Babies spend most of their time asleep. New technologies are beginning to reveal why

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"... “This is a time when … the brain is developing new connections at a rate of something like a million synapses a second,” ...

Eight ways scientists are unwrapping the mysteries of the human brain

Optogenetics and advanced imaging have helped neuroscientists understand how memories form and made it possible to manipulate them. ...

The team has used a cap with light sources and sensors embedded in it. Together, these components can measure blood flow in the brain in the same way as a pulse oximeter clipped onto your finger in a doctor’s office. ...
The new device makes use of recently developed tiles that each contain several light sources and detectors. ... team has fitted 12 of these tiles into a cap suitable for newborns, connected to a computer with a single cable. The resulting system offers an image of the brain “at least 10 times the resolution of the [previous] fiber-optic cable system,” ...

Babies cycle through two phases of sleep: an active phase, which is accompanied by twitching and grimacing, is followed by a quiet phase, when the baby is very still. ...

Later, when ... team analyzed snapshots of the recordings, they noticed differences in the brain during active and quiet sleep. During active sleep, when the babies were more fidgety, brain regions in the left and right hemispheres seemed to fire at the same time, in the same way. This hints that new, long connections are forming all the way across the brain ... During quiet sleep, it looks as though more short connections are forming within brain regions. ... "

Babies spend most of their time asleep. New technologies are beginning to reveal why | MIT Technology Review Monitoring the brains of newborn babies while they sleep gives us insight into how they learn.