Scientists put wriggly babies in fMRI machines to learn about their memories : Shots

Tristan Yates has no doubts about her initial memory, even if it is a little vague.

“I was about three and a half years old at Callaway Gardens, Georgia,” she recalls.

But she has Zero’s memories before that, which is typical. This amnesia in our babies is almost a rule.

“I have memories from what happened early today, from what happened last week and a few years ago,” he says. YatesCognitive Neuroscientist at Columbia University. “But we all have no memories from childhood.”

Is that why we don’t make memories when we are babies, or is there something else to blame? Now, in a new study published in a journal by Yates and her colleagues. Sciencethey suggest that babies can form memories, even if they become inaccessible later in life.

These results may reveal something important about the early moments of our development. “It’s when we learn who our parents are. It’s when we learn a language, it’s when we learn how to walk,” Yates says.

“It’s amazing what happens to your brain in the first two years of your life.” Nick Turk Browna cognitive neuroscientist at Yale University. “It’s a much greater age of plasticity across your entire lifespan. And better understanding how your brain learns and remembers in childhood will lay the foundation for everything you know and do for the rest of your life.”

Babies are the worst – Subject

There is a reason why I don’t know much about infant memories. One of the best ways to get a deeper look into the brain is to use an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine.

“In many ways, infants are the worst subject population,” admits Turk Brown. “They don’t understand the instructions. It’s like taking a photo – you get a blurry photo [so] You cannot move millimeters. They also really pay a short attention. So we had to adapt. ”

Turk-Browne and his colleagues have spent nearly a decade figuring out how to do fMRI research on babies. They came up with all sorts of tricks to keep them happy and engaged. If they cry, the experiment will stop and allow the baby to play or go for a walk. “We’ll bring you some comfortable items like pacifiers, blankets and toys,” he says. “We gave the baby a bottle during these scans.”

Researchers snuggle the baby into the bedding, the children’s parents are always in the room with them, and the work they need is short. “It’s the only way you can ask what’s going on in the toddler’s mind, despite being unable to ask questions,” Turk-Browne says. “You can see their brains, and their brains have an answer.”

Screen time in the name of science

Here’s how this particular experiment fell: The baby was shown a video inside the fMRI machine. Throughout the background, a green kaleidoscope-like pattern appears. “This type of PF psychedelic screen is intended to secure the infant towards the center of the screen,” says Yates.

After that, one image will be displayed for 2 seconds at a time before disappearing. These are images you’ve never seen before, such as canyons, dog toys, and female faces.

“In about a minute, we’ll show you one image we saw along with a different image from the same category,” says Yates. It could be a canyon along with a waterfall, for example.

If the baby remembers seeing the canyon before, the child will look longer in the canyon than in the waterfall. “You’re looking at it more, as if you’re still learning about it,” Turk-Browne says. “That’s only when they like the familiar we take as evidence of memory formation that we have done it.”

This procedure gave researchers signs of which images the baby remembered and which ones forgot.

fMRI, meanwhile, took photos of the baby’s brain, including the hippocampus, which is “areas known to be extremely important for adult memory.”

It became clear that when the scan began about 12 months old, the more activity there was in the baby’s hippocampus when they first saw the image, like the canyon, the more likely they would remember the image later.

“What we can conclude is that even the hippocampus is capable of encoding individual memories even in human infants,” Yates says. She and her colleagues say it is proof that memory has been formed in the baby’s hippocampus.

Unlocks early moments

These results allow scientists to “place the first memory timestamp a little earlier than they thought possible.” Flavio Donatoa neurobiologist at the University of Basel who was not involved in the study.

He now seems to be an infancy not a passive and unforgettable stage in our lives. This is a related consideration about how we raise and educate our children, as well as how we understand early trauma and stress.

“This is an important question,” Donato says. “How can these traumatic events lead to memories and traces in the brain that can last for a long time and even affect the way this person develops?”

There’s still a lot to understand. How durable are the memories we may keep as infants? And if they are still there and trapped in our old brains, are they off-limits forever?

“The question,” Turk Brown said, “Can we avoid that in some way to help children, or even adults, reactivate old memories?”

To try to answer this question, researchers are conducting another study, asking families to record videos from their homes in terms of babies. Later, in the lab, when you play those videos for your infant, you will start to see what is happening in the infant’s hippocampus.