By David Paltin, PhD

Baby's Growing Brain

In the course of our lifespans, there is no greater period of time of rapid change in the brain than in the first few months of life.  Hour by hour, new growth takes place, new connections are formed, and rythyms develop that correspond with the rythyms of the environment.  A noise occurs in the nursery, maybe the chirping of a bird just outside the window,  and the infant brain responds with a spark, not yet understanding the meaning of the sound, but ready to transform that spark into a simple brain connection that will spark again if it hears that bird again the next morning.  The baby hears mother's muffled voice on the phone in the next room, then soon mother appears at the side of the crib, and and the baby's brain starts to make the connection that mother is still nearby even if she can't be seen.  Something like a computer, a baby's brain comes pre-wired to take in, remember, and begin to adapt to the demands of the environment.  But that's where the analogy with computers ends, because unlike a computer the infant brain builds its own hardware as it grows to meet the demands of the rich tapestry of his or her environment.  There is a term brain researchers use called plasticity referring to this kind of biological adaptation.  Plasticity is the brain's ability to change, adapt, and program itself in different ways to meet the demands of the environment.  In one famous case of plasticity, a young girl in a terrible car accident became blind when lost a portion of her brain dedicated to sight.  A couple of years later, she told her mother she was "seeing things."  Her mother, not believing this was possible, tested her daughter and found that she had begun to regain her ability to see basic shapes and shadows.  In this amazing case, a portion of the girl's brain that had nothing to do with vision began to adapt itself to sight.  Although this was a rare case, neurologists and psychologists use it as an example of the adaptable nature of the young child's brain.

Your Baby's Brain has its own Timetable

In the first few hours after birth, and when they are not sleeping, baby movement looks like an uncoordinated jumble.  Shaky arms wave in the air as toes and fingers curl.  But a closer look shows the brain already activating and triggering movement sequences that will set the baby on the path of his or her next steps.  Some babies start to strain their face and neck muscles, and nearly all babies purse their lips and thrust their tongues.  These early reflex movements are just the start of a brain coordination process that helps move your baby from simple feeding to running across a field or playing a musical instrument years later.  In the early stages, baby movements are designed to promote feeding and attachment and bonding.  But why aren't babies born ready to walk and move around their environment more quickly, like the animals do?

Unlike animal movements, human movements are often much more complex, for example, using fingers to hold a crayon or put a block on top of another block. Human movements often involve planning and thinking before they happen, like when a child imagines being put to bed and puts a doll to bed first. In order for the human brain to coordinate little fingers on the crayon, or a make-believe action with its actual movements, it needs to develop the ability to make smooth, steady, and fast movements. Long after birth, the movement parts of your baby’s brain go through a process called myelination. During myelination, the neuron connections in the brain develop a special coating that helps them transmit information quicker. Think of myelination like pouring water on a metal slide at the neighborhood park. Without that water, we’d stick a lot more to the slide and take longer to go down, but the water helps us slip down much quicker. When myelinated connections in the brain send a message to each finger on baby’s hand to make a fist around the soft toy, the message gets to the hand much quicker. Why do baby’s shake so much when they are first born? Because their arms and legs have not yet been covered by myelin (the actual material that “coats” the nerve connections in the brain), The messages sent from the brain to follow the baby’s desired movement either don’t reach the different muscles in a coordinated way or send competing signals to those parts of the body. The result? Fingers and hands jerk in an uncoordinated way toward a toy rather than smoothly.
 

Growth and development of the baby’s brain happens according to its own schedule, and allows for the brain to focus its energy on other important areas of development. So whenever we see a program that promises parents that they can “get an early start,” like early toilet training, we may be distracting the brain from something even more important while trying to force a level of coordination that doesn’t really have any benefit for the baby.

Your Baby's Patterns Tell His or Her Secrets 

Some parents have difficulty understanding and communicating with their babies.  "My husband just had trouble bonding with our baby until the baby was able to say some words," one parent described.  Yet even though babies don't use language to communicate, their non-language communication is much more sophisticated than we once thought.  For an example of baby communication, let’s look at baby’s gaze. John and Julie Gottman, researchers at the Gottman Institute in Seattle, did fascinating research in which they filmed babies’ faces during periods of communication with parents and caretakers. What they found was that baby’s had a type of subtle communication much more sophisticated and telling than we would have thought. In their hours and hours of videotape, they saw that babies didn’t just stare at parents while parents cooed and baby-talked and gazed lovingly toward them. Instead, the babies looked, took interest, then took a “break” after a short period of time by looking away from the parent’s face. This brief looking away might look like the baby being distracted by something else, but often simply looked like a brief “drifting off” or looking away. This break in eye contact initiated by the baby, the Gottman’s realized, was a signal, or a communication by the baby that he or she needed a brief time to “regroup” or collect energy after the shared gaze. Babies’ brains were calming down after the intense stimulation that contact with parents offered.  The Gottmans also found that parents could be taught to read this small, but important signal and could learn to pull back for a few minutes from interaction with the baby when this signal was abserved.

This glancing away behavior also leads us to understand a major task of the infant brain; patterning toward self-regulation.  Over time, we develop a balance between the way our brains respond to the outside world and our own brain signals for rest, hunger, and other inner states.  The baby's brain seeks rythyms and patterns that match its external environment and that fit his or her natural cycles.  Even in infancy, the baby's brain is a "pattern seeker," and will begin to attune itself to his or her surroundings.  For parents, it is our first opportunity to influence how our babies self-regulate and develop important emotional skills such as calming, showing anger and upset, and dealing with stress.  During this time, if baby's environment is unstable, with parents stressed and arguing, or with no regularity in schedules, self-reguation will be poorly developed.  This doesn't have to do with rigidity or keeping minute-by-minute schedules, but instead it involves a natural "give-and-take" communication between parents and baby regarding helping the baby return to a state of calm following stress, hunger, or stimulation versus what has to be done within the family environment.  So rather than being too concerned about teaching babies sign language, infant potty skills, or alphabet recognition, babies who learn patterns of relaxation and adapting to mild stress will develop self-regulation patterns that promote good health throughout their lifetimes.  

From these few examples where we took a deeper look into the incredible work happening minute-by-minute in the infant brain, we can see that babies are more active in development than we might have imagined.  From early, shaky movements of arms and legs to repeating peek-a-boo games while a "laugh pathway" is formed among brain cells, babies' brains never stop developing and only briefly rest even during long hours of sleep.

For more information on John and Julie Gottman's research, check out their publications at Amazon.com .