Brain Rules for Baby Read Online Free PDF Page B

developing.

When can your baby hear you, smell you?
    The purpose of that furiously fast (then frustratingly slow) production is to build a functioning brain, one that can receive and respond to inputs. So the questions for prying parents become: What do fetuses
know, and when do they know it? When is your baby capable of sensing, say, taps on your belly?
    The developmental principle to remember is this: The brain spends the first half of pregnancy setting up its neuroanatomical shop, blissfully ignoring most parental involvement. (I am referring to well-intentioned interference. Drugs, including alcohol and nicotine, clearly can damage a baby’s brain during pregnancy.) The second half of pregnancy is a different story. As brain development moves from mostly neurogenesis to mostly synaptogenesis, the fetus begins to exhibit much greater sensitivity to the outer world. The wiring of cells is much more subject to outside influences—including you—than the act of creating them in the first place.
The senses develop strategically
    What is baby’s approach to constructing the brain’s sensory systems? Ask paratroop commanders. They will tell you that successfully fighting a war involves three steps: parachuting into enemy territory, securing hostile real estate, and communicating back to home base. This process gives central command both knowledge about progress and “situational awareness” of what to do next. Something similar happens to sensory systems in the brain as they develop in utero.
    Like parachutists securing enemy territory, neurons invade a given region of the brain and establish various sensory bases. Neurons that hook up to the eyes will eventually be used for vision, ears for hearing, nose for smelling. Once their areas are secured, these cells will establish linkages that help them reach out to the perceptual command-and-control structures also growing up within the brain. (In the real world of the brain, there are many central commands.) These CEOLIKE structures, which give us perceptual abilities, are busily capturing territory just like the paratroopers. And they are some of the last areas in utero to wire up properly. This means neurons hooked up to the eyes or ears or nose might receive a busy signal when they try to
report back to their home base. Because of this odd timing, parts of a baby’s brain can respond to sensory stimulation before a baby can actually perceive being stimulated.
    But once babies can perceive inputs like sounds and smells, starting around the second half of the pregnancy, they become precisely attuned to them. And they subconsciously remember. Sometimes it’s spooky, as legendary conductor Boris Brott discovered one day.
Babies remember
    “It just jumped out at me!” Brott exclaimed to his mother. Brott had been at the podium of a symphony orchestra, conducting a piece of music for the first time, when the cellist began to play. He instantly knew he’d heard this piece before. This was no casual reminder of some similar but forgotten work: Brott could predict exactly what musical phrase was coming next. He could anticipate the flow of the entire work during the course of the rehearsal; he knew how to conduct it even when he lost his place in the score.
    Freaking out, he called his mother, a professional cellist. She asked for the name of the piece of music, then burst out laughing. It was the piece she had been rehearsing when she was pregnant with him. The cello was up against her late-pregnancy mid-abdomen, a structure filled with sound-conducting fluids, fully capable of relaying musical information to her unborn son. His developing brain was sensitive enough to record the musical memories. “All the scores I knew by sight were the ones she had played while she was pregnant with me”, Brott later said in an interview. Incredible stuff for an organ not even zero years old.
    This is but one of many examples of how babies in the womb can pick up information from the