Babies develop conscious perception from five months of age

Infants develop the ability to consciously process their environment as early as five months of age, according to a study published in the journal Science.

The team of French and Danish researchers, led by neuroscientist Sid Kouider, discovered a signal in the nervous system of infants that reliably identifies the beginning of visual consciousness, or the ability to see something and recall that you have seen it.

The team set out believing infants had the capacity for conscious reflection, but they had to overcome the barrier that babies could not report their thoughts.

They used electroencephalography (EEG) to record electrical activity in the brains of 80 infants aged five, 12 and 15 months while they were shown pictures of faces and random patterns for a fraction of a second.

When adults are aware of a stimulus, their brains show a two-stage pattern of activity. When they see a moving object, the sensors in the vision centre of the brain activate with a spike of activity.

The signal then moves from the back of the brain to the prefrontal cortex, which deals with higher-level cognition. This is known as the late slow wave.

Conscious awareness begins after the second stage of neural activity reaches a specific threshold.

The new study found this two-stage pattern of brain activity was present in the three groups of infants, though it was weaker and more drawn out in the five-month-olds.

The researchers say neurological markers of visual consciousness may help paediatricians better manage infant pain and anaesthesia.

But they note the research does not provide direct proof of consciousness. “Indeed, it is a genuine philosophical problem whether such a proof can ever be obtained from purely neurophsysiological data,” the paper said.

Professor Louise Newman, Director of the Centre for Developmental Psychiatry & Psychology at Monash University, said the study was novel in its ability to measure the way very young brains register stimuli.

But five months should not be seen as a fixed point at which infants start to process information, she said.

“Although this group has studied five months and up, my suspicion would be that if we had different techniques, young infants – from birth on – would show the capacity of registering these sorts of stimuli.

“Infants are born with quite sophisticated capacities to observe, respond to and interact with the environment, particularly the social environment,” she said.

“Very soon after birth, infants will maintain gaze with their parents or parent: they’ve got quite sophisticated visual tracking capacity from an early age.”

Professor Newman, who has undertaken behavioural studies in two- to four-month olds, said young infant brains were extremely sensitive to their mother’s emotional reaction.

“They learn that ‘if I do this, or if I smile or signal in this way, this is what usually happens’. If you manipulate that so they don’t get that response, they’re very sensitive to that and they show signs that it’s very aversive to them.”

Babies’ brains to be mapped in the womb and after birth

UK scientists have embarked on a six-year project to map how nerve connections develop in babies’ brains while still in the womb and after birth.

By the time a baby takes its first breath many of the key pathways between nerves have already been made. And some of these will help determine how a baby thinks or sees the world, and may have a role to play in the development of conditions such as autism, scientists say.

But how this rich neural network assembles in the baby before birth is relatively unchartered territory.

Researchers from Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, King’s College London, Imperial College and Oxford University aim to produce a dynamic wiring diagram of how the brain grows, at a level of detail that they say has been impossible until now.

They hope that by charting the journeys of bundles of nerves in the final three months of pregnancy, doctors will be able to understand more about how they can help in situations when this process goes wrong.

Prof David Edwards, director of the Centre for the Developing Brain, who is leading the research, says: “There is a distressing number of children in our society who grow up with problems because of things that happen to them around the time of birth or just before birth.

"It is very important to be able to scan babies before they are born, because we can capture a period when an awful lot is changing inside the brain, and it is a time when a great many of the things that might be going wrong do seem to be going wrong."

'Neural networks'

The study - known as the Developing Human Connectome Project - hopes to look at more than 1,500 babies, studying many aspects of their neurological development.

By examining the brains of babies while they are still growing in the womb, as well as those born prematurely and at full term, the scientists will try to define baselines of normal development and investigate how these may be affected by problems around birth.

And they plan to share their map with the wider research community.

Central to this project are advanced MRI scanning techniques, which the scientists say are able to pick up on details of the growing brain that have been difficult to capture until now.

While in the womb, foetuses are free to somersault in their amniotic sacs, and this constant movement has so far hindered clear images of growing brains.

But researchers at the Centre for the Developing Brain have found ways to counter the effects of these movements, building up full three-dimensional pictures while the foetus is in motion.

And by placing the MRI machine in the neonatal intensive care unit at Evelina Children’s Hospital in London they are one of the few centres in the world to have a scanner in such close proximity to the babies who often need it most, Prof Edwards says.

This means the same scanning system can be used to find out more about the brains of the sickest and smallest newborn babies, he says.

'Macro level'

Daniel Rueckert, professor of visual information processing at Imperial College London, who is also involved in the research, says: “We are trying to look at brain connectivity in two ways: firstly, from a structural perspective, to find out which parts of the brain are wired to other parts. And secondly we are looking at functional connectivity - how strongly two brain regions are linked across time and activity.”

But Prof Partha Mitra, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York state, says we need to be aware of the limitations of the technology in use.

"It would obviously be a very good thing to know more about the circuits in the developing human brain. Much of what we know hasn’t changed in a hundred years and has come from dissection studies.

"But we need to keep in mind the imaging techniques we have are indirect - we can’t open up a human brain and look at the connections while someone is alive so we rely on these non-invasive methods. But there is a big gap between the real circuits in the brain and what images can show us."

Prof Rueckert acknowledges that this map will provide a “macro-level” view of the developing brain and not be the “final answer”.

But he points to early results from the adult version of this project - the Human Connectome Project, based in the US: “There is so much evidence already from the adult project that there are significant changes in the brain that can be mapped with the technology we have now.

"It will be incredibly useful to be able to do this with the still growing and developing brain - perhaps giving us more time to intervene when things go wrong."

Children of Blind Mothers Learn New Modes of Communication

A loving gaze helps firm up the bond between parent and child, building social skills that last a lifetime. But what happens when mom is blind? A new study shows that the children of sightless mothers develop healthy communication skills and can even outstrip the children of parents with normal vision.

Eye contact is one of the most important aspects of communication, according to Atsushi Senju, a developmental cognitive neuroscientist at Birkbeck, University of London. Autistic people don’t naturally make eye contact, however, and they can become anxious when urged to do so. Children for whom face-to-face contact is drastically reduced—babies severely neglected in orphanages or children who are born blind—are more likely to have traits of autism, such as the inability to form attachments, hyperactivity, and cognitive impairment.

To determine whether eye contact is essential for developing normal communication skills, Senju and colleagues chose a less extreme example: babies whose primary caregivers (their mothers) were blind. These children had other forms of loving interaction, such as touching and talking. But the mothers were unable to follow the babies’ gaze or teach the babies to follow theirs, which normally helps children learn the importance of the eyes in communication.

Apparently, the children don’t need the help. Senju and colleagues studied five babies born to blind mothers, checking the children’s proficiency at 6 to 10 months, 12 to 15 months, and 24 to 47 months on several measures of age-appropriate communications skills. At the first two visits, babies watched videos in which a woman shifted her gaze or moved different parts of her face while corresponding changes in the baby’s face were recorded. Babies also followed the gaze of a woman sitting at a table and looking at various objects.

The babies also played with unfamiliar adults in a test that checked for autistic traits, such as the inability to maintain eye contact, not smiling in response to the adult’s smile, and being unable to switch attention from one toy to a new one. At each age, the researchers assessed the children’s visual, motor, and language skills.

When the results were compared to scores of children of “sighted” parents, the five children of blind mothers did just as well on the tests, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Learning to communicate with their blind mothers also seemed to give the babies some advantages. For example, even at the youngest age tested, the babies directed fewer gazes toward their mothers than to adults with normal vision, suggesting that they were already learning that strangers would communicate differently than would their mothers. When they were between 12 and 15 months old, the babies of blind mothers were also more verbal than were other children of the same age. And the youngest babies of blind mothers outscored their peers in developmental tests—especially visual tasks such as remembering the location of a hidden toy or switching their attention from one toy to a new one presented by the experimenter.

Senju likens their skills to those of children who grow up bilingual; the need to shift between modes of communication may boost the development of their social skills, he says. “Our results suggest that the babies aren’t passively copying the expressions of adults, but that they are actively learning and changing the way to best communicate with others.”

"The use of sighted babies of blind mothers is a clever and important idea," says developmental scientist Andrew Meltzoff of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences in Seattle. "The mother’s blindness may teach a child at an early age that certain people turn to look at things and others don’t. Apparently these little babies can learn that not everyone reacts the same way."

Meltzoff adds that there are many ways to pay attention to a child. “Doubtless, the blind mothers use touch, sounds, tugs on the arm, and tender pats on the back. Our babies want communication, love, and attention. The fact that these can come through any route is a remarkable demonstration of the adaptability of the human child.”

Low-Cost ‘Cooling Cure’ Could Avert Brain Damage in Oxygen-Starved Babies

When babies are deprived of oxygen before birth, brain damage and disorders such as cerebral palsy can occur. Extended cooling can prevent brain injuries, but this treatment is not always available in developing nations where advanced medical care is scarce. To address this need, Johns Hopkins undergraduates have devised a low-tech $40 unit to provide protective cooling in the absence of modern hospital equipment that can cost $12,000.

The device, called the Cooling Cure, aims to lower a newborn’s temperature by about 6 degrees F for three days, a treatment that has been shown to protect the child from brain damage if administered shortly after a loss of oxygen has occurred. Common causes of this deficiency are knotting of the umbilical cord or a problem with the mother’s placenta during a difficult birth. In developing regions, untrained delivery, anemia and malnutrition during pregnancy can also contribute to oxygen deprivation.

In a recent issue of the journal Medical Devices: Evidence and Research, the biomedical engineering student inventors and their medical advisors reported successful animal testing of the Cooling Cure prototype. The device is made of a clay pot, a plastic-lined burlap basket, sand, instant ice-pack powder, temperature sensors, a microprocessor and two AAA batteries. To activate it, just add water.

The device could help curtail a serious health problem called hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, which is triggered by oxygen deficiency in the brain. Globally, more than half of the newborns with a severe form of this condition die, and many of the survivors are diagnosed with cerebral palsy or other brain disorders. The problem is particularly acute in impoverished regions where pregnant women do not have easy access to medical specialists or high-tech hospital equipment. The inventors say Cooling Cure could address this issue.

“The students came up with a neat device that’s easy for non-medical people to use. It’s inexpensive and user-friendly,” said Michael V. Johnston, a Johns Hopkins School of Medicine pediatric neurology professor who advised the undergraduate team. Johnston also is chief medical officer and executive vice president of the Kennedy Krieger Institute, an internationally recognized center in Baltimore that helps children and adolescents with disorders of the brain, spinal cord and musculoskeletal systems.

Atypical brain circuits may cause slower gaze shifting in infants who later develop autism

Infants at 7 months of age who go on to develop autism are slower to reorient their gaze and attention from one object to another when compared to 7-month-olds who do not develop autism, and this behavioral pattern is in part explained by atypical brain circuits.

Those are the findings of a new study led by University of North Carolina School of Medicine researchers and published online March 20 by the American Journal of Psychiatry.

"These findings suggest that 7-month-olds who go on to develop autism show subtle, yet overt, behavioral differences prior to the emergence of the disorder. They also implicate a specific neural circuit, the splenium of the corpus callosum, which may not be functioning as it does in typically developing infants, who show more rapid orienting to visual stimuli," said Jed T. Elison, PhD, first author of the study.

Elison worked on the study, conducted as part of the Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS) Network, for his doctoral dissertation at UNC. He now is a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology. The study’s senior author is Joseph Piven, MD, professor of psychiatry, director of the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities at UNC, and the principle investigator of the IBIS Network.

The IBIS Network consists of research sites at UNC, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Washington in Seattle, the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, and the University of Alberta are currently recruiting younger siblings of children with autism and their families for ongoing research.

"Difficulty in shifting gaze and attention that we found in 7-month-olds may be a fundamental problem in autism," Piven said. "Our hope is that this finding may help lead us to early detection and interventions that could improve outcomes for individuals with autism and their families."

The study included 97 infants: 16 high-risk infants later classified with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), 40 high-risk infants not meeting ASD criteria (i.e., high-risk-negative) and 41 low-risk infants. For this study, infants participated in an eye-tracking test and a brain scan at 7 months of age a clinical assessment at 25 months of age.

The results showed that the high-risk infants later found to have ASD were slower to orient or shift their gaze (by approximately 50 miliseconds) than both high-risk-negative and low-risk infants. In addition, visual orienting ability in low-risk infants was uniquely associated with a specific neural circuit in the brain: the splenium of the corpus callosum. This association was not found in infants later classified with ASD.

The study concluded that atypical visual orienting is an early feature of later emerging ASD and is associated with a deficit in a specific neural circuit in the brain.

New Early Warning System for the Brain Development of Babies

A new research technique, pioneered by Dr. Maria Angela Franceschini, was published in JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) on March 14th. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School have developed a non-invasive optical measurement system to monitor neonatal brain activity via cerebral metabolism and blood flow.

Of the nearly four million children born in the United States each year, 12% are born preterm, 8% are born with low birth weight, and 1-2% of infants are at risk for death associated with respiratory distress. The result is an average infant mortality rate of 6 deaths per 1,000 live births. These statistics, though low compared to those of 50 or even 20 years ago, are troubling both to parents and to clinicians. Until recently there were no effective bedside methods to screen for brain injury or monitor injury progression that can contribute to developmental abnormalities or infant mortality. Dr. Franceschini’s new system does both.

“We want to measure cerebral vascular development and brain health in babies,” Dr. Franceschini tells us. Because neuronal metabolism is hard to measure directly, scientists instead evaluate cerebral oxygen metabolism, which highly corresponds to neuronal metabolism. Dr. Franceschini and her team have developed a near infrared optical system to quantify cerebral oxygen metabolism by measuring blood oxygen saturation and blood flow.

The technology is an improvement on continuous-wave near-infrared spectroscopy (CWNIRS), which measures oxygen saturation but does not provide long-term or real time brain monitoring. Instead, frequency-domain near-infrared spectroscopy (FDNIRS) is used in conjunction with diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) to get a more robust evaluation of infant health. Dr. Franceschini explains, “CWNIRS has been used for many years but it only provides relative measurements of blood oxygen saturation. Our technology allows quantification of multiple vascular parameters and evaluation of oxygen metabolism which gives a more direct picture of infant distress.”

“This technology will let us monitor babies who may be having seizures, cerebral hemorrhages, or other cerebral distresses and may allow us to expedite treatment,” says Dr. Franceschini, who plans to develop and streamline this technology to one that nurses can use clinically. “We chose to publish in JoVE because it is important to show how these measurements can be done and this publication lets us reach early adopters.”

Infant brains imply adult ills: Researchers study traits in babies as young as two weeks

Brain images from newborns are giving scientists a glimpse of the future - not just into the lives of their tiny subjects but also paths to treatment for adult patients with schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill found degeneration in the brains of 2-week-old infants, a result considered a “game changer” for the field of brain research, said Jay Giedd, a brain imaging specialist for the National Institute of Mental Health.

"Our original model was that the brain was fine until someone got the illness," Giedd said. "This work shows that these changes are there probably from conception. It also suggests that while these traits don’t cause brain damage, they set up the brain to be slightly different."

The researchers examined scans of 272 newborns. About 15 percent were found to have smaller medial temporal lobe sections. “The medial temporal lobe plays an important role in memory,” said Rebecca Knickmeyer, a UNC assistant professor of psychiatry and co-author of the research, published last month in Cerebral Cortex, an online journal.

"The idea is that this is an anatomical vulnerability. If you start out with less, you might hit active symptoms earlier in life."

The researchers also found specific gene traits associated with Alzheimer’s in babies with the smaller media temporal lobes.

"We were interested because it was generally known that people’s genes contribute to psychiatric conditions later in life, but pretty much all the existing studies were in adults," Knickmeyer said. "Our question was ‘When were these genes exerting their effect?’ Now we know it’s much earlier than previously thought, perhaps before birth."

Research such as this would benefit from the Brain Activity Map under development through the National Institutes of Health. The project’s 10-year goal is to create a map of the brain’s nearly 30,000 genes as well as the circuitry system that transmits information via brain waves.

President Obama mentioned the project in his State of the Union address and is expected to include funding for the project in the upcoming federal budget. Foundations and some private companies have also expressed interest in assisting in the project, which is expected to push brain research to a higher level.

"As brain scientists, we were giddy to hear this," Giedd said. "Motivation is sky high. If they fund this, we believe our work will really take off." Giedd, who is familiar with but did not participate in the infant brain study, said the search for treatments or cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, autism, schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease have been stymied by the many mysteries that remain regarding how the brain functions.

"If we understood more about the mechanisms that cause these diseases, we could step in and do something about it," Giedd said. "The brain is so complicated. Most diseases don’t just involve one or two or even three genes. It might be 60 or 100 genes, along with upbringing, diet and environment. There are so many parameters to the equation."

Knickmeyer said her research team plans to follow up with the newborns as they grow into adulthood to see whether the traits displayed by infants change over time or remain stable throughout their lives.

Daniel Kaufer, cognitive neurology and memory disorders chief for UNC’s Department of Neurology, said he thinks the time is right for great advances in brain research.

"We are at the crossroads of two important events: the realization that brain disorders may occur long before symptoms begin, and the development of brain imaging technology to record brain processes," Kaufer said.

Learning more about the brain’s functions through gene mapping may be the third piece of the puzzle. “Right now, there is no map of the human brain,” said Murali Doraiswamy, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine.

Doraiswamy said the brain carries thousands of genes that influence thought, perception, emotion, memory and other mental activities. “We want to find out how much is nature and how much is nurture,” he added. “I think we are at the forefront of something very insightful, but also a little frightening.”

MAPPING A NEW WORLD

The Brain Activity Map is being planned as a decade-long research effort to create a comprehensive outline of the structure of the human brain and its neurons.

Funding is expected to come from a variety of sources, including the federal government, private industry and research foundations.

Details of the project have not yet been made public. But it is being compared to the DNA sequencing effort known as the Human Genome Project, which ran from 1990 to 2003 and cost $3.8 billion.

Study shows human brain able to discriminate syllables three months prior to birth

A team of French researchers has discovered that the human brain is capable of distinguishing between different types of syllables as early as three months prior to full term birth. As they describe in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team found via brain scans that babies born up to three months premature are capable of some language processing.

Many studies have been conducted on full term babies to try to understand the degree of mental capabilities at birth. Results from such studies have shown that babies are able to distinguish their mother’s voice from others, for example, and can even recognize the elements of short stories. Still puzzling however, is whether some of what newborns are able to demonstrate is innate, or learned immediately after birth. To learn more, the researchers enlisted the assistance of several parents of premature babies and their offspring. Babies born as early as 28 weeks (full term is 37 weeks) had their brains scanned using bedside functional optical imaging, while sounds (soft voices) were played for them.

Three months prior to full term, the team notes, neurons in the brain are still migrating to what will be their final destination locations and initial connections between the upper brain regions are still forming—also neural linkages between the ears and brain are still being created. All of this indicates a brain that is still very much in flux and in the process of becoming the phenomenally complicated mass that humans are known for, which would seem to suggest that very limited if any communication skills would have developed.

The researchers found, however, that even at a time when the brain hasn’t fully developed, the premature infants were able to tell the difference between female versus male voices, and to distinguish between the syllables “ba” and “ga”. They noted also that the same parts of the brain were used by the infants to process sounds as adults. This, the researchers conclude, shows that linguistic connections in the brain develop before birth and because of that do not need to be acquired afterwards, suggesting that at least some abilities are innate.