How do children learn? It's a question researchers have been trying to solve for as long as people have existed.

Now there's a project at the University of Washington that lets researchers see what's going on in the minds of babies.

The University of Washington's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) opened its new brain imaging center with the world's first brain imaging machine calibrated to study infants and young children.

The magnetoencephalography (MEG) machine is able to map the brain activity of children, even as young as only a few days old as they think, feel, act and listen to languages.
 
Dr. Pat Kuhl, co-director of I-LABS, talks more about the center and its Mind Developing Project

via king5.com

New software and hardware opens a window into babies' developing brains.

A maelstrom of neural connections develop in a child's brain during the first five years of life. Understanding how interconnected circuits develop, and how babies think, could lead to a host of new insights into everything from autism to language acquisition. But gathering such information has been tricky: infants can't be ordered to stay motionless, which is required for most advanced neuroimaging techniques. Now a system that works in concert with existing imaging machinery can account for head movement and, for the first time, let researchers see detailed activity in an active baby's brain.

Deciphering young minds: Magnetoencephalography (MEG) (bottom) scans provide precise information on where neuron clusters are firing in the brain. A new setup at the University of Washington that combines a cap to monitor head position (top)lets researchers use it on infants and young children, such as the six-month-old pictured here. Credit: University of Washington Institute of Learning and Brain Sciences

Magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technology used to study brain function and to pinpoint diseased areas of the brain, capitalizes on the very weak magnetic fields created whenever a cluster of neurons fires at once. A helmet, resembling a salon hair dryer, with 306 sensors hovers over the subject's head and detects where the magnetic pulses are occurring. Unlike magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines--which only show snapshots of data and require people to lie still inside a noisy, narrow tunnel while subjected to a powerful, rotating magnetic field--the MEG is pin-drop quiet and open, allowing subjects to interact with their surroundings. The resulting data can show researchers precisely where activity is occurring in the brain in real time.