Brain Scans Show the Impact of Neglect On a Child's Brain Size 206
An anonymous reader writes "A shocking comparison of brain scans from two three-year-old children reveals new evidence of the remarkable impact a mother's love has on a child's brain development. The chilling images reveal that the left brain, which belongs to a normal 3-year-old, is significantly larger and contains fewer spots and dark 'fuzzy' areas than the right brain, which belongs to that of a 3-year-old who has suffered extreme neglect. Neurologists say that the latest images provide more evidence that the way children are treated in their early years is important not only for the child's emotional development, but also in determining the size of their brains. Experts say that the sizeable difference in the two brains is primarily caused by the difference in the way each child was treated by their mothers."
Any other variables..? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sample size? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree in theory with the findings in theory (though I haven't read TFA due to them putting two of the same obnoxious ad with sound on the same page so it plays with an echo) I think a sample size of two children is a bit small to declare any sort of scientific result.
genetics is a factor (Score:5, Insightful)
This would only be valid if it was a comparison of identical twins raised in the different environments.
Re:Any other variables..? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. How big a role has NUTRITION played in the two images? It would stand to reason that a 'severely neglected' child would also eat lower quality food.
So let's skip the "lovey dovey" story for a moment and make sure we're not drawing the wrong conclusions here.
Re:Any other variables..? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm not saying this study isn't true, but it sounds like a sample size of one, which is pretty meaningless.
Extreme Neglect should be defined clearly (Score:5, Insightful)
Anecdotal (Score:5, Insightful)
So basically this qualifies as a glorified anecdote. We're taking the researcher's word for age and conditions of these two brain scans. The article chooses to talk solely about mother's love, and not any confounding factors. Where are the correlation statistics for mother, father, age, genetics, economics, poverty, education, community, nutrition, illness, accidents, grandparents, number of siblings, geographic location, social services, etc., etc.?
Offhand I would bet that simple nutrition is more highly correlated with brain size than mother's emotional attention -- and the former is something we can change with social programs. For this kind of stuff I want to see scientific studies, not People magazine exposes.
Re:What about teh gayz?! (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as at least one is nurturing and attentive in the formative years, wich one is doing it or their gender does not really matter.
Re:Sample size? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure why anybody thought this was news, I remember reading about it in my Pschology 101 textbook. Nearly any mammal (not just humans) deprived of external stimulus when young will end up with a less developed brain than their otherwise normal peers.
This doesn't apply only to babies and toddlers either. There was a study awhile back trying to figure out why certain groups of inner-city teens don't learn in school. As in, they were taught the same material, given the same homework, spent the same amount of time in class. The study controlled for things like truants and habitual trouble-makers. It turned out that all of them were dealing with at least major parental crisis. For example, their parents were severe alcoholics, beat them, sexually abused them, or died recently. When stuff like that happens, the kids' brains switched into survival mode and were then completely incapable of the kind of in-depth learning that normal kids enjoy. Remove the crisis, and the kid can learn at a normal capacity again. (Depending on the extent/length of the trauma.)
Re:Any other variables..? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Look, you are asking for something that does not exist."
That doesn't make the methodology used valid. There is no shortage of BS hocus pocus in the medical field.
"For me that points to malnutrition (which is not uncommon in these situations) – not just lower quality of food."
You get malnutrition from eating low quality food.
Re:Any other variables..? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. How big a role has NUTRITION played in the two images? It would stand to reason that a 'severely neglected' child would also eat lower quality food.
No offense, AC, but your viewing "NUTRITION" and mothering as being two different things makes it obvious that you have never parented a young child.
FYI, a newborn requires feeding every 3 hours, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the first two months of their life. After about 8 or 9 weeks, if you are lucky, your child will (hopefully!) sleep for 5 to 6 hours at a time, so Mom can finally start getting more than 3 hours of sleep then. Furthermore, the experts also say that mom's breast milk is more nutritious than purchased formula and so a young child should be breast fed (by mom) for at least their first 6 months of life.
Re:What about teh gayz?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Any other variables..? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is misleading to say that "this study shows that children need momma's love more than anything else in the world" when it most likely boils down to "nutrition starved brain develops poorly". Probably get more attention from the former though- even Slashdot picked it up despite being hardly relevant and having no scientific merit.
Re:Any other variables..? (Score:4, Insightful)
Language and visual stimulation. I propose even if you gave the infant the correct nutrition while growing, withholding wider interaction with the world around them would have detrimental effect. When do you learn the most? As a child of course, from the day we are born our bodies systems begin a learning feedback loop. We lay the foundations of language in our minds. Our eyes learn to interpret the signals we receive. Our muscles begin to work in a coordinated manner. To pose this a different way, who would have better muscle tone? A. a person who eats cheetos and reads slashdot all day or, B. A person who works out three days a week a proper diet? Any rational person would answer B, because we need both good food and exercise to have a healthy body. Now take two people who eat healthy and work out, one lives in a calm stress free environment, the other in a high stress environment. Statistically, the person in a high stress environment will have a higher occurrence of disease. I would have to imagine that any environment where a child is neglected is going to cause stress on that child. From this (and some google-fu) we can posit these three things.
A nutrition starved brain develops poorly.
A neglected brain develops poorly.
A stress flooded brain develops poorly.
All three are very likely in a situation where a child would be neglected. We call it the maternal instinct (who knows if it is one in humans) to feed our children, to teach our children, and to soothe and calm our children. The parents with these traits are more likely to have sane children that will be around to spawn another generation.
Re:What about teh gayz?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably true, I should have stated the inverse -- I suspect the percentage of same sex couples raising children would comprise less than 1% of families over the last 50 years.
In any case, the parent AC was responding to a previous AC who asked for evidence that it (being brought up by same-sex couples) mattered. The '50 years of sexual liberation' argument looks meaningless in that light because likely only a very small fraction of same sex couples raised kids during those 50 years.
Re:What about teh gayz?! (Score:5, Insightful)
The poorest and meanest individuals living in modern society live better than the rulers of vast empires lived a mere century or two ago.
And then there is war. And the fact that what you call "sexual liberation" has never been anything but the rule for the lusty old human species, however much some of those antique and false mythologies sought to demonize it and regulate it. That, in fact, is why sex "worked" to perpetuate the species. Evolution requires warm bodies, produced in abundance, and lets abilities and luck sort it all out afterwards.
Personally, I think that while TFA is undoubtedly correct that it is really gangbusters good to love your children and provide them with a stimulating environment and the occasional kick in the pants to overcome the natural sloth to which our species (with its energy conserving reptile-brain core) is prone, "sexual liberation" has far less to do with any sort of social ennui or malaise visible among youth than the fact that our society forces them to delay acceptance into society as adults until they are in their 20s, when their evolved biology presumes that they would be 50% likely to be dead by their 20s and that "adulthood" begins at age 13 or thereabouts.
There is a deadly window in the teenage years where every hormone flooding a young brain is whispering to them to have sex, start a family, challenge the tribal leaders for status, run away to found your own tribe. It stimulates risk taking (which fuels evolution, successful risk takers being good genetic stock). It is the occult cause of gangs (tribes where youth can gain status), teen-age pregnancy, overt and covert rebellion against parents, society, experimentation with drugs and alcohol, tattoos and piercings. Failure to attain social status during these years is deadly indeed -- it is often the kids that are "outsiders", who don't fit in, who become depressed, although mere brain dysfunction due to imbalances of various neurotransmitters or damage from the toxins rampant in modern civilization no doubt contribute more than their fair share. One of the largest causes of death at this age is the humble automobile -- we let children in the throes of this transition drive massive machines at high speeds largely because it is more convenient to the adults to permit them to do so, and pay the price in human misery when they not terribly surprisingly run their cars into trees, into other cars, into ditches and rivers as they drive them too fast, without enough fear of consequence or attention, with other equally distracted youth in the car with them egging them on in pushing the envelope.
For all that -- your "rampant suicide, depression, crime and delinquency" -- youth outlive their predecessors from more than 50 years ago by an increasing margin, and one that is clearly correlated with both reproductive age/female fertility (negatively) and education (positively) across many countries and social strata. Not to introduce anything like data into a good social rant, but you might look at things like: www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/sosis/.../BulledSosis2010.pdf to see how the actual numbers work out.