#developing brain

Fish oil fatty acids must for your kid’s brain

New York, April 16 : The fatty acids that fish oil contains are vitally important to the developing brain, says a new study, suggesting that women maintain a balanced diet rich in these fatty acids for themselves during pregnancy and for their babies after birth.

Dietary deficiencies in the type of fatty acids found in fish and other foods can limit brain growth during foetal development and…

New Discoveries about the Developing Brain

 The Summer 2010 issue of Future Reflections included a short announcement about a study on brain development in blind and sighted children that was being conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Now, a year and a half later, the study is well underway. In this article Hilary Richardson, a member of the research team, describes the study and discusses some of the preliminary findings.

Right now is an incredibly exciting time to be a developmental neuroscientist. A developmental neuroscientist studies the minds and brains of children in order to understand how we grow and learn and how a baby’s mind transforms to that of an adult. By studying young children, scientists can ask questions about how the brain supports learning a language, how and when we learn that other people may hold beliefs that are different from our own, and how we come to understand and make reasonable moral evaluations. Studying how the mind and brain develop will illuminate which mental abilities we are born with and how we are shaped by our experiences.

In the past ten years it has become possible to ask questions such as these by studying children’s brain development with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI is a very safe procedure we can use to take pictures of people’s brains. Images that show the brain’s anatomy, or shape, appear as still photographs. The brain’s function is shown through a functional MRI, or fMRI, as a series of images over time, much like a movie. MRI technology lets us study the brain as it does the things we otherwise take for granted in our everyday lives, such as processing language, perceiving social interactions, and interpreting visual images. We can study how the brain typically processes these stimuli and how this neural response changes with age. We can also study how mind and brain development are different in children who have unique developmental experiences, such as children who are blind.

The MIT Study

I am fortunate to be involved in this research through my work with Dr. Marina Bedny and Dr. Rebecca Saxe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These researchers have already studied language and social cognition in blind adults, using behavioral tests (question and answer) and fMRI. Their research shows that the part of the brain that is used for seeing in sighted people gets recycled for many other jobs in blind people, including understanding language. Scientists used to think that only a small number of specially evolved regions, unique to the human brain, could ever be involved in processing language. By contrast, recent studies suggest the brain is extremely adaptable; parts of the brain typically used for vision can switch to understanding the meanings of words and sentences. This remarkable discovery highlights how experience dramatically alters brain development.

To understand better how and when the brain accomplishes this change, we are now working with children who are blind. Does this change happen during childhood, or does it occur as the result of aging or learning to read Braille? Does the visual part of the brain take on a specific part of language processing? What does the development of the typical language brain regions look like in children who are blind?

From a practical perspective, the results of this study may eventually have an impact on educational planning for blind children. In the more distant future, the results may inform decisions about the timing of possible treatments for the restoration of vision. We always caution parents that this study will have no direct benefit for their children. However, we take this research program as an opportunity to communicate with children, their families, and the blind community about our studies and about neuroscience in general, and we learn a great deal from the families that take part in our studies.

So far, twelve congenitally blind children between the ages of four and seventeen have participated in our study. We are actively recruiting more blind children from across the country to come visit us. When a family is interested in the study, we talk with the parents and child about the research and explain what the testing day is like. If the family wishes to participate, we arrange a trip to MIT. Though the testing only takes about half a day, most families stay in Cambridge for one to two nights, and we cover travel expenses.

The Testing Day

We try to make the testing day a fun learning experience, and we share with children the excitement of being a part of real science. We help the children become familiar with the scanning environment by practicing in a “mock” scanner. While they are in the practice scanner, children listen to music or hear a story.

Next we head to the real scanner. The children are given an opportunity to learn about the scanner by touch. We explain how it works, how we use it to learn about the brain, and what questions we are hoping to answer. When the child is ready, we start the scan.

During the first part of the scan, the child listens to a story or music of his/her choice while we take anatomical still photographs of the brain. Then the child plays a game that involves listening to stories and music while we measure brain activity related to the various types of stimuli. Using this task we can study the response to language and music in different parts of the brain, including regions typically recruited for vision.

The whole scan takes thirty to forty minutes. After the scan, we take a break and eat lunch. The last part of the testing day is the behavioral testing. A certified teacher of the visually impaired (TVI) administers tasks that assess Braille reading, language, and math ability. Throughout the day the children are encouraged to take breaks and are provided with snacks. Each child receives an Amazon gift card and small brain-related prizes for participating in the testing. We also print pictures of the child’s brain for the parents to keep.

The families that have taken part in our studies have enjoyed their experiences at our lab. For Marina, Rebecca, and me, this project is incredibly fun and interesting. We have had the opportunity to meet some fantastic kids, and we have immensely enjoyed getting to know them and their families.

Preliminary Findings

Though we are still collecting data, our preliminary findings suggest that the functional reorganization of the brain that we have observed in blind adults begins in early childhood. We find that some visual areas respond to language and others to music in children as young as four years of age. This project is an important step toward understanding how the mind and brain develop, how abstract knowledge such as language is represented in the brain, and how experience plays a role in each of these processes.

Our findings so far encourage us to continue and expand our work. In future studies we will work with a more varied population of blind children, including those with some residual vision, in order to see how varying levels of visual experience affect brain development. Looking forward, we are eager to expand our relationships with blind individuals, parents of blind children, educators, researchers in related fields, and clinicians. Our work has benefited tremendously from the help of the blind community. We are also incredibly grateful to the families that have made our research possible. We extend a warm thank-you to the National Association of Parents of the Visually Impaired (NAPVI) and to the National Braille Press for their encouragement and support.

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CommonHealth: How Playing Music Affects The Developing Brain | WBUR

Remember “Mozart Makes You Smarter”?

A 1993 study of college students showed them performing better on spatial reasoning tests after listening to a Mozart sonata. That led to claims that listening to Mozart temporarily increases IQs — and to a raft of products purporting to provide all sorts of benefits to the brain.

(more…)

Childhood poverty and chronic stress may lead to problems regulating emotions as an adult, according to research published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Our findings suggest that the stress-burden of growing up poor may be an underlying mechanism that accounts for the relationship between poverty as a child and how well your brain works as an adult," said Dr. K. Luan Phan, professor of psychiatry at University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine and senior author of the study.

The study was conducted by researchers at UIC, Cornell University, University of Michigan and University of Denver.

The researchers found that test subjects who had lower family incomes at age 9 exhibited, as adults, greater activity in the amygdala, an area in the brain known for its role in fear and other negative emotions. These individuals showed less activity in areas of the prefrontal cortex, an area in the brain thought to regulate negative emotion.

Amygdala and prefrontal cortex dysfunction has been associated with mood disorders including depression, anxiety, impulsive aggression and substance abuse, according to the authors.

Phan said it is well known that the negative effects of poverty can set up "a cascade of increasing risk factors" for children to develop physical and psychological problems as an adult. But it has not been known how childhood poverty might affect brain function, particularly in emotional regulation. The ability to regulate negative emotions can provide protection against the physical and psychological health consequences of acute and chronic stress, he said.

The study examined associations between childhood poverty at age 9, exposure to chronic stressors during childhood, and neural activity in areas of the brain involved in emotional regulation at age 24.

The 49 participants were part of a longitudinal study of childhood poverty. Data on family income, stressor exposures, physiological stress responses, socio-emotional development, and parent-child interactions were collected. About half the participants were from low-income families.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers evaluated the participants' brain activity as they performed an emotional-regulation task. Subjects were asked to try to suppress negative emotions while viewing pictures, using a cognitive coping strategy.

"This serves as a brain-behavioral index of a person's day-to-day ability to cope with stress and negative emotions as they encounter them," Phan said.

A study published today in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests an association between smoking during pregnancy and increased risk for developing bipolar disorder (BD) in adult children. Researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Department of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, in collaboration with scientists at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland.

, California, evaluated offspring from a large cohort of pregnant women who participated in the Child Health and Development Study (CHDS) from 1959-1966. The study was based on 79 cases and 654 comparison subjects. Maternal smoking during pregnancy was associated with a twofold increased risk of BD in their offspring.

Smoking during pregnancy is known to contribute to significant problems in utero and following birth, including low birth weight and attentional difficulties. This is the first study to suggest an association between prenatal tobacco exposure and BD, a serious psychiatric illness marked by significant shifts in mood that alternate between periods of depression and mania. Symptoms typically become noticeable in the late teens or early adulthood.

"These findings underscore the value of ongoing public health education on the potentially debilitating, and largely preventable, consequences that smoking may have on children over time," said Alan Brown, MD, MPH, senior author and Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University and Mailman School of Public Health.

The authors wrote: "Much of the psychopathology associated with prenatal tobacco exposure clusters around the 'externalizing' spectrum, which includes attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), conduct disorder (CD), and substance abuse disorders. Although not diagnostically classified along the externalizing spectrum, BD shares a number of clinical characteristics with these disorders, including inattention, irritability, loss of self-control, and proclivity to drug/alcohol use." In effect, children who were exposed to tobacco smoke in utero may exhibit some symptoms and behaviors that are found in BD.

Every hourly increase in daily television watching at 29 months of age is associated with diminished vocabulary and math skills, classroom engagement (which is largely determined by attention skills), victimization by classmates, and physical prowess at kindergarten, according to Professor Linda Pagani of the University of Montreal and the CHU Sainte-Justine children’s hospital. “This is the first time ever that a stringently controlled associational birth cohort study has looked at and found a relationship between too much toddler screen time and kindergarten risks for poor motor skills and psychosocial difficulties, like victimization by classmates,” Pagani said. “These findings suggest the need for better parental awareness and compliance with existing viewing recommendations put forth by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The AAP discourages watching television during infancy and recommends not more than two hours per day beyond age 2. It seems that every extra hour beyond that has a remarkably negative influence.”

Journalists are welcome to use the following responses in their own reports. Interviews and further information (including the original French text of this document) can be obtained by contacting media relations at the University of Montreal. The University of Montreal is officially known as Université de Montréal (www.umontreal.ca).

Question: Why did you conduct this study? Pagani: Much of the research on school readiness has focused on how kindergarten characteristics predict later success. Kindergarten entry characteristics predict long-term psycho-social adjustment and economic characteristics like income and academic attainment. Being innovative, my focus has been to examine what predicts kindergarten entry characteristics. Adding further originality, I also wanted to focus on neglected yet crucial aspects of school readiness such as motor skills, which predict later physical activity and reading skills, likelihood of being “picked-on”, which predict social difficulties, and skills at linked to doing what you are supposed to be doing when having been given instructions, which are in turn linked to attention systems that are regulated by the brain’s frontal lobe development.

Question: Who participated in this study? Pagani: 991 girls and 1006 boys in Quebec whose parents reported their television viewing behaviour as part of the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development.

Question: How did you come up with the figure of an extra hour of TV? Pagani: The standard deviation is a commonly used statistic tool that tells us what is within a normal range compared to the average. One standard deviation from the average daily amount of television viewed by thetoddlers in this sample (105 minutes) is 72 minutes. Some of the children who participated in the study were two or even three standard deviations away from the average, and their kindergarten indicators were correspondingly worse than those who were one standard deviation away.

Question: Where did you examine television viewing? Pagani: This study only looks at the most common form of screen time, which is in the home. However, it may be an underestimate because many child care settings use television as an activity during care giving.

  The ability to recognize oneself in the mirror is a basic aspect of self-awareness. CREDIT: Dreamstime

Some of the more awkward growth spurts that mark adolescence occur in the brain, and a new study suggests certain developmental changes might make teens ultra-sensitive to the gaze of other people.

Teens are famous for their self-consciousness and suspicion that everyone is watching them. In the new study, compared with children and adults, teens who thought one of their peers was looking at them experienced much stronger emotional, physiological and neural reactions, the researchers found.

In their experiment, 69 participants, ranging in age from 8 to 22 years old, were told they would be testing a new video camera as they lied down in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. The participants were told a same-sex peer of similar age would be watching the video feed in another room. There was not actually a camera in the brain-scanning machine, but the participants had a screen in front of them indicating whether the camera was off, warming up, or on.

"We were concerned about whether simply being looked at was a strong enough 'social evaluation' to evoke emotional, physiological and neural responses," study researcher Leah Somerville, a psychological scientist at Harvard University, said in a statement. "Our findings suggest that being watched, and to some extent anticipating being watched, were sufficient to elicit self-conscious emotional responses at each level of measurement."

Those levels of measurement included the participants' self-reported embarrassment, physiological arousal, and activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), a late-developing region of the brain, the researchers said.

"Our study identifies adolescence as a unique period of the life span in which self-conscious emotion, physiological reactivity, and activity in specific brain areas converge and peak in response to being evaluated by others," Somerville added.

The brain scans also revealed that teens had greater connectivity between the MPFC and striatum, an area thought to be involved in motivated behaviors and actions. This pathway could be the route by which social evaluation influences behavior for teens, which could explain why they tend to engage in riskier activities when they are with their peers, Somerville and colleagues say.