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Article: What's known about the developing brain
- Article from:
- The Herald News - Joliet (IL)
- Article date:
- May 23, 2003
CopyrightCopyright (c) 2003 The Herald News (Joliet, IL). (Hide copyright information)
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In the past decade, new brain-imaging technologies have shown that:
[] It's nature, then nurture. Genes provide each brain's basic building materials. The environment builds it through trillions of brain-cell connections made by sight, sound, smell, touch and movement. Positive experiences enhance brain connections, and negative experiences damage them.
[] Young brains work at warp speed. An infant's brain can form new learning connections at a rate of 3 billion per second. A child's brain uses twice as much glucose (fuel) as the brain of a chess master plotting three moves in advance.
[] Words work wonders. Babies whose mothers and fathers talk to them more often have bigger vocabularies ...