you remember your baby’s first smile
have you ever thought what they were
thinking as they smiled at you for sure
that we’re letting you know that they
are happy but they were also reading
your faces and responding to it facial
expressions play a critical role in
communicating our emotions to each other
and they do so for babies too when
you’re happy they read it in your face
and they respond to it they smile back
at you when you’re sad or angry or
afraid they read that too they may frown
they may start crying but they respond
to that too so have you ever thought as
they read that emotional state in your
faces what is happening in their brain
how does their brain allow them to do
that how is their brain responding to
your emotions so this is the very
question that our research hope so
answer faces are at the center of our
social world and before language
develops babies really depend on their
ability to read faces this is their
means of communicating however we know
very little about what is happening in
their brain and how their brain
facilitates that function which is
really critical to survival
how do brain cells communicate with each
other to talk to each other to allow
this to happen so we know very little
about the baby brain it’s mostly a
mystery and we’re starting we’re now
starting to understand a little bit
about the communications between neurons
that form early life and changing in
life we know that we are born with a
very large number of connections between
brain areas and between neurons and we
know that some of these connections are
redundant some are weak and some are
unspecialized and they change in a very
profound way in the first few years of
life however we know very little about
how they change how do this change
happen in the human infant brain why are
we interested in that question we’re
interested in that question because we
would like to better understand of
course brain development and we are
interested in identifying a blueprint of
what constitutes the healthy baby brains
wiring in early life and how does that
wiring how does that communication that
talk between neurons changes in the
first few years of life however were
also interested to better understand
your developmental disorders right now
autism ADHD our developmental disorders
that are very heterogeneous and in order
to understand how they impact this
wiring of the brain we need a solid blue
print of the healthy baby brain only
once we have that
we will be able to understand these
disorders better and to develop
strategies for early intervention to be
able to either prevent or at least stop
the brain from ms wiring studying the
infant brain is a very difficult task
even the healthy baby brain the reason
is that babies are exposed to a very
unique experiences early in life both
positive and negative and those
experiences impact the way the brain
wiring evolves in very put in very
distinct ways so although there are
every baby brain has common
characteristics the neural organization
of the of the brain is also very unique
I like the term that really tansy used
this morning so I’ll steal for it for F
for a second he referred to it as the
neural tapestry that makes us who they
are who we are and that’s exactly what
it is it’s a neural tapestry that is
unique to us that takes it about two
decades to develop entirely and remains
unique both in adulthood and in infancy
in addition in infancy the rate at which
that circuitry those brain networks
develop is also very unique that makes
it difficult to identify a common
blueprint of the healthy baby brain and
to do soil we need to study a lot of
babies so with colleagues at Boston
Children’s Hospital we are in a unique
position to do that this is a laboratory
that studies that conducts large-scale
experiments involving brains so by using
a technology that has been around for a
long time were able to feed a cup of
electrons over their heads and record
brain activity electrical activity of
the brain from thousands of neurons that
are simultaneously active and talk to
each other as babies perform tasks or
looking at the world how xperiment that
are conducted involves them sitting in
their caregivers lab and looking at
faces human faces and animal faces each
with a different expression some are
happy some are angry others are fearful
and we do that over and over and over
again and at the same time record brain
activity from a large number of
electrons you can imagine that recording
electrical activity from the babe from
the baby brain from 400 babies from
hundreds of electrodes results in a very
very large amount of data it’s a norm is
an enormous amount of data so
identifying patterns that are specific
to the neuro communication to the talk
between neurons as they respond
specifically to emotional faces is a
difficult task so even in these very
control experimental conditions in the
baby brain is impacted in its getting
activated not just by the faces their
mother’s touch the fact that they may be
hungry at poor in the room the presence
of the experimenter a chair all these
may be activating their brains so
finding
this these patterns of activity that are
specific to emotional face processing is
a very difficult task for me personally
it was also a very interesting challenge
I started my career in a completely
different field I studied underwater
acoustics at MIT and that’s a branch of
science that is involves listening to
our oceans and recording massive amounts
of data from their sounds and they said
these sounds come from the movement of
waves from see life from icebergs and
even submarines we then use this very
novel big data analytics and
computational tools in order to extract
physically meaningful information from
this from this data so I decided that we
could use and we could translate these
techniques into our study of the baby
brain with a goal to extract from these
data those patterns of electrical
activity that are specific to the
communication between brain regions as
they talk to each other and process
information related to faces so here is
a diagram of brain connections that are
being activated as an infinite five
month old infant is looking at a fearful
face on top you have the front of the
brain that is involved in many different
functions including attention at the
bottom you have the back of the brain
which includes area the process visual
information and each line represents a
connection between two points in space
from which electrical activity was being
recorded on the right hand side you have
the same diagram but in addition there
are also the more the strongest
actions that are being activated in
response to that particular phase are
also shown as this baby’s age this
connections change at seven months maybe
a little bit but the changes are
profound just by 12 months you can see
without doing any statistics just
visually but there is a much smaller
number of connections that are being
activated many of those connections that
you saw before were probably redundant
and have now been eliminated so life is
shaping up the brain is training the
brain to become faster and more
efficient so these connections we were
redundant or were weak or wealth
unspecialized are now being trimmed and
this is a very exciting result in the
past we have been able to track brain
maturation in animals this is a process
that has been fairly well characterized
but it has been very difficult to do so
in humans and it particularly in the
intact brain but using these novel tools
is big analytic data analytic tools were
now able to track these developmental
changes in humans too and as a finding
it’s very exciting to see how the brain
even in a period of seven months is
finding the most efficient routes the
more the faster words let’s say to
transmit information from one point to
another between its regions so the
second set of very exciting findings is
what happened specifically to the brain
as they look at different types of
emotional faces
so when you’re happy and you’re smiling
at your 5 month old baby a set of
connections become activated in response
to that facial expression and this is
one of the of several networks that
become activated in response to faces in
general an angry face has a little bit
of a different response in the brain
there are a bit more connections that we
are being activated but look what is
happening when babies are looking at a
fearful face there are a lot more
connections a lot more a lot more
communication between large groups of
neurons that are simultaneously active
and although by 12 months you see that
process of connection elimination and
efficiency happening you can see that
the fact that the fearful face activates
a lot more fait a lot more connections
is still there fewer connections in
response to happy faces a lot more
connections in response to fearful faces
again this is a very very interesting
finding this looking at what happens at
five months is telling us that early in
life there are networks that are
specialized to be able to process
information related reading emotional
faces and these networks are
sufficiently developed even at five
months of life in addition fear
activates a lot more connections
potentially another network that is also
in place early in life
so although at five months our brains
may not be wired to make complex
decisions they are sufficiently well
wired to be able to respond to fear and
to be able to distinguish and process
information related to facial
expressions this is really profound
because it means that we are already
even whether it’s at five months or at
birth probably earlier than five months
but we can’t measure that so well we are
our brains are already or although not
yet developed they are already well
wired to be able to perform functions
that are critical to survival so why is
that exciting of course it’s exciting
because we’re now starting to understand
what constitutes a blueprint of the
healthy baby’s brain wiring early in
life when we are starting to understand
that the brain develops very rapidly
connections are being eliminated and the
brain is becoming increasingly efficient
and fast however were also beginning to
put together the blueprint so going back
to the motivation of our work being able
to have this blueprint is a critical
component to being able to understand
developmental disorders only with this
blueprint were going to be able to
understand the heterogeneity of these
disorders the way they impact each brain
affected by disorders in a very
potentially in a very unique way and we
have seen Otis moon is a good example of
a very heterogeneous disorder so only
with this blueprint we will be able to
do so so in our quest
to defeat these disorders we are now
establishing the backbone of this
research and to end the blueprint that
will allow us to do that but finally
this work emphasizes that the baby brain
the way it’s being shaped in the first
few years of life is impacted by their
micro world but they whatever surrounds
them and you are at the center of that
world so keep smiling at them thank you
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