Eliot

Wer What’s Going on in There? lesen sollte

New parents or parents-to-be
Teachers and caregivers curious about infant psychology
Anyone who’s ever wondered what babies think about

Über den Autor

Lise Eliot is a neuroscientist and professor at the Chicago Medical School. As a writer, she is known for her contributions to the magazine Slate, as well as her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It.

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