Group items tagged

Ozzy is a child who had half his brain removed, due to severe epileptic seizures. Interesting fact: the brain is so adaptable that even when an entire hemisphere is removed, if the patient is young, the other hemisphere can adapt to take on the functions of the hemisphere that was removed.

Researchers have found that people who speak multiple languages are twice as likely to recover their mental functions after a stroke as those who speak one language. The study gathered data from 608 stroke patients in Hyderabad, India, who were assessed, among others, on attention skills and the ability to retrieve and organise information. Bilinguals and multilinguals have better cognitive reserve - an improved ability of the brain to cope with damaging influences such as stroke or dementia - due to the mental challenge of speaking multiple languages and switching between them.

This article talks about the benefits of meditation and how your body reacts. I find it interesting how much of an effect on the body meditation can do. Taking breaks throughout the day to reflect in peace allows the body (sympathetic nervous system) to calm down in order to achieve homeostasis. After trying some meditation techniques I find myself living a more relaxed life.

This is a Hopkins Medicine page that shares information on ADHD specifically in children. It gives the basic definition of ADHD as well as some of the basic information on the learning disorder. It gives common causes, types of ADHD, who is affected, symptoms, diagnosis, etc.

When a human baby is born, its first cry is a normal sign of good health. Having never taken a breath before, the baby signals its first inhalation and exhalation-in the form of a screech. How do babies know to create a sound they've never made before? And is their first yelp truly the start of speech development? As it turns out, human babies may be practicing how to cry long before they ever make a sound. That is, if they're anything like marmosets, humans' primate cousins. A study of marmosets by Daniel Takahashi, a co-author of the study and an animal behaviorist at the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. shows fetal monkeys practicing crying in the womb. Takahashi notes, "marmosets are monkeys that we know vocalize a lot, and they share a lot of features with humans." For instance, both male and female parents raise their offspring together, and unlike other primates, marmoset babies are relatively helpless when they're born, like human infants. Takahashi says the central finding will help illuminate when speech development begins, and that studying pre-birth-rather than the moment of birth-may help identify speech or motor development problems earlier. "There are a lot of things going on in the womb that might be relevant to what's going on afterwards," he says.

This source talks about different experiments done on toddlers who were bilingual and not. The underlying findings: - Being bilingual doesn't confuse children, they are able to understand that the languages are separate. - Being bilingual actually has longterm effects (especially with cognitive development).

This article is about how words can effect our outlook on life, but also our physical health.

A new longitudinal study, led by Mary E. Brushe, a researcher at the Telethon Kids Institute at the University of Western Australia, gathered data from 220 families across South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland with children who were born in 2017. Once every six months until they turned 3, the children wore T-shirts or vests that held small digital language processors that automatically tracked their exposure to certain types of electronic noise, as well as language spoken by the child, the parent or another adult. The researchers were particularly interested in three measures of language: words spoken by an adult, child vocalizations and turns in the conversation. They modeled each measure separately and adjusted the results for age, sex and other factors, such as the mother's education level and the number of children at home. Researchers found that at almost all ages, increased screen time squelched conversation. When the children were 18 months old, each additional minute of screen time was associated with 1.3 fewer child vocalizations, for example, and when they were 2 years old, an additional minute was associated with 0.4 fewer turns in conversation. The strongest negative associations emerged when the children were 3 years old - and were exposed to an average of 2 hours 52 minutes of screen time daily. At this age, just one additional minute of screen time was associated with 6.6 fewer adult words, 4.9 fewer child vocalizations and 1.1 fewer turns in conversation.