Amazing stuff!
Remember that next time when abortion is in the news again!
"... Most do agree that certain features of the brain are crucial for consciousness. One is a set of connections between the thalamus—which receives and relays sensory and motor information from the body—and the cortex, where such information is further processed. Studies of fetal brains show the foundations of that link are not in place until about 24 weeks of development. ...
In a study published last month, ... found another feature thought to support conscious awareness, one that seems to emerge even earlier. Most premature newborns scanned before 37 weeks had signs of what’s known as small-world architecture. This organizational pattern, consisting of dense neural connections between nearby brain areas and sparser links between more distant ones, has been shown to be disrupted during anesthesia and after brain injury. ...
recent research has implications for infants born preterm. Babies born as early as 22 weeks can sometimes survive, living for months in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), he notes. All that time their developing brains are wiring up based on feedback from an environment that’s very different from the uterus. ..."
From the abstract:
"Understanding the emergence of complex cognition in the neonate is one of the great frontiers of cognitive neuroscience. In the adult brain, small-world organization enables efficient information segregation and integration and dynamic adaptability to cognitive demands.
It remains unknown, however, when functional small-world architecture emerges in development, whether it is present by birth and how prematurity affects it. We leveraged the world's largest fMRI neonatal dataset—Developing Human Connectome Project—to include full-term neonates (n = 278), and preterm neonates scanned at term-equivalent age (TEA; n = 72), or before TEA (n = 70), and the Human Connectome Project for a reference adult group (n = 176). Although different from adults', the small-world architecture was developed in full-term neonates at birth. The key novel finding was that premature neonates before TEA showed dramatic underdevelopment of small-world organization and regional communication in 9/11 networks, with disruption in 32% of brain nodes. The somatomotor and dorsal attention networks carry the largest spatial effect, and visual network the smallest. Significant prematurity-related disruption of small-world architecture and reduced efficiency of regional communication in networks related to high-order cognition, including language, persisted at TEA.
Critically, at full-term birth or by TEA, infants exhibited functional small-world architecture, which facilitates differentiated and integrated neural processes that support complex cognition.
Conversely, this brain infrastructure is significantly underdeveloped before infants reach TEA. These findings improve understanding of the ontogeny of functional small-world architecture and efficiency of neural communication, and of their disruption by premature birth."
Typical and disrupted small-world architecture and regional communication in full-term and preterm infants (open access)
Clarifying when consciousness arises in human development could help refine hospital care for premature infants
No comments:
Post a Comment