Why Small Children Can't Walk Right Away

[petrossa]

Well growing up around horses as a kid, people always told me, "Look how amazing horses are, unlike humans, they can walk within the first few hours of birth!" I was always told it was attributed only to the fact that they are prey animals, so they need to quickly learn how to run...Is it also because horses have small brains?

Humans are very very fragile and are actually prey. At birth they are as helpless as any prey animal. As adults they have no physical means whatsoever to defend themselves against any predator. Even a fox can mortally wound a human.

Viewed in that context the argument of herbivores needing to run more quickly after birth doesn't hold water. The real reason is having four legs, which makes for more stability and indeed less complex brains.

The human brain has 3 major separate layers, each have autonomous control over the body. The first most basic brain is somewhat like a reptilian brain, on top of that is the second brain which is that of a primitive mammal, the 3rd is like all other primates in structure just more complex.

It's the first brain which does the day to day body control, and houses the neural networks needed for motor control. Since the 3rd brain is largely dysfunctional in the first few years of life it completely messes up the motorcenters inhibiting them from functioning properly.

Over time the 3rd brain gets organized and starts to integrate the motorcenters thus allowing them to function fully.

[san.W10]

Lund University in Sweden

:rofl:

[User6060]

dude the majority of pruning mostly occurs during adolescence i think a good answer here is that the lateral corticospinal tract is still growing and migrating while babies are born

[petrossa]

dude the majority of pruning mostly occurs during adolescence i think a good answer here is that the lateral corticospinal tract is still growing and migrating while babies are born

There you are talking about pruning the brain towards full human conscience. It's not necessary to be fully conscious in order to walk, just that the brain isn't wildly firing all over the place.

The neural network for walking rests in the brainstem, as all other repetitive motor sequences. Whilst the basic infrastructure is there it needs integrating and obviously developing. However the basic principle that the human brain is no way different from all other mammals is valid. Nature doesn't reinvent, it just evolves existing structures.

Whatever anthropocentric studies may want to show how the human is unique, it isn't.?

[lamminium]

I like LiveScience but also hate it because it never references the original article. Skimmed through the current issue of PNAS and found no article related to this. Maybe it's in an older issue. =-=

[*RedBull*]

What the scientists and most of normal people fail to consider is that humans begin to crawl far earlier than we walk. A more aptly applied comparision would be to the crawling of human childern to that of the walking of animals.