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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		New insight into brain development
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:02
	Publish Date:		2017-01-22 18:00:00
	Description:		Our brains take more time to develop than was previously thought. Those were the findings of a new study conducted by neurologist Mercedes Paredes of the University of California, San Francisco. “The old dogma has been that a lot of the development that happened after birth was more related to fine tuning, changes such as white matter development and synaptic connections, the connections between brain cells or neurons.” But Paredes has found that the brain is still developing – significantly right after birth, with young neurons moving to the frontal lobe of the brain, where they then become functional. “And that is something new, both in terms of how long brain development is still ongoing, but also the fact that this is period right around the time of birth and there is a lot of pathological changes that can happen and the brain is vulnerable.” So trying to understand what’s happening in newborn babies’ brains will help scientists get a better sense of what triggers developmental disorders.
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