The following story contains information on infant research conducted by CBMM PI Rebecca Saxe. The Netflix series discussed also features CBMM PI Laura Schulz and her research with toddlers - https://www.netflix.com/babies.

Babies' brains light up when they see someone they love – plus more lessons learned from the show's second season

By Victoria Richards

...Babies’ brains are the same as adult brains.

Rebecca Saxe, Professor of Neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put her own infant son, Percy, in an MRI scanner (which was adapted to protect his hearing) to look at his brain functioning while he was awake. Previously, experiments had tested children no younger than five.

“We wanted to find out where knowledge comes from,” she says. By showing Percy a movie made up of happy/sad facial expressions – with other images thrown in as a baseline – Saxe was able to determine what areas of the brain lit up on the MRI when looking at faces and scenes.

“The biggest surprise was the similarity between baby and grown-up brains,” she says. “The regions recognising ‘faces’ and ‘scenes’ – in the middle frontal lobe – were the same. This proves that even a six-month-old already has specialities for seeing and understanding other people...”

Read the full story on the Huffington Post website using the link below.