Understanding the brain of your baby
As you’ve certainly noticed, your newborn can recognize human faces and can tell between happy and sad expressions.
As you’ve certainly noticed, your newborn can recognize human faces and can tell between happy and sad expressions. By the time a baby is born, he or she can recognize your voice, and some evidence shows that your baby can recognize stories you told during pregnancy.
Over the first year, the brain continues to develop in fascinating ways. As motor skills start to develop, the cerebellum triples in size. Sight is improved as the visual areas of the cortex grow. This is a period of learning for your child. Everything is brand new, and he or she discovers the world, one day at a time.
By the time your child is 3 months old, the hippocampus growth significantly, leading to your infant’s power of recognition. The language circuits also come together by that time, influenced heavily by the language your child hears. Even as a baby, a child can recognize a foreign language it has not heard before. Interestingly, your child loses this ability by the end of the first year. His or her brain has now been wired to your language. (TIP: If you’re bilingual, have each parent speak one language to the child. This will facilitate learning both languages later on!).
By the time your baby is one, the brain has developed enough to allow facial recognition, language recognition, recognition of a range of emotions, and perfected vision. That’s quite impressive for just one year!
