20 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Importance of Vestibular Stimulation in Infants
One study offers particularly provocative evidence of the benefits of vestibular stimulation. These researchers exposed babies, who ranged in age from three to thirteen months, to sixteen sessions of chair spinning: Four times a week for four weeks, the infants were seated on a researcher's lap and spun around ten times in a swivel chair, each spin followed by an abrupt stop. To maximize stimulation of each of the three semicircular canals, the spinning included one or two rotations in each d...
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Giving babies four "spin" sessions in a chair improved their reflexes and motor skills. Also, jiggling and rocking babies sorts out their discombobulation and allows them to focus and learn for a period of time.
18 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny
The similarity between different vertebrate embryos is indeed remarkable. Since the early 1800s, embryologists have been struck by the parallel between early development in various animal species and their evolutionary relationship, a resemblance conveniently abbreviated by the saying "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Of course, each of us does not really pass through a "lizard" stage on our way to a fully developed human form. But it is true that animals who are more closely related in ter...
1 Living things go through the forms of their ancestors, not specifically but generally, because it is easier for evolution to add a mutation to the end of a complex sequence of developments than to re-engineer earlier in the process.
29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Shortening a Baby's Crying Duration
What seems to work best is simple human contact. Peter Wolff long ago demonstrated that picking up a baby works better than anything else to stop any baby from crying. In another study, infant researchers BeU and Ainsworth showed in the 1970s, with a sample of twenty-six infants, that consistent and prompt response by the infant's mother is associated with a decrease in the duration of infant crying. Urs Hunziker and Ronald Barr recently took this idea even further when they experimented with...Nothing works better than carrying the baby and responding quickly to its needs.
