The brain is the key to being human. Much of the evolutionary success of sapiens has revolved around our thinking organ, hence it is not surprising that much of the energy used during growth is destined precisely to the development of the brain. Now a research group has discovered exactly the rate at which it develops in the first days of life. And the result is surprising.
Until now, the most reliable way to measure brain development in babies was to look at the diameter of the skull and perform calculations over the next several weeks. However, new brain scanning techniques have allowed researchers to analyze this growth much more precisely.
After scanning the brains of 87 healthy babies from birth to 90 days of age, researchers at the University of California found that children’s brains develop much faster than expected. In fact, according to their data, after just three months of life our brains are already more than half the size they will be in adulthood. More specifically, the researchers found that the brain grows, right after birth, at an impressive rate of 1%, slowly slowing down to 0.4% at the end of 90 days. In total, the brain of babies grows about 64% in the first three months of life.
The area that grew the most after delivery was an area of the cerebellum involved in movement control, the size of which doubled in just three months. For its part, the brain area with the least growth was the hippocampus, an area linked to memory.
This pioneering study in its field will serve to shed some light on how certain disorders such as autism form at an early age. It will also allow researchers to analyze how the consumption of alcohol, drugs, food, etc. affects the development of the brain of babies. The study has been published in the scientific journal JAMA Neurology .
