Developmental neurobiology

-they are faced with the challenge of learning how to navigate a lot of sensations
-organizing the sights and sounds of the world is a difficult task, but babies seem to do it
-they actively explore and construct a view of the world
-babies are every sensitive: a newborn can identify his mother's voice and respond to the fragrance
of her body and the taste of her milk, even recognize her face
-the distance that babies like to look at most of all is the distance of the mother's face when she's
holding the baby
-by two days of age babies can recognize their mother's face from sight alone
-vision is the last sense to develop: an immature eye is sending signals to a still developing brain,
what newborns see looks something like a faded photograph if we're looking at it through a tube
-the immature brain can't handle excess stimulation so the eye is dampening down that external
stimulation making it something that the brain can handle much better
-no matter how dampened that stimulation is, it is critical

-what happens if the brain doesn't get the stimulation it needs

-the light falls upon the eye but it never reaches its destination
-Holly is five weeks old, healthy, normal baby but her right eye is clouded by a faulty lense – a
cataract that must be removed at once or she will never see like a normal child
-of the baby has a cataract, the images that are supposed to be getting in, they are critical for the
brain to be able to develop the vision, those images aren't getting there and as a result the brain is
not getting the opportunity to experience vision and go through its normal visual development
which allows it to eventually create the healthy normal vison
-when grandma has a cataract, all of her connections between eye and brain have been formed years
ago and they remain stable over time, even if they're not used, they don't go away
-when a child has a cataract – use it or lose it – it's a period of decision making and pruning of
connections
-even just one or two months of missing visual experience from birth can have permanent
consequences on the way the brain is wired up and what it can do later on
-a week after the operation, the eye has healed and a contact lense is inserted into the eye, the baby
will need it for the rest of her life
-for the first time, holly's right eye is sending clear images to the brain
-for at least five years until her visual development stabilizes she will have to wear a patch for the
most of her waking hours over her good left eye or her brain will never learn to use the right eye
-the weak eye would have to fight for cortical connection with a normal strong good eye (which
will, if allowed, take over all the brain space leaving nothing for the deprived eye which will get
weaker and weaker)
-even within 10 mins of first being able to see, holly can see as well as a normal newborn
-the brain can mature up to some point without any visual experience, up to the newborn levels
-they don't see as well as babies their own age, but they catch up quickly
-within one hour there is a significant improvement – although the brain is no better than the brain
of a normal newborn who had the absence of visual experience, once it gets that visual experience
the brain is sent into action faster than it would in normal development
-as cataract babies grow, their vision continues to improve until their first birthday
-they begin falling behind after a year but on average with early treatment and complying with
doctor's instructions, the eye can end up being a completely good functioning eye
-7 months since the surgery: holly's vision is improving, her cataract was removed early in time for
her developing brain to learn to see