Food for Thought Friday

TGIF! It has been a looooong week around here.

Sick baby =no sleep for mommy.

Good thing he is cute, right?

I can’t believe he is 6 months old already!

So this is a quick post, sharing some goodies from around the net I have found the last couple weeks! If you are new to PWW365, I love to share some  interesting, inspiring, enlightening, or just plain cool stuff that I find while pursuing the interwebs on Fridays. You can go here to see past posts if you’d like!

Coming up next week, I have another installment in my How to Help Your Child Talk series and if I ever get any sleep, maybe more 😉 Until then…happy reading!

Enjoying the Small Things: Square Pegs, Round Holes and Raising a Child with Special Needs

I LOVE this post from Kelle of Enjoying the Small Things. I mean, I love this post. Kelle explains that deciding what is best for her daughter, Nella, who has Down syndrome is “like putting a square peg in a round hole” and goes on to say:

But then, (Don’t you love “but thens”?!) I remembered Apollo 13. Have you seen it? The astronauts’ lives literally depended on fitting a square peg in a round hole. Technically speaking, the lunar module’s round receptacles didn’t fit the command module’s square filters for carbon dioxide disposal, and CO2 levels were near toxic. There’s this scene where these NASA engineers go into a room, dump everything to which the astronauts have access on the table, and are given the challenge of using what’s on the table to transform the round receptacle to fit the square filter. It’s an impossible task, but these people are solution-based thinkers and their friends’ lives are at stake. And they figured it out. They walked out victoriously an hour later carrying a contraption that was once a non-existent solution. They used duct tape and cardboard and creativity and determination and never once said “we can’t do this.” They did it because they had to.

You need to read the whole post over at Enjoying the Small Things as it’s awesome and will inspire you.

 UCSF Study Shows How the Brain Sorts Sound to Make Language

Interesting new research on language!

The brain, it seems, immediately filters language sounds into broad groupings, with small neighborhoods of neurons activating at certain sounds. The scientists were able to build brain maps of these sound neighborhoods, showing that the same neurons “lit up” each time patients heard, for example, a specific type of vowel or consonant.

“When we hear sounds or language, our brain is actually organizing this information through very particular filters – neurons that are detecting certain sounds,” said Dr.Edward Chang, a UCSF neurosurgeon and lead scientist of the brain research. “The cool thing about it is you see this real clear heterogeneity in how those neurons correspond to speech. There’s definitely an organization to it.”

Read the whole article at  SFGATE.com.

Breakthrough Study Reveals Biological Basis for Sensory Processing Disorders in Kids

There is little scientific research regarding SPD, so this is pretty interesting stuff!

In a groundbreaking new study from UC San Francisco, researchers have found that children affected with SPD have quantifiable differences in brain structure, for the first time showing a biological basis for the disease that sets it apart from other neurodevelopmental disorders.

One of the reasons SPD has been overlooked until now is that it often occurs in children who also have ADHD or autism, and the disorders have not been listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by psychiatrists and psychologists.

“Until now, SPD hasn’t had a known biological underpinning,” said senior author Pratik Mukherjee, MD, PhD, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging and bioengineering at UCSF. “Our findings point the way to establishing a biological basis for the disease that can be easily measured and used as a diagnostic tool,” Mukherjee said.

Read the entire post at the UCSF website.

Have a fantastic weekend!