Babies brains can follow a beat as soon as they&#8...

What’s Happening

Let’s talk about Brain scans and signals show babies can sort images and sense rhythm, offering new insight into how infant brains are wired from the start.

News Neuroscience Babies brains can follow a beat as soon as theyre born Two new studies show that infants can categorize some images and sense interruptions in rhythms Keeping a ba a function MRI isn’t easy. But that’s exactly what researchers attempted to test how babies’ brains categorize visual objects. (wild, right?)

Cusack Lab By Nora Bradford 12 hours ago this: via email (Opens in new window) Email Click to on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Click to on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit Click to on X (Opens in new window) X Click to print (Opens in new window) Print For more than a century, psychologists thought that the infant experience was, as the psychologist and philosopher William James famously put it, a “blooming, buzzing confusion.

The Details

” But new research suggests babies are born with a surprisingly sophisticated neurological toolkit that can organize the visual world into categories and pick out the beat in a song . In the first of two new studies, neuroscientists managed a rare feat: performing functional MRI (fMRI) scans on more than 100 awake 2-month-old infants to see how their brains categorize visual objects.

FMRI requires near-stillness, which makes scanning babies notoriously difficult. While the infants lay in the machines, images of animals, food, household objects and other familiar items appeared above their heads like “an IMAX for babies,” says Cliona O’Doherty, a developmental neuroscientist at Stanford University who conducted the work at Trinity College Dublin.

Why This Matters

For our We summarize the week’s scientific breakthroughs every Thursday. “MRI is difficult even under ‘ideal’ circumstances when research participants can follow instructions to hold still,” says Scott Johnson, a developmental psychologist at UCLA who was not involved in the study. “Babies can’t take instruction, so these researchers must have the patience of saints.

Scientists and researchers are watching this development closely.

The Bottom Line

“Babies can’t take instruction, so these researchers must have the patience of saints.

What’s your take on this whole situation?