What Neuroscience Says Every Parent Should Do | Dr. Baland Jalal

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0:42From all the research you've done as a neuroscientist studying the brain, dreams, neuroplasticity, what are three things you would say, whether it be from a neuroscience standpoint or just a practical personal standpoint, that if parents did these three things, they would give their kids a much better chance at a better life later on?

1:03Dr. Baland Jalal:Deep question. I would say, first of all, give them affection, hugging, caring, taking sort of being physical with children. We know that when you touch, just by merely touching, you have a lot of things like oxytocin and a lot of, and a lot of these neuroendorphins, we call them, and neuropeptides are involved in neuroplasticity as well. It's very, very good to have a lot of that. So being affectionate around your children, hugging them, kissing them, it's very important. A baby's brain, we said, has about 50 % more synapses. But what happens though in a baby's brain is there's something I'll call a pruning process, meaning that the brain of a child is hyper-connected.

1:53Dr. Baland Jalal:So everything is almost connected. Everything is flirting with everything. There's connections everywhere. And so as time passes, there's a gene that says, look, we don't need all these connections. I'm only going to take what the brain is actually using. So it's kind of a use it or lose it brain. So whatever I'm not using, whatever skill I'm not using, it will just shave it away. So you want to definitely optimize for using the brain in various ways So you kind of don't just shave off all the good connections. So stimulate, stimulate, stimulate. This is what you want to do. So stimulating a baby's brain, hyper-connected in this way.

2:36Dr. Baland Jalal:So you want to stimulate them. Affection, we said. I'm assuming not stimulate through like screens and iPads and cell phones, but in other ways, right? In other words, that's a great, that's a good. You can stimulate with an iPad all day long. You can stimulate. That's the wrong kind of stimulation. Exactly. That can lead to addiction and too much dopamine in the brain and too much of addictive cycles. You don't want that. So what type of stimulation should babies be having? Intellectual. It could be emotional stimulation. It could be teaching them how to interact with other people. So, for example, nowadays people are becoming less good at human interaction.

3:13Dr. Baland Jalal:We're becoming like robots. We don't know how to read facial expressions, emotional cues. So we actually have neurons in the brain called mirror neurons, or some people call them perceptual action neurons. They're involved in, you know, what is Lewis thinking of right now? What is his agenda? What is he up to? I can sort of do mind reading. These are the medial part of the prefrontal lobe. And these neurons can be titillated and activated, and the circuits can become strengthened by us engaging with other people and learning. Like during the COVID era, I was, I'm pretty isolated generally as a scientist.

3:54Dr. Baland Jalal:I don't do enough, I don't do enough social interactions, but especially during COVID. When I came out of COVID, I couldn't interact with people. I was just like, how do I do it? How do I, you know, I was just completely handicapped. Like a Sheldon from Big Bang Theory kind of scenario. You can train these circuits and the more you use them, the better you become. Gotcha. Okay. Stimulate? Yeah. So you stimulate in that way. What would be the third thing? Physical. I would say physical exercise. So we know that when you do physical exercise, when you go out and do sports, when especially cardiovascular type exercise, obviously you don't want to take your kid to the gym and start lifting weight, but we know generally cardiovascular exercise is the type of exercise that can lead to the growth of certain proteins called neurotrophic factors, like BDNF, GDNF, just fancy names for fertilizers in the brain that will cause the brain to create more synapses.

4:53Dr. Baland Jalal:So generally, not only for kids, but for all of us doing more of play and exercise, running for kids. Take your kid to the playground and let them run around. They obviously do this a lot if you just allow them to instead of sitting on the iPad. Yeah. I would definitely encourage that. Teach them things, you know, take them to the zoo and let them show them different animals. What is this animal? Stimulate their brains intellectually. Make them curious and passionate, too. It's not only the brain. It is the brain, but it's also thinking about, like, how can I convey passion to my kid? So for me, the way I became passionate about the brain was the fact that I had mentors that were extremely passionate about the brain and fascinated about the brain.

5:44Dr. Baland Jalal:And so that fascination and passion, you know, was passed down to me. So you do that with your kids. You know, you show them interesting things, take them to the museums and take them to the zoo and all these kind of things. Yeah, yeah. Convey passion. I like that. Convey passion, yeah.

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