April 25th

EQ: How does the infant brain structure work?

This week I let my curiosity steer most of my studying. Now that I have a pretty basic understanding of how the infant brain structure works, and am still working on my online course, I thought I’d start taking a look at some studies that have been conducted on babies. This week I have mostly focused on the parent to the baby relationship, particularly the chemistry and changes in hormones that happen once a baby is born. I’ve always been fascinated by the way the attachment styles we carry in our daily lives with the people we are close to, directly stem from the attention we were given as babies. I decided I’d start reading more into research papers, and found a Princeton study that examined the way babies and their parent’s brains sync up. 

The researchers found that during the face-to-face sessions, the babies’ brains were synchronized with the adult’s brain in several areas known to be involved in the high-level understanding of the world — perhaps helping the children decode the overall meaning of a story or analyze the motives of the adult reading to them. So interesting! Emotional communication between parents and their children is crucial during early life, yet little is known about its neural underpinnings. Giving myself more time to read research papers on different studies has allowed me to see how the world of science puts neuroscience into action. Though I have no baby lab, perhaps one day I can put what I’ve learned into action.