What's Going On in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life Quotes

“It's the strangest feeling at the end of pregnancy: you look down at this huge belly and try to imagine how some little person, whom you haven't even met, is going to emerge from it any day and completely change your lives. First, you wonder how this pregnancy, to which you've grown so accustomed over much of the last year, can, with barely any notice, come to an abrupt end. Then you try to fathom how this baby is ever going to come out; your bowling ball stomach seems misproportioned for what lies between it and the outside world. And only then do you realize what it all means-that the easy part, pregnancy, is almost over, and it's time to gear up for the tough stuff: childbirth!”
― Lise Eliot, What's Going On in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life

“So what does any of this have to do with maternal stress during pregnancy? It turns out that high doses of many of the major stress hormones, including cortisol and adrenaline, interfere with testosterone production. Men, for instance, show a decreased level of circulating testosterone when they are significantly stressed. Because maternal stress hormones can cross the placenta, it has been proposed that pregnant females who are highly stressed may release sufficient quantities of adrenal hormones to interfere with the usual testosterone surge in male fetuses, thereby nudging their brains toward more feminine behavior, including a propensity for homosexuality.”
― Lise Eliot, What's Going on in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life

“A better reason why we, and other intelligent species, are born with such poorly developed brains is so that we can learn.”
― Lise Eliot, What's Going on in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life

“One study offers particularly provocative evidence of the benefits of vestibular stimulation. These researchers exposed babies, who ranged in age from three to thirteen months, to sixteen sessions of chair spinning: Four times a week for four weeks, the infants were seated on a researcher’s lap and spun around ten times in a swivel chair, each spin followed by an abrupt stop. To maximize stimulation of each of the three semicircular canals, the spinning included one or two rotations in each direction with the babies held in each of three positions: sitting, with the head tilted forward about 30 degrees, and side-lying on both left and right sides. Not surprisingly, the babies loved this treatment. They usually babbled or laughed during the rotation and became fussy during the thirty-second rest period between spins. In addition to this “trained” group, there were two groups of control infants, one that received no treatment, and one that came in for the same sixteen sessions but only sat on the researcher’s lap in the swivel chair; they did not get to spin. The results were striking. Compared with both control groups, the babies who were spun showed more advanced development of both their reflexes and their motor skills. The difference was particularly marked for motor skills like sitting, crawling, standing, and walking. In fact, the study included a set of three-month-old fraternal twins, of whom one received the training and the other did not. By the end of the study, when they were four months old, the twin who had experienced the vestibular stimulation had mastered head control and could even sit independently, while the unstimulated twin had only just begun to hold his head up.”
― Lise Eliot, What's Going on in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life

“lead in water and in the paint of older homes continues to present a significant hazard for pregnant women and young children. Lead paint poses a risk when young children eat or suck on paint chips, or when pregnant women or children breathe dust from deteriorating painted surfaces. Houses built before 1978 are especially suspect, and under a new law passed by Congress in 1992, owners of targeted housing have been required to reveal any information about known lead-based paint to potential buyers or renters”
― Lise Eliot, What's Going on in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life

“gestation. High-intensity levels can cause fetal death or malformations, especially of the brain and skull. These effects are not surprising, since the exposures also substantially elevate the animals’ body temperature. Lower intensities do not cause heating and have generally been found to produce no harmful effects. In any case, the levels of radio- or microwave exposure in these animal experiments are well above those to which most women are normally exposed. However, there are some occupations that involve exposure to microwaves or radio waves at intensities much higher than the communication frequencies in the air all around us. The power of electromagnetic radiation decreases exponentially with distance, which means that its intensity is considerably higher at the site of generation—on top of a radio tower, for instance—than even a short distance away. People who”
― Lise Eliot, What's Going on in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life

“The P300 (whose name derives from the fact that it is a positive wave that occurs, in adults, about 300 milliseconds after the onset of a stimulus) is perhaps the closest thing we have to an index of conscious mental experience.”
― Lise Eliot, What's Going on in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life

“When it’s cool, babies tend to wake up and move their bodies more, as”
― Lise Eliot, What's Going on in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life