 president and so you know so making money is a virtue and people write books and sell these programs to make money but but let's take you know the field of how do you get an intelligent well educated what can you do what kind of lessons do we have from neuroscience and science in general and so the number one role is if you want a smart baby have a smart mate that's number one rule then so it's absolutely the case from what we've learned in the last few decades that intelligence has a very high hereditary function to the circle g-factors I kind of just call it it's absolutely the case people don't want to talk about that because they think you know it's not politically correct and so on but it's absolutely true that smart parents make smart babies okay so but what can we do beyond that and what kind of lessons do we have from from neuroscience so well here's the kind of popular views that various magazines have this is a news magazine in America that you know whole issue emphasized to how to raise smart kids based on stuff from neuroscience here's another issue your child's brain now what parents never buy that you know you need to know about your child's brain so you buy that how kids are wired from music mat and emotions right you won't know that and here's a book that was a best seller in the United States the most are effective you know I'm gonna hear about this book so this is a book that basically said you want your kid to be another Mozart play Mozart to your kid even before the baby is born and so what this did was so a lot of books but also I did a good thing so a lot of Mozart albums so mothers were playing you know Mozart to the kids in utero and that was based on the fact that by the way it's absolutely true then last trimester the fetus can perceive sound absolutely true so people have recorded from this from the fetus and they can they can differentiate and they can brain reacts to sound not as a brain that reacts to sound but it reacts differently to different kinds of sounds but that's a big leap from that finding to the fact that you can make your kid another Mozart by doing this so this is kind of popular press most of these things are written by not neuroscientists by by journalists on the other hand there's this position this is a book that was put out a few years ago by the National Academy of Science in the United States and here's what they said neuroscience can offer a few insights into how early development can function enhance development beyond what might be considered otherwise expected totally different point of view kind of pessimistic point of view but let me tell you five things that I think that the science supports about how to raise a smart and children to their optimal potential and so this is stuff you know something may seem obvious to you but this is stuff that can be supported by the science without any you know major overblown statements so here's some specific suggestions these are from me and I think this is something that all neuroscientists would agree on so the first statement that is absolutely the case is do no harm it's a very this very little evidence that you could take somebody of a given intelligence level as measured by IQ tests and do stuff to make them superior IQ that performance yes but there's a lot of evidence that you could say it takes somebody a certain level and put in the situations where they're harmed and that intelligence levels falls down by various ways and so these things actually start in utero so for example you know needs for the normal brain development you got the stuff on the left here and stuff that is detrimental and this has been well known alcohol lead poisoning tobacco renal infections and things like that unfortunately in the United States we currently have a opium epidemic and so you have a lot of babies being born that have been subjected to serious drug abuse by the pregnant woman and that's causing major kind of problems so that's the first thing and here's here's something about brain development that you may may not know the brain is develops put together in a kind of con a counterintuitive way what happens is that when you were in utero or when you were a certain age the you had more synaptic connections in the brain than you have currently so the brain is built by overproducing cells over producing I'll show you examples that my own work over producing connections and then is what's called pruning of synaptic connections certain connections stay certain are gone and take a look at that this is a very famous slide there's been many textbooks by a guy called Charles Nelson and University of Minnesota and what he shows there are three areas of the brain that he does happen in the human brain and what he shows is the change in the number of synapses during development so you start out at a certain point developing no synapses no connections the number of synapses in the different areas increase increase increase to a certain age so for example three years old and then they start dropping down to a adult level what so there's a pruning of connections it doesn't mean that more synapses are better factors that is the more synapses is worse it's a normal kind of process that goes on and so if you look at that if you look at that the teenage brain is still getting synapses pruned and actually there's now new evidence that the normal connections in a human brain are not really developed until about early 20s so so this is a something that has been well documented all kinds of species here's what I did with a professor from UC Irvine a number years ago in the fetal monkey so you have two hemispheres I'll show you a picture of that left hemisphere and right hemisphere and those hemispheres are connected by massive number of axons of these are fibers of nerve cells there are about in your brain and my brain of the order of 250 million of them okay and what we were studying is the development of these colossal projection in fetal monkeys at the University of California where I was a professor for many years we had a primate center one of sevens the centers in the United States and so we were able to get fetal monkeys and we studied these we were able to get time pregnant fetal monkeys we're studying them and at a time when the monkey was about that big like that and what we did was we're able to inject these dyes into a monkey brain and one side of the brain and look at the neurons on the other side of the brain that project from one side to the other so-called colossal projection neurons and this is a early fetal monkey the gestation in the monkey and the monkey is 165 days this is about 100 days before birth and all those white things you see those white specks you see along there those are individual neurons many hundreds of thousands of them every one of those specs is an individual neuron so see every one of these every one of these is and what you see is there's just a continuous array of neurons all around this part fetal monkey brain okay and when you look at a fetus about a month later in development this is normal normal developmental structure this is what we found okay they don't have to be anonymous to say there's something very different about this than that there are fewer neurons and then distributed in ways that are very different that's a continuous pattern distribution this is a pattern distribution that is discontinuous here there are hopefully few neurons was doing a lot there here there are more but there's still a few in there so these colossal connections during normal development I just lost so the result you have many more of these connections and you and I have the same thing when you are a fetus then when you then when you became born and so so this guy these kinds of regressive events are very common in the building of your brain my brain and all species of the home and this is one of the things I worked at the republic is in the prestigious national Academy of Sciences a number of years ago so here so one of the reasons one of the factors for the loss of these connections is something you wouldn't suspect and that is the fact that in the developing brain in the field developing brain neurons are active already and not just lying there and this happens to be a recording that was made in my lab of two neurons this is one neuron this is another neuron the time scale here is 25 seconds so time is here these recordings were made simultaneously by M.D.P.H.D. in my lab called William Wong who came from University of Beijing and what he did was he was able to put electrodes into the retina the retina is the back of the eye that contains all the cells that process visual information and sends information to the brain and one of the things about the retina is and this has this has problems clinical problems is the retina is very easy to detach you've heard about the detached retina you get hit in the eye retina because the detached it dies you become blind but for experimental purposes it necessitates an animal saying a mouse in this case you just remove the retina put it in the dish and it stays alive for days okay and under the microscope you can look at this retina and record from these cells what ganglion cells that form an action between the eye and the brain proper and that's what he did here this is before the animal can see anything because there are no photoreceptors so light cannot impact the system at all okay but yet these two cells which are ganglion cells predicting the brain fire in a correlated way so this is one cell and every 25 seconds or so boom a couple of innermost then quiet and boom again very quite regular every 25 30 40 seconds it does this completely spontaneous you're not doing anything you're not touching it next to it and I'll show you these cells in a second it's another cell it's neighbor and it goes with a burst of activity at the same time this one fires then quiet this one fires this one fires again like that this this activity is present in every mammalian species that we've looked at fetal monkeys mice and almost definitely in humans and I'll show you these two cells are they were recorded from completely spontaneous when you were a fetus your brain was firing impulses and here's the key thing depending on how these impulses fire that will determine which connections with synapses are eliminated and which are maintained if you muck around with this activity by blocking with drugs or something you completely change the pattern of connections in the visual system okay so if you're doing stuff to in some ways interfere with the developing brain would say exogenous drugs or some kind of a infection something like that activity is going to be affected in the brain and connections will be will be abnormal so let me now show you these two cells that after one recorded from okay so so here's so the electrode was placed one in this cell this is about 20 microns one in this cell these are processing