Why Fetuses Newborns Make Jerking Movements Researchers Have the Answer

April 4, 2005 -- Everybody has the clear idea of the very special, seemingly purposeless and unmotivated jerky movements of all newborns including human babies. Pregnant women also are too familiar with similar movements inside themselves when the unborn babies push, and kick, and roll. They do it almost non-stop as soon as the pregnancy enters its second half. Scientists know that the maturity of the second half of gestation human fetuses are equal to maturity of newborn rat pups so they studied the newborn pups' movements to understand how the human brain matures during pregnancy.

The common sense explanation seems to be on the surface: both rat pups and human fetuses just don't know how to move, haven't had time to learn yet. But is that it Turns out, Mother Nature knows better than that. The researchers figured out that every single event of a pup's sudden limb or body twitches causes a closely related important event in its brain. The matter is that immature brain of the newborns (or fetuses) is pretty much a raw material. Though the neuronal "hardware" is encoded already in the genes and exists by the time period we discuss, it lies dormant and the neuronal networks posses only a very few neuronal contacts (synapses) that are functional. The pups' environment is pretty poor: they are blind and protected by the mothers from environmental stimuli such as temperature, thirst, hunger, etc. The human fetuses environment seems to be even more deprived.

What's left is up to the pups or human fetuses themselves: they can move and send the stimuli from those movements into the brain . It might be just occasional startles and muscle twitches, but every single one of them leaves its mark on the brain in the form of special electric activity of the brain 's neurons. Mark by mark, a map of body's representation in the brain is being created, the first orderly patterns in pups' brains. Later in life, a detailed three-dimensional map will be completed where all senses will find their target brain areas, but the first twitches are the only cause for the very first functionally organized neuronal networks.

Without these networks, there would be no coordinated, targeted, and finally well planned body movements in the future. What's more, the process that begins with these primitive movements, continues on to form neuronal network for every brain function including perception and learning.

"If we compare the brain with an orchestra, these early activities can serve a fine tuning of the participants following by a rehearsal," said Rustem Khazipov, a team leader from Inmed -- the Mediterranean Institute of Neurobiology, Marseilles.

The results of this thought-provocking work were published in the Nature journal.

Further information: http://inmednet.com/khazipov.htm

Why Fetuses Newborns Make Jerking Movements Researchers Have the Answer

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Why Fetuses Newborns Make Jerking Movements Researchers Have the Answer

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