For the first time, King’s College London researchers have pinpointed the brain activity that occurs in a newborn baby as it learns to associate various sensory events.
The researchers discovered that a baby’s brain activity can be altered through these associations using cutting-edge MRI scanning techniques and robotics, casting new light on the possibility of rehabilitating infants with injured brains and fostering the development of lifelong skills like speech, language, and movement.
The research, which was just published in Cerebral Cortex, draws on the idea that forming associations is a crucial aspect of a baby’s growth but that the brain activity behind this learning remained unknown and unstudied.
Lead researcher, Dr. Tomoki Arichi said “it is the first time it has been shown that babies’ brain activity can be altered through associative learning and in particular, brain responses become associated with particular stimuli, in this case, sound.”
“We also found that when a baby is learning, it actually is activating lots of different parts of the brain, so it is starting to incorporate the ‘wider network’ inside the brain which is important for processing activity,” he said.
A baby’s brain is constantly learning associations and changing its activity all the time so that it can respond to the new experiences that are around it. In terms of influencing patients and interpreting it in a wider context, what it means is that we should be thinking about how we could help with disorders of brain development from a very early stage in life because we know that experience is constantly shaping the newborn brain’s activity.
Dr. Tomoki Arichi
A customized 3D printed robot was attached to the right hand of 24 toddlers to be researched while playing them a sound of a jingling bell for six seconds and gently moving their hand.
During this time, the resulting brain activity was measured using functional MRI (fMRI). The newborns’ brain activity was then compared to that before the learning period to determine how the association between the two types of stimuli had changed after 20 minutes of learning.
Dr. Arichi said “not only do the results provide new information about what is happening inside the normal baby brain when it is learning, but also have implications for the injured brain.”
The clinicians could then be able to induce that activity by learning an association with sound, and using the sound simulation to try and amplify and rehabilitate their movement if a baby was not capable of processing movement, or if movement is not associated with normal activity inside the brain (such as might be the case in a baby with cerebral palsy).
“With our findings it raises the possibility of trying to do something to help with that through targeted stimulation and learning associations,” Dr. Arichi said.
“It is possible to induce activity inside the part of the brain that normally processes movement, for instance, just by using a single sound. This could be used in conjunction with rehabilitation or to try and help guide brain development early in life.”
In comparison to what they would have been experiencing in the womb, newborns experience a new sensory environment when they are born.
Then, and this is even more crucial for infants with brain damage, they must soon begin to comprehend their surroundings and the connections between various events.
The goal of the study was to comprehend how babies begin to learn these crucial connections between various sensory experiences and how this affects the early stages of overall brain development.
“A baby’s brain is constantly learning associations and changing its activity all the time so that it can respond to the new experiences that are around it,” Dr. Arichi said.
“In terms of influencing patients and interpreting it in a wider context, what it means is that we should be thinking about how we could help with disorders of brain development from a very early stage in life because we know that experience is constantly shaping the newborn brain’s activity.”
