Week 2 - Genetics, Brain, and Motor

Heredity Overview
- Most cells have 46 chromosomes
- Gametes (eggs and sperm) have 23 chromosomes
- A gene is a group of nucleotide bases on the DNA that provides a specific set of
biochemical instruction
- Gene comes in different forms called alleles

Genes and Complex Traits

- Polygenic inheritance
- Is the a single gene for attribute X
- AA BB CC = Giant
- Aa bb cc = Dwarf
- All the highest in between
- Genotype + environment = phenotype
- Incomplete dominance
- Height could be determined by genetics but there are other factors such as
nutrition, sleep…

What is behavioral Genetics?

- The branch of genetics that deals with the inheritance of behavioral and psychological
traits
- Is there a heritability for depression

Methods for Studying Hereditary Influences

- Selective breeding
- Deliberately manipulating the genetic makeup of animals to study hereditary
influences on behavior
- Dull vs bright rats
- Bright rats in a poor environment perform like the dull rats and vice versa
- Twin/family studies
- Compare the prevalence of attributes across varying degrees of genetic
relatedness
- Concordance rates
- Similarity of environment (monozygotic)
- In utero
- In childhood

Neurodevelopment
- How does the brain develop?
- Fastest organ to reach adult size
- Some brain development occurs after birth for example on the hippocampus
(memory)
- When you are born, your brain is 30% of the size of an adult brain
- When you're born, you have all the neurons you'll ever have

- The first brain growth spurt: Infancy

- What accounts for brain growth?
- Myelination (Glial Cells)
- Oligodendrocytes / Schwann Cells
- Improved coordination and reaction times in children, faster
cognitive abilities
- 50% of the brains weight
- Problems with myelination can be related to ALS or MS
- Symptoms include motor-related problems,
- Nutrition is important for myelination
- An axon without myelination, the electrical signal can travel at 7
km/hour, with myelination jumps to 54km/hour
- Synaptogenesis
- Creating new synapses, connections between two cells
- At age 1 we have the most synapses than we will ever have
- Synaptic pruning happens after this to improve efficiency
- Happens until early adolescence
- The ones still being used keep getting stronger
- Attention and planning
- From 1 to 10, 40% of the synapses that we had have
died off

- Second Brain Growth Spurt: Adolescence

- Another wave of overproduction and pruning
- The final phase of the growth pattern and maturation
- Age 11 or 12 and peaking at puberty
- Corpus callosum thickens
- Fibers connecting the left and right hemisphere
- Improved ability to process information
- The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex matures slowly
- Attention, impulses, planning
- The frontal lobe develops until 25
 - The cortex grows until we’re 30
- We’re more susceptible to harm and damage
- The adolescent brain can experience more detriment because of overuse of school
and drugs
- Increase of dopamine in the brain - related to risk-taking

Two kinds of Specialization

- Where: the brain regions active in processing become more focused
- In early infancy, perceptual input leads to responses from neurons over a broad
area, the occipital lobe for vision for example, if we look at it again after some
time we’ll see a more focused area of the occipital lobe being used for perception
- What: the kinds of stimuli that trigger activity become more specif
- Activation in the brain becomes more focused
- Example: activation of the fusiform gyrus in response to visual stimuli: percentage signal
change for faces versus nonface stimuli
- Fusiform gyrus: a key structure for functionally specialized computations of
high-level vision such as face perception, object recognition, and reading.
- The fusiform gyrus responds equally to nonface stimuli and face stimuli but over
time, it becomes more specialized
- More specialization = less plasticity
- If a child has a head injury they recover in a different way than adults,
they’re more likely to recover

Nature needs Nurture

- Critical and sensitive periods
- Critical periods are way more severe, and sensitive periods are less
- Animal studies
- Visual stimulation in cats (Hubel & Wiesel, 1970)
- Critical period for visual development (kittens)
- For adult cats, there was no change when the eye was covered
- Enriched vs impoverished environment → brain size

Romanian Orphans Data

- Switching them to enriched environments at different stages affects how they are able to
recuperate from impairments
- The longer they were in impoverished environments the more impairments they
demonstrated
- More severe cognitive impairments
- Smaller heads
What kind of exeprienes…When?
- Two stages of brain development
- Experience-expectant brain growth
- Our brain changes because it expects regular, typical input; we expect to
see faces, to hear language
- the brain expects certain kinds of experiences, and if they do not occur
development won’t occur
- Experience-dependent brain growth
- Unique experiences
- Not expected by the brain, but if they happen the areas activated in this
experience will be developed
- Not the standard experience

The shaking, slowing of the brain: Adulthood and Aging

- 5% to 10% of brain weight loss between the ages of 20-90
- Shrinking in the PFC with a decrease in working memory
- Demyelination leads to slower responses and reflexes
- Sensory areas show fewer changes

The Adapting Brain: Adulthood and Aging

- Dendritic growth increases from age 40 to 70
- Keeping the brain active can keep it healthy
- Aerobic exercise
- Research shows that psychical activity can lead to growth in the frontal
areas and the hippocampus
- The “Nun Study”
- Nuns who did teaching showed healthier neuron
- Staying cognitive alert show brain health

Motor Development

At what age do most infants walk - 12 months

Why do babies start to walk?

- The maturation viewpoint
- The unfolding of a genetically programmed sequence
- The experience hypothesis
- Opportunities to practice are important
- Gahvora
- Snowsuits
- Dynamical Systems Theory
- Motivation to explore drives infants to combine motor patterns in new ways