These are my notes from reading Lise Elliot’s What’s Going On in There?.

“Why Babies Love to Be Bounced: The Precocious Sense of Balance and Motion”.

This chapter talks about the vestibular sense, i.e. the sense of balance and movement.

A few interesting facts I learned:

Already at 10 weeks, a fetus reacts to movement.

  • Vestibular stimulation (chair spinning) can help the development of babies’ motor skills and reflexes

  • (more…)

    These are my notes from reading Lise Elliot’s What’s Going On in There?.

    “The Importance of Touch”.

    This chapter goes through the development of the sense of touch, which is the first sense to emerge and the most advanced one at birth. It also covers the related senses of pain and temperature. Touching is shown to be immensely important for the normal development of a baby, with babies raised in isolation growing up stunted physically, mentally and emotionally (or dying in early age).

    A few interesting facts I learned:

    • Nerve signals for touch, temperature, pain and proprioception go along very similar, parallel pathways.
    • Touch signals are mapped to a body map in the brain (which I knew). This map needs stimulation to develop: if it gets no signals from a certain part of the body, the corresponding neurons do not develop normally. In humans this development happens before the baby is born.
    • The sense of touch is diffuse in babies. Over time that map of the body grows sharper and babies get better at distinguishing which part of the body they felt the touch on.
    • Touch develops head to toe. The face is most sensitive to begin with, and remains more sensitive than the hands until the child is 5 years old.
    • Babies (human and animal) need touch for their normal development. Babies who get adequate food and medical attention, but are not touched and held, grow up sick and stunted. Massage is beneficial for babies and children with all sorts of medical problems.

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    These are my notes from reading Lise Elliot’s What’s Going On in There?.

    “How Birth Affects the Brain”.

    This chapter describes the effects on the baby of labour, birth, and the drugs used in childbirth. The drugs, while beneficial for the mother, are probably overused from the baby’s point of view.

    In general women today are quite careful about what they put in their bodies during pregnancy, so it can seem a little odd that many lose all caution on the last day of gestation, just when the baby is making the difficult transition to surviving on his own and will no longer have the benefit of his mother’s circulation to clear drugs out of his system. […] All analgesics and anesthetics used in childbirth are serious controlled substances, in another league entirely from the occasional Tylenol or antihistamine that many women worry about during pregnancy.

    A few interesting facts I learned:

    • The birth itself may be triggered by the brain of the baby. That’s how it works in some other species.
    • Stress hormones, which speed up breathing and heart rate in adults, have the opposite effect in babies, which helps them conserve oxygen during birth. They also give some last-minute help to mature baby’s lungs.
    • For some reason, they don’t use nitrous oxide for pain relief in the US – it isn’t even mentioned in this chapter!

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    These are my notes from reading Lise Elliot’s What’s Going On in There?.

    “Prenatal Influences on the Developing Brain”.

    This chapter goes through all the things that can affect the development of the fetus – mostly negatively. Nutrition (lack of), alcohol, drugs, chemicals, infections, stress, etc etc. On a more positive note there is a section about folic acid and how it helps prevent neural tube defects.

    A few interesting facts I learned:

    • There is enough folic acid in normal multivitamins for the needs of pregnant women. There is no evidence that the extra amount in specialist pills is useful (or unsafe, for that matter).
    • A woman needs about 300 kcal extra per day during pregnancy, and 500–600 during breastfeeding.

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    These are my notes from reading Lise Elliot’s What’s Going On in There?.

    “The Basic Biology of Brain Development”.

    This chapter covers prenatal development of the brain and the nervous system, and an overview of the structure of nerve cells.

    A few interesting facts I learned:

    • The nervous system starts out flat as a pancake, then curls up into a groove, and then a tube.
    • The brain cortex is made up of units perpendicular to its surface. More intelligent species have more grooves in their brains, and thus a larger surface.
    • Initially too many connections are created between neurons, leading to noisy connections. This excess is pruned during early childhood.

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    These are my notes from reading Lise Elliot’s What’s Going On in There?.

    Chapter 1, short and light, gives a brief overview of the nature/nurture issue, and explains the author’s reasons for writing this book.

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    As I’ve started reading Lise Eliot’s What’s Going On in There, I’ve realised that my brain, at least, works the same now as it did in university. I cannot read a work of non-fiction and expect to remember its contents, unless I actively work with the text. Exercises, quizzes, taking notes, underlining and summarising… Otherwise I read, take in the text, think “Aah, this is interesting!”, and yet I remember very little of it later.

    After reading 2 chapters of this book I looked back and realised I couldn’t tell you a single thing I’d learned from it. So I’m going back to the beginning and starting over, this time taking notes. And since typing is faster than writing by hand, I’m going to post my notes here.