#brainscan

#brainscan

Not Listening to Mom is a Normal Part of Growing Up, According to ScienceThe development of the MRI has done wonders for neuroscience and brain research. Previous research shows that the brains of infants, toddlers, and children are uniquely stimulated by their mother's voice. New research shows how that changes at about age 13, which signals the beginning of a teenager's separation from parents. The change in adolescence shows that teenagers become more receptive to all kinds of voices, compared to younger children. However, stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain begin to react more to novel voices, meaning those not quite as familiar as family, and less to one's mother's voice. By the end of the experiment, the scientists could guess how old the subjects were by just looking at data from the brain scans! The effect has been long known by parents. However, the data shows how the change is controlled by biology and is quite consistent from one teen to the next. So when your kid starts to value the voices and opinions of their friends over Mom's, rest assured it's just part of growing up. Read about the experiments that showed these results at Stanford Medicine. -via Damn Interesting(Image credit: SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget) #brain #voice #brainscan #teenager #adolescence

120,000 Brain Scans Show How Brains Grow and Shrink Over a LifetimeHuman brains grow quickly in childhood, then slowly shrink over the rest of our lives. Neurologists knew this, but never had a reference for normal size variations in brains -until now. A catalog of 120,000 brain scans from more than 100,000 people have been compiled into a kind of "growth chart" by a team led by neuroscientist Jakob Seidlitz of the University of Pennsylvania. It is a massive project, and Seidlitz was impressed with how many colleagues participated by donating scans, surmising they had more time to reply to emails due to the pandemic. The scans show that different parts of the brain expand and contract at different rates. For example, cortical thickness peaks in late infancy, while ventricular volume begins a growth spurt that only starts in adulthood. The growth chart can be used to determine what is normal for brain development and size by age, but they caution that the project is not exactly representative of the global population. These scans come from mainly white patients in relatively wealthy nations, because MRI scanners are expensive and not commonly found in many countries of the world. But it's a start, and this catalog will be a big help to researchers and physicians alike. Read more about this project at Nature.(Image credit: Zephyr/SPL)#brain #brainvolume #braingrowth #brainscan  