The odds are against human babies!

Interesting article;

In the fable, the tortoise wins the race because the hare takes a nap. But, if anything, human infants nap even more than kittens! And unlike the noble tortoise, babies are helpless, and more to the point, hopeless. They could not learn the basic skills necessary to their independent survival even if they tried. How do human babies manage to turn things around in the end?

In a recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Sharon Thompson-Schill, Michael Ramscar and Evangelia Chrysikou make the case that this very helplessness is what allows human babies to advance far beyond other animals. They propose that our delayed cortical development is precisely what enables us to acquire the cultural building blocks, such as language, that make up the foundations of human achievement. Indeed, the trio makes clear that our early vulnerability is an evolutionary “engineering trade-off,” much like the human larynx—which, while it facilitates the intricate productions of human speech, is actually quite a precarious adaptation for anyone trying to swallow safely. In the same way, they suggest, our ability to learn language comes at the price of an extended period of cognitive immaturity.

This claim hinges on a peculiar and unique feature of our cognitive architecture: the stunningly slow development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). While other animals’ brain regions development in synchrony, in humans, the development of the PFC lags far behind that of other areas. The PFC is the swath of gray matter that makes up the anterior frontal lobes, and functionally, it appears to be heavily implicated in a wide-range of sophisticated planning and attention driven behaviors. Indeed, it is often referred to as the “control” center of the brain. One of its main functions appears to be that of selectively filtering information from the senses, allowing us to attend to specific actions, goals, or tasks. For this reason, “cognitive control” tasks are thought to be one of the best assessors of PFC function and maturity, and they are tests that young children reliably, and ignominiously, fail.

Please Help Avoid Misdiagnosing Development Disorders

It is estimated that one in six children suffer from developmental disorders, including mental retardation, autism spectrum disorders, learning disorders, attentional disorders, genetic disorders, sleep disorders.  However, despite the fact that all these disorders originate in the brain, most of them are diagnosed solely by looking at behavioural symptoms without ever looking at the brain!  That is, they are diagnosed behaviourally rather than neurologically.  This often results in an incomplete or inaccurate diagnosis....

Almost 50% of the children previously diagnosed with autism are found to be suffering from some degree of brain seizure activity that is undetectable to the eye.  In some cases, these seizures are the cause of the child's autism-like symptoms.  In other cases, these seizures are not causal, but comorbid (coexistent) to autism and are exacerbating the child's symptoms.  And in a few cases, the seizures are mild and possibly unrelated to, or a consequence of, the child's symptoms.  In the cases where these seizures are the cause of the symptoms, once the seizures have been detected and treated, the level and speed of recovery in the children has been remarkable.

Learn more about the work of Dr. Aditi Shankardass