Lamont Buckley
PSYCH 1100
Research Paper 11/20/2010
Is your child reaching their full potential? Is there anything that you can do to aid them on their journey in developing? In my research paper I will look into the effects of social interaction on the development of children’s brains. How does stimulation of social interaction increase the brain development, and learning of the “social norms” of society? Do greater stimulating activities lead to higher IQ? Will socially exposed infants become more emotionally stable?
In the beginning, from birth that is, an infant will quickly learn the sound and smell of their mother and will possibly react differently to a favorite care giver than to a stranger. This m arks the beginning of the child’s social development process. In the next year the baby will continue to interact more and more with everything they encounter starting with the environment they are in. They may reach for a familiar face or play more interactively with a care giver. Next they will begin to mimic what they see in others’ faces such as smiling, playing peek-a-boo, and recognize a familiar care giver more strongly. They may cooperate better with this care giver in getting dressed, eating or other activities as opposed to an unfamiliar individual. In the next stage the baby will actively seek to receive the care giver’s attention constantly. They start to cling to familiar care givers and try to hide their face when introduced to an unfamiliar person. This however, is a good sign of the baby’s social development. Nearing the end of the infant’s first year they will begin to understand the connection between their

caregiver and the fulfillment of their needs. When they are hurt or hungry they will turn to their caregiver and fuss hoping that they will respond to their needs. (http://www.brighthub.com/ education/early -childhood/articles/41655.aspx)
While this is the very earliest of the brain development it is a very vital time for the baby to have consistency in caregivers that they interact with. It can have lasting effects on the baby’s social out come if something comes in and interferes with the interaction that is going on with them and their caregiver. This can cause the infant to miss some of the development toward the social norms of society.
Having continuous interactions with the baby’s care giver is important for them to feel comforted, but the caregiver has a major responsibility in helping the baby’s brain develop the
“right way”. At birth the baby’s brain is the only organ that is not fully developed. Brain development in infants consists of dendrite formation, synaptic pruning, and myelination.
These processes are the main processes in the development of the infant’s growing brain. A newborn’s brain has over 100 billion brain cells known as neurons. Each of the neurons form small branches known as dendrites. This branching allows the brain cell to communicate through synapses which are connections between the neurons. The newborn’s brain only has about 20 percent of these dendrites from birth, the other large percent of these form in the first three years of life. During this critical time the baby’s brain is set in overdrive constantly forming millions of these dendrites. In so doing, the baby takes in information from the world.
By stimulating the baby, the caregiver is helping form these dendrites. Many things are

considered stimulating i.e., talking to the infant, holding them, singing to them, massaging the baby or any other thing that we do that affects their senses.
The second process that is going on in the first three years is known as synaptic pruning.
Because of the vast number of neurons that are in the brain, if all of the synapses continued to form and stay formed, they would eventually start to slow down the brain’s functioning power because each time the brain would receive information it would have to sort through millions and millions of unimportant synapses first. This is solved through the synaptic pruning. In this process the synapses that are rarely used are “pruned” from the brain. In doing so only the important synapses are left behind enabling them to become stronger. During this time if a certain synaptic pathway is used frequently, that pathway becomes stronger and stronger.
Therefore if the caregiver is constantly providing important stimuli, such as shapes pictures or spoken language the baby will more easily be able to retrieve the information that they need when they need it.
Finally we have the Myelination. Myelin is a fatty material that coats neurons and helps the electrical impulses that travel through the neurons to speed up. Neurons that are not coated in Myelin do not work as quickly or effectively as the neurons that are coated in Myelin.
Babies that are shown love through both physical and verbal interactions, produce more myelin to coat their neurons. Research shows that giving infants and children love and stimulation improves brain development in the early stages of life. (http://www.brighthub.com/education/ early-childhood/articles/47362.aspx).

From what we have learned so far we can conclude that a stable upbringing is very vital for babies’ brains to develop properly, but what effect does this have on IQ? Does it impact infants in any measurable way? How would this be tested? Such tests on humans would be unthinkable but in the book Invitation to the Life Span by Kathleen Berger, such a chilling natural experiment is cited. It began in Romania in the 1980s when a dictator Nicolae Ceauescu forbade birth control and outlawed abortions except for mothers who already had five children or more. Parents were paid for every birth but received no financial support for raising their children. As a result infant mortality rose and more than 100,000 children were abandoned to crowded institutions, forced to endure severe and pervasive restriction of human interactions such as, play, conversation, and experiences. Ceauescu was killed in 1989. In the following years, North American and Western European couples adopted thousand of these children hoping that lots of love and good food would help these children become the child of their dreams.
All the Romanian adoptees went through catch-up growth, growing taller and gaining weight until they reached the norm for their age. Many of the Romanian children showed signs of emotional damage. They were too friendly to strangers, or too angry without reason, or too frightened of normal events. By age 11 most of those who had been adopted before they were
6 months old, seemed normal, but those adopted when they were older than a year, averaged
15 points below normal on an IQ test. Their deficits were especially evident in abilities controlled by the prefrontal cortex, including social interaction and impulse control. This is the only known case of this being “researched” in humans but Marion Diamond, William
Greenough, and their colleagues raised rats, some being in a social playground(large cages with

other rats and many stimulating objects).Some of their litter mates(from the same gene pool) were raised alone in small barren cages. Autopsies on rats from both groups found that the brains of the “enriched” rats were larger and heavier and had more dendrites than the brains of the “deprived” rats. (Greenough, William T., &Volkmar, Fred R. Experimental Neurology).
Studies have shown that babies or children who receive little to no attention and are not exposed to positive, purposeful stimuli by their parents, end up with brains that are 20 to
30 percent smaller than those who have hade those good sensory experiences. The development of an infant’s brain is essential to the life-long learning process and must be taken seriously in helping an infant’s brain develop to it’s full potential.
In looking back at the unfortunate events that happened in Romania and the outcomes that came from it, we see that the children who were adopted out after a year old were still effected through their life being less stable than other children of their same age being angry without reason, too friendly to strangers, and too frightened of normal events.
According to Janet Doman, one of the authors of, How Smart Is Your Baby?: Develop and
Nurture Your Newborn's Full Potential, "a newborn baby is functionally blind, deaf and insensate." She believes it is up to the parents to use sensory stimulation to develop the sensory pathways that lead to proper brain development and function. Using positive sensory stimulation (through all five senses) in brief intervals will help these sensory pathways to become strong and therefore will achieve a sense of permanent learning.

However, there are negative forms of stimulation that could lead to developmental delays for life. Neglect, stress, trauma, and abuse are all negative stimuli that can have lasting tragic effects on the brain growth.
In conclusion I think that parents and caregivers have a major role in the development of their baby’s brain and they should take this responsibility very seriously. Parents not only effect their children when they are raising them but they always have life long impacts on how their child will “turn out”. They must realize that “teaching” their baby is more important than anything. Also having a loving, nurturing environment for them to explore and learn from is vital to their emotional state in both the short and long run. Baby’s brains are always developing because everything is new to them and they have to create a place for new things in the brain. Parents have to create a place for themselves in their infant’s brain and must create a healthy loving nurturing environment for the child to be raised in.

http://www.brighthub.com/education/early-childhood/articles/41655.aspx http://www.brighthub.com/education/early-childhood/articles/47362.aspx
Invitation to the Life Span Kathleen Stassen Berger http://www.brighthub.com/education/early-childhood/articles/35203.aspx
Greenough, William T., &Volkmar, Fred R. Experimental neurology
How Smart Is Your Baby?: Develop and Nurture Your Newborn's Full Potential Janet Doman