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2009 by anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee,

But the Falk study was based on only a handful of photographs that had been previously made available by Harvey, who died in 2007.

several regions feature additional convolutions and folds rarely seen in other subjects.

and his prefrontal cortex—linked to planning, focused attention, and perseverance in the face of challenges—is also greatly expanded.

Albert Galaburda, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, says that "what's great about this paper is that it puts down … the entire anatomy of Einstein's brain in great detail.

he study raises "very important questions for which we don't have an answer."

whether Einstein started off with a special brain that predisposed him to be a great physicist, or whether doing great physics caused certain parts of his brain to expand

"some combination of a special brain and the environment he lived in."

Falk agrees that both nature and nurture were probably involved

"he had the right brain in the right place at the right time."

According to Sandra Witelson, a behavioural neuroscientist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who discovered that the parietal operculum is missing from Einstein’s brain

the white insulating coat of myelin

on the axons that carry signals between nerve cells continues to accumulate,

a process not completed until the early 20s

Among the last connections to be fully established are the links between the prefrontal cortex

seat of

judgment and problem-solving, and the emotional centers in the limbic system, especially the amygdala.

The adolescent brain pours out adrenal stress hormones, sex hormones,

and growth hormone, which in turn influence brain development.

Sex hormones act in the limbic system and in the raphe nucleus, source of the

neurotransmitter serotonin

things can go wrong in many ways,

Stress can retard the growth of the hippocampus, which consolidates

memories.

Compared to the normal control group, the children with ADHD showed abnormal functional activity in several regions of the brain involved in the processing of visual attention information

"What this tells us is that children with ADHD are using partially different functional brain pathways to process this information, which may be caused by impaired white matter pathways involved in visual attention information processing," Dr. Li said.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, there is no single test capable of diagnosing a child with the disorder. As a result, difficult children are often incorrectly labeled with ADHD while other children with the disorder remain undiagnosed.

ested the learning abilities of sleeping newborns by repeating tones that were followed by a gentle puff of air to the eyelids.

After about 20 minutes, 24 of the 26 babies squeezed their eyelids together when the tone was sounded without the puff of air.

The brain waves of the 24 infants were found to change, providing a neural measurement of memory updating.

While past studies find this type of learning can occur in infants who are awake, this is the first study to document it in their most frequent state, while they are asleep

Learned eyelid movement reflects the normal functioning of the circuitry in the cerebellum, a neural structure at the base of the brain. This study's method potentially offers a unique non-invasive tool for early identification of infants with atypical cerebellar structure, who are potentially at risk for a range of developmental disorders, including autism and dyslexia, she said.

Newborn infants' sleep patterns are quite different than those of older children or adults in that they show more active sleep where heart and breathing rates are very changeable," she said. "It may be this sleep state is more amenable to experiencing the world in a way that facilitates learning."

Another factor is that infants' brains have greater neural plasticity, which is the ability for the neural connections to be changed

"Too often, people dismiss ADHD as being down to bad parenting or poor diet. As a clinician, it was clear to me that this was unlikely to be the case. Now we can say with confidence that ADHD is a genetic disease and that the brains of children with this condition develop differently to those of other children."

The condition is highly heritable -- children with ADHD are statistically more likely to also have a parent with the condition and a child with an identical twin with ADHD has a three in four chance of also having the condition.

"Children with ADHD have a significantly higher rate of missing or duplicated DNA segments compared to other children and we have seen a clear genetic link between these segments and other brain disorders," explains Dr Nigel Williams. "These findings give us tantalising clues to the changes that can lead to ADHD."

ADHD is not caused by a single genetic change, but is likely caused by a number of genetic changes, including CNVs, interacting with a child's environment," explains Dr Kate Langley.

absorb the movements that match basic sounds

first birthdays, babies start shifting back to look you in the eye again

University of Iowa psychology professor Bob McMurray, who also studies speech development.

quality face-time with your tot is very important for speech development – more than, say, turning on the latest baby DVD.

Other studies have shown that babies who are best at distinguishing between vowel sounds like "ah" and "ee" shortly before their first birthday wind up with better vocabularies and pre-reading skills by kindergarten.

babies also look to speakers' faces for important social cues about what they're hearing

So he and doctoral student Amy Hansen-Tift tested nearly 180 babies, groups of them at ages 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 months. How? They showed videos of a woman speaking in English or Spanish to babies of English speakers. A gadget mounted on a soft headband tracked where each baby was focusing his or her gaze and for how long.

They found a dramatic shift in attention: When the speaker used English, the 4-month-olds gazed mostly into her eyes. The 6-month-olds spent equal amounts of time looking at the eyes and the mouth. The 8- and 10-month-olds studied mostly the mouth.

At 12 months, attention started shifting back toward the speaker's eyes.

at 6 months, babies begin observing lip movement, Lewkowicz says, because that's about the time babies' brains gain the ability to control their attention rather than automatically look toward noise.

Duke University cognitive neuroscientist Greg Appelbaum

Journal of Clinical Investigation

Men who drank more than 14 drinks per week or women who drank more than eight drinks per week

Ting-Kai Li of Duke University, tells sciencenews.org