KRISTA FOSS
Health Reporter
Friday, March 10, 2000

Parents who feverishly stimulate their newborns with Mozart concertos and alphabet flash cards may want to relax a bit, according to a new study that says they have a much longer time to influence their children's developing brains than previously thought.

U.S. and Canadian scientists who used sophisticated brain-mapping technology to track growth in children's brains between the ages of 3 to 15 made a surprising discovery: a lot more development and growth than scientists realized occurs after the age of 3 and continues until children become teenagers.

"One thing that is encouraging is that all this growth goes on so late, right up to puberty," said Paul Thompson, a neurologist at the University of California in Los Angeles and lead author of the study. "It's encouraging because you can say if my child is doing less well than his friends at a young age, there's a very long way to go."

The findings, published yesterday in the journal Nature, arrive in the midst of a controversial debate among child-development experts: How important is the level of neurological stimulation children receive in their first few years to their future intellectual ability and success?

John Bruer, a Missouri-based philosopher, created a stir last year when he published a book called The Myth of the First Three Years. Mr. Bruer, who heads an institute that finances neuroscience research, asserts that early childhood advocates have twisted brain science to support their urgent pleas for more educational programs for children aged 0-3.

But the scientists responsible for the newest research have distanced themselves from the debate, saying that what the study really does is provide the most sophisticated images, and analysis, of the growing brain available so far.

"It would still be true that the early years are the critical ones," said Alan Evans, a professor of neurology with the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, who contributed to the study. "But, yes, there is room for improvement and refinement [afterward]."

Scientists have long understood that in the first few years of life, a child's brain manufactures neurons and synapses -- the connections between nerve cells -- with a factory-like intensity. Afterward, the brain organizes and streamlines those connections and sheds those it doesn't use. The new research has found that this streamlining goes on longer than was previously thought. The bottom line, said Dr. Thompson, is that children who are slow starters have room to gain ground before they become teenagers. Still, he added, the importance of the early years cannot be minimized.

Dr. Thompson hopes the brain-mapping technology will eventually unravel the mysteries of everything from attention deficit disorder to autism, and how drug therapies affect growing minds.

McGill University will play a big role in that future understanding. In October, Dr. Evans and a team at the Montreal Neurological Institute received money from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to create the definitive brain map of a growing child.