What babies can tell us – and why we need to listen

If you've ever seen an infant lying on its back, you've surely seen them endlessly waving their arms and legs in seemingly haphazard ways. And crying? To the uneducated eye and ear, it does all seem a little... unplanned. But from their earliest moments, infants actually cry in a way that suggests they're already learning the patterns of their mother's language while in the womb! And when you see them waving their arms around? They're actually deliberately trying to figure out what this thing is on the end of their arm, and how can they get it to do what they want?

The way babies move not only tells us loads about healthy infant development, but about whether things might not be quite right, especially when it comes to problems such as cerebral palsy.

Today's guests help us decode the meanings of these movements, why they matter, and what parents in particular need to know to help stimulate their babies' development in the best possible way.

Our first guest, Audrey van der Meer, a professor of neuropsychology, is interested in how an infant makes sense of the world, and how we can encourage that learning to give our children the best start. Our second guest, Lars Adde, has spent his entire career working with infants in neonatal intensive care units, and is pioneering new ways to speed the detection of cerebral palsy as early as possible.

You can read more about Audrey's work at the NuLab here, where you can also see a trailer for a Netflix series on babies in which Audrey is one of the experts for the episode called "Movement". You can also visit this page to see some of the lab's seminal publications.

Lars's collaboration with AI researchers, called DeepInMotion, is featured here. A three-minute video describing his research can be found here.The webpage for his startup, In-Motion Technologies, can be found here.

Here's a link to a transcript of the show.

If you've listened to the very end of this episode, you'll hear that this is the last ever episode of 63 Degrees North! Thanks to all of you listeners, and stay tuned! You never know where I might pop up next.

Questions, comments? Contact me at nancy.bazilchuk@ntnu.no

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