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Understanding Why Parrots Talk - For Dummies
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emphasis
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Birds love attention from their humans
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Amazon parrots should be talked to a lot for the first couple of years
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early as six months of age; in an African grey, real talking may take nine months to over a year,
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he babble will become clearer and will form into words and sounds.
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budgie, an African grey, or an Amazon parrot
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communicate with its humans, get attention, or at least to fit in.
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parrot that talks or mimics other sounds in the home is a parrot that's interested in the humans around it, just as a wild bird is interested in the other birds in the area for nesting, finding food, or watching out for danger.
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learning the language of the home is the primary way of getting noticed and getting its needs met.
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begins to learn the language of its area
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aren't equipped to learn the parrot's language
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that the humans around it are its social group
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Parrots are fussy creatures, but they aren't stupid.
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hould the house parrot languish away, waiting for another parrot to share its language?
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form of communication to be able to interact.
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parrots are social creatures
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Those Were the Days, Today in History - December 7
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926 - The household refrigerator, operating on gas, was patented. No, not
by what you might think of as a major appliance manufacturer. The
refrigerator was patented by the Electrolux Servel Corporation. Name sound
familiar? Yep -- the vacuum cleaner people.
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Ten Amazing Brain Facts
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An elephant's brain is huge - about six times as large as a human brain. However, in relation to body size, humans have the largest brain of all the animals, averaging about 2% of body weight.
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What part of you is only 1% to 3% of your body's mass, yet uses 20% of all the oxygen you breathe? Your brain!
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"MOZART EFFECT" - MUSIC/BRAIN RESEARCH
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The Mozart Effect
Online Resources on Music/Brain Research
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Neuroscience for Kids - Brain Development
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more fromfaculty.washington.edu
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The brain grows
at an amazing rate during development. At times during brain development,
250,000 neurons are added every
minute!! At birth, almost all the neurons
that the brain will ever have are present. However, the brain continues to
grow for a few years after birth. By the age of 2 years old, the brain is
about 80% of the adult size.
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Brain Based Learning, IQ and Brain Development from Educational CyberPlayGround™
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Another stark example of this use it or lose it phenomenon is language learning.
By 6 months of age, infants develop a map in the auditory cortex of the phonetic sounds in the native language their mother or caretaker speaks.
By 12 months, infants lose the ability to discriminate between sounds that are not made in their native language. -
While subtle phonetic distinctions might be lost in the first year, children have the ability to learn a second, third and fourth language quickly until about age 10. -
How fast brain signals travel along these dendrites depends on how well their axons are coated with myelin, a fatty coating similar to plastic insulation around an electrical wire.
Myelin sheaths enable brain signals to travel 100 times faster.
Babies are born with few myelinated axons. That's one reason infants can't see well and can't do much with their hands other than grasping and batting at objects.
As children get older, different areas of the brain become myelinated on a genetically determined timetable. These periods of mylenization are critical periods for learning. For instance, the first axons to be myelinated in the language area of the brain are those that enable language comprehension. Six months later, myelination extends to the language-production area. -
An infant's brain can form new learning connections at a rate of 3 billion per second. A child's brain uses twice as much glucose, the brain's fuel, as that of a chess master plotting three moves in advance.
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At birth, the infant brain has few of these branches. Its neurons look like saplings. Adult neurons resemble trees with hundreds of branches formed through experience and learning. -
The extraordinary development of the human brain begins a few weeks after conception. Neurons - the brain cells that store and send information - begin multiplying at 50,000 per second, a frenzy that continues throughout gestation.
From that point on, environment begins to play its starring role in the way the brain is wired for emotion, behavior and learning.
Neurons send signals to other neurons through axons, a thin fiber that relays electrical messages. Once an axon finds its target cell, it develops dendrites, or branches, which receive a wide variety of information from other brain cells. The more dendrites a nerve cell has, the better and quicker it is at learning. -
It's nature, then nurture.
Genes provide each brain's basic building materials. The environment builds it through trillions of brain-cell connections made by sight, sound, smell, touch and movement. Positive experiences enhance brain connections, and negative experiences damage them.
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Penn State Infant Brain Development Lab
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Our goal is
to understand how rapid development in the infant brain relates to changes in
babies' understanding of the physical world in the first year of life. We conduct
research that explores basic questions about infant development, such as:- How well infants
see and how rapidly their vision improves
- How infants
perceive objects and motion within their environment
- How well infants
remember simple events or objects
- How temperament
and motor development affect other facets of development
- How well infants
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The
Infant Brain Development and Cognition Laboratory studies the development of
spatial perception, action planning, and memory in early infancy.
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ZERO TO THREE BrainWonders
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By most measures of sensory and cognitive development, girls
are slightly more advanced: vision, hearing, memory, smell, and touch are
all more acute in female than male infants. Girl babies also tend to be somewhat
more socially-attuned--responding more readily to human voices or faces, or
crying more vigorously in response to another infant's cry--and they generally
lead boys in the emergence of fine motor and language skills. -
males of all
ages tend to have slightly larger brains, on average, than females, even after
correcting for differences in body size. -
By three months of age, boys' and girls' brains respond differently to the
sound of human speech. Because they appear so early in life, such differences
are presumably a product of sex-related genes or hormones. -
Men's brains
tend to be more lateralized--that is, the two hemispheres operate more
independently during specific mental tasks like speaking or navigating around
one's environment. For the same kinds of tasks, females tend to use both their
cerebral hemispheres more equally. -
The human brain takes
time to develop, so nature has insured that the neural circuits responsible
for the most vital bodily functions--breathing, heartbeat, circulation, sleeping,
sucking, and swallowing--are up and running by the time a baby emerges from
the protective womb. The rest of brain development can follow at a more leisurely
pace, maximizing the opportunity for a baby's experience and environment to
shape his emerging mind -
The lower brain is therefore
largely in control of a newborn's behavior: all of that kicking, grasping,
crying, sleeping, rooting, and feeding are functions of the brain stem and
spinal cord. -
By birth, only the
lower portions of the nervous system (the spinal cord and brain stem) are
very well developed, whereas the higher regions (the limbic system and cerebral
cortex) are still rather primitive. -
the brain of a newborn baby is
still very much a work-in-progress. It is small--little more than one-quarter
of its adult size -
Every experience--whether it is seeing one's first
rainbow, riding a bicycle, reading a book, sharing a joke--excites certain
neural circuits and leaves others inactive. -
Brain development
is "activity-dependent, -
Generally speaking, genes are responsible for the basic wiring plan--for
forming all of the cells (neurons) and general connections between different
brain regions--while experience is responsible for fine-tuning those connections,
helping each child adapt to the particular environment (geographical, cultural,
family, school, peer-group) to which he belongs. -
This plasticity has both
a positive and a negative side. On the positive side, it means that young children's
brains are more open to learning and enriching influences. On the negative side,
it also means that young children's brains are more vulnerable to developmental
problems should their environment prove especially impoverished or un-nurturing. -
The major difference between brain development in a child versus learning an
adult is a matter of degree: the brain is far more impressionable (neuroscientists
use the term plastic) in early life than in maturity.
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ZERO TO THREE BrainWonders
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Reading
to a newborn infant is the best way to help a child learn to read in the future.False
- It is important to recognize
that what is most important is providing a language-rich environment for children.
Reading is one way, but there are many other ways as well, such as talking,
singing, listening to music. - There are a number of
studies that show that when children hear a good deal of "live" language,
when they are spoken to often and encouraged to communicate, they are more
proficient with language than children who have more limited language exposure.
For example, Janellan Huttenlocher, University of Chicago, found that at 20
months of age children of "chatty" moms averaged 131 more words than kids
of "non-chatty" moms and by age two the gap had increased to a difference
of 295 words. Only live language, not television, produced these vocabulary-boosting
effects (Begley, 1997).
- It is important to recognize
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Babies
are born with the ability to learn all the languages in the world.True
- The infant brain is "wired"
to seek out and learn language. - Amazingly, infants are
born with the capacity not just to learn language, but to learn all languages.
As researcher Patricia Kuhl from the University of Washington puts it, infants
are "citizens of the world." They are able to perceive the different sounds
and patterns of speech of all languages in the world. For example, at birth,
Japanese babies can hear the distinction between "r" and "l", although only
the "r" sound exists in Japanese. They can still hear the distinction at 6
months of age, but cannot by 12 months of age. - Even in the womb, the
infant is turning towards the melody of its mother's voice. The brain is setting
up the circuitry needed to understand and reproduce language. - Babies learn to talk
by hearing language and having language directed at them in "conversation."
- Between 6-12 months,
babies begin to fine-tune their ability to perceive the speech sounds of their
native language as opposed to non-native language.
- The infant brain is "wired"
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Infant Cognition Center--Home
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Our research examines how infants and young children reason about their
physical and social world.
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photo of black hole - Google Image Search
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