Ep. 4 - The Connected Mind (with Vicky Leong)

Summary

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Birth of a Parent – Ep. 4: The Connected Mind (with Vicky Leong)

Podcast: Early Childhood Matters with Michael Feigelson
Date: July 29, 2026
Guest: Dr. Vicky Leong, developmental neuroscientist

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Episode Overview

This episode explores how parenthood transforms the human mind, focusing on the science of "synchrony"—the remarkable process by which parents and young children literally connect their brains and bodies. Host Michael Feigelson and Dr. Vicky Leong dive into the dance of human connection, the neural and behavioral magic underpinning early relationships, and how both children and parents learn and change in tandem.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Science of Connection – What Is Synchrony?

• Definition: Dr. Leong explains synchrony as the physiological and behavioral alignment between parent and child, allowing them to share focus, emotions, and a sense of "being together."
  • "That experience is something that we call synchrony. And what I study is how your brain and your body generate the brain impulses and the patterns of behavior that allow you to experience that state of being together." – Vicky Leong [02:23]
• Metaphor of Dance: Synchrony is described as a 'dyadic dance'—unfolding through gaze, vocalizations, gestures, and emotional exchanges, present even in infants just a few months old.
  • "Coordinating the patterns of behavior in a way that is fluid and interactive and forms a greater whole... we can achieve this level of connection and behavior even from the earliest days of life." – Vicky Leong [03:35]

2. How Babies and Parents Communicate Beyond Words

• Nonverbal Genius of Babies: Even pre-verbal infants engage in coordinated, rhythmic exchanges with caregivers through gaze, turn-taking in sounds, smiles, and gestures.
  • "When we use the term dyadic dance, we're talking about coordinating multiple forms of behavior..." – Vicky Leong [04:46]
• Host’s Reflection: Michael shares feeling retrained by his own infant in nonverbal connection.
  • "While I was training her to acquire that language, I felt like she was training me in communication without it." – Michael [06:53]
• The Purity of Nonverbal Bonding:
  • "That is maybe the most primitive and the most pure form of a human connection, and we can create it with so little." – Vicky Leong [07:22]

3. Vicky Leong’s Journey: From Medicine to Measuring Synchrony

• Personal Backstory: Leaving medical school to care for her mother, Dr. Leong worked as a special needs teacher. Her biggest lesson: forming deep connections precedes learning.
  • "All my higher levels of learning and my degrees did not prepare me for what these children needed to receive from me, which was fundamentally to understand them..." – Vicky Leong [08:01]
• The challenge and joy lay in communicating at a child's level with tools as simple as a touch, gaze, or responsive attention.

4. The Quest to Measure Brain-to-Brain Connection

• Pioneering Experiments: Dr. Leong’s lab was first to measure brain synchrony (using hyperscanning EEG) between babies and adults.
  • "We got to the point where we were lucky to be able to perform the first successful measurements of brain to brain synchrony between babies and adults..." – Vicky Leong [12:35]
• Lab Realities: The process involves turning the lab into a welcoming space, distracting babies with toys and songs, and improvising to capture fleeting moments of synchrony.
  • "All your notions of having a script… have to go out the window because you're dealing with a very unpredictable young human." – Vicky Leong [13:52]
  • Singing, playing, wearing funny jewelry or glasses—all ways to keep the dance going (and the data usable).

5. Singing, Rhythm, and the Mechanics of Synchrony

• Music as a Tool: Rhythmic speech and song (nursery rhymes, poetry) structure interactions and help align parent and child neural activity.
  • "Rhythm is good because it gives a predictable structure... All of that helps to drive the, what we call entrainment between brains." – Vicky Leong [18:28]
• Synchrony and Emotion: Beyond rhythm, sharing emotional states and intention also creates synchrony. Positive emotions, shared affect, and engaging play are crucial.

6. The Power of Eye Contact

• Dr. Leong’s research pinpointed eye contact as a trigger for learning—babies only absorbed new words when they could see the speaker's eyes.
  • "They only learned the language when they could see the speaker's eyes." – Vicky Leong [24:45]
  • Brain synchrony was highest in these conditions, demonstrating the integral role of perceived intent and connection.

7. How Parents Help (and Learn From) Their Children

• Scaffolding Attention: Responsive parents prolong their child’s focus and support exploration simply by joining in and mirroring interest.
  • "Parents have an incredibly important role in helping the child to focus... by joining in with your child when you see that they're interested in something." – Vicky Leong [26:00]
• Parental Learning: Synchronicity is not just for babies—parents rapidly learn what cues work for their child, adjusting communication style, and developing intuitions.
  • "Every parent and every child will negotiate and learn between them what is the best modality and patterning of communication." – Vicky Leong [27:57]

8. Parenting as Superpower: The Gift of Play

• Benefit to Parents: Parenting reawakens playfulness, making adults more creative and present. Play is shown as a lifelong vitality booster.
  • "One of the superpowers I think of becoming a parent... is rediscovering how to play and the joy of play and the benefits of playing with your child." – Vicky Leong [29:58]
  • Quoting George Bernard Shaw: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.” [30:45]
• Beyond Parenting: Skills developed through synchrony—attunement, nonverbal reading, improvisation—benefit friendships, workplaces, and leadership.
  • "Some of the best creative moments... come when you're having fun... going with the flow a little bit may help in some contexts." – Vicky Leong [34:19]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "You lose a little bit of propensity to connect. So never mind." – Vicky Leong, as video fails and audio-only conversation mirrors the episode’s theme. [00:30]
• "Before a child learns from you, they have to connect with you." – Narrator [10:14]
• "Getting good EEG data is just the first step. After that, it goes through a very rigorous series of checks and cleaning... a session that lasts 45 minutes can sometimes yield 3 minutes... of usable data." – Vicky Leong [20:48]
• "I think parents have that unique privilege to rediscover [play] at a later stage of our lives... play is an incredible privilege." – Vicky Leong [29:58]
• Michael's mother on synchrony: "Yes, we had synchrony when you were little... I've always been able to read your mind." [33:32–33:40]
• On play as a transferable skill: "Play sounds simple, but underneath... sits a set of essential skills. You have to pay attention to other people, read their cues... Play stops sounding like something childish and starts sounding like the exact set of skills we need to be healthy, happy adults." – Narrator [35:46]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:25 – Discussion of synchrony begins; the “dance” metaphor
• 06:53 – Michael’s experience of learning to communicate without language with his daughter
• 08:01 – Vicky’s background: Working as a special needs teacher, and learning to connect nonverbally
• 12:35 – First experiments measuring brain-to-brain synchrony
• 13:52 – Realities of working with babies in a neuroscience lab
• 18:28 – The mechanics of synchrony: rhythm, song, emotional state
• 24:45 – Eye contact as the key to learning in infants
• 26:00 – How parents can help their children focus—and what this looks like neurologically
• 27:57 – Parental learning: adapting communication to each unique child
• 29:58 – Play as the “superpower” bestowed by parenthood
• 34:19 – How play and synchrony help in work and other adult relationships
• 35:46 – Nonverbal skills and attunement as the building blocks for adult connection

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Final Takeaways

• Synchrony is foundational, arising from subtle, shared behaviors and emotional cues; it's apparent in early life and visible in the brain.
• Parenting reshapes not just the child’s mind, but the parent’s as well, training adults in the art of flexible, intuitive, playful human connection.
• Play is much more than recreation—it is essential for healthy development and a skill that carries benefits throughout life.
• Dr. Leong’s pioneering work shows that beneath the everyday rituals of parenting lie powerful tools for growth, adaptation, and joy for both parent and child.

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Transcript

[Vicky Leong]

Thunder Foundation.

[Michael]

You lost me again. Do you want to.

[Vicky Leong]

Ooh, lost you again.

[Michael]

Do you want to do just audio? Do you want to try turning the video off and see if that works better?

[Vicky Leong]

That may be necessary. Let me try that.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Vicky Leong]

Yep.

[Michael]

Okay. How's it now?

[Vicky Leong]

Yes, so far, no problems. It's a shame, though. I can't see your reaction.

[Michael]

I worry about our levels of synchrony, though. Now that we can't see each other.

[Vicky Leong]

I know every modality you lose, you lose a little bit of propensity to connect. So never mind.

[Michael]

Okay, well, we'll use all of our senses.

[Narrator]

We spent the beginning of this interview fighting with a bad Internet connection. At one point, we gave up on video altogether and switched to audio only, which turned out to be an unexpectedly appropriate way to begin a conversation about what happens in our brains and bodies when two humans connect.

[Michael]

Hello?

[Mike]

What?

[Narrator]

This podcast begins with a simple idea. When a baby is born, a parent is also born. And in that transition, just like their babies, parents, brains and bodies team up to help them learn and adapt at high velocity, developing a set of skills and perspectives valuable for their kids and for society as a whole.

[Michael]

This is Birth of a Parent.

[Narrator]

Today's guest is Vicky Leong, a developmental neuroscientist who studies neural synchrony between parents and babies. She studies what happens when a parent and child truly connect. And her work made me wonder, what if? Becoming a parent is about learning how to connect two minds,

[Michael]

How do you explain what you study to parents when they come into the lab?

[Vicky Leong]

So my work is understanding how parents and their children connect together in the moment and share a sense of being present in the same place at the same time, being able to share a common focus, share a common state of mind, experience some emotions together and collectively. That experience is something that we call synchrony. And what I study is how your brain and your body generate the brain impulses and the patterns of behavior that allow you to experience that state of being together.

[Narrator]

Connection is one of those words we use so often, it almost disappears into the background. Vicki studies what it means physiologically, the tiny adjustments that allow two people to find each other moment by moment, step by step.

[Michael]

I've heard you describe it as a dance before. Could you explain what kind of dance dance it is or why you use that metaphor?

[Vicky Leong]

Sure, sure. So when we talk about how parents and children coordinate or connect with each other, one analogy that comes to mind is that of a dyadic dance, where dyadic means two people. And coordinating the patterns of behavior in A way that is fluid and interactive and forms a greater whole. So the idea that there is a give and a take and a movement and the flow between one partner's actions and the other. And it might or might not surprise you to know that we can achieve this level of connection and behavior even from the earliest days of life. And that, in fact, the very youngest infants, just a few months old, share the highest levels of behavioral synchrony with their caregivers.

[Narrator]

Synchrony might sound like an advanced social skill, but Vicki says it really isn't. And what's remarkable is not that parents do this. It's that babies do too. Long before they can speak, they are already dancing.

[Vicky Leong]

So when we use the term dyadic dance, we're talking about coordinating multiple forms of behavior, like sharing gaze, sharing gaze patterns, taking turns to utter words or babble or make sounds, but having that coordination and saying something and listening, smiling or sharing positive emotions together, laughing together or moving, gesturing in the same tempo or in a coordinated way. So all of those are ways that even very young babies can coordinate their behavior with a caregiver. And so when you take a step back and you look at how moms and babies interact with each other, you can see this kind of beautiful flow of back and forth between them. And that's what we describe as the dyadic dance.

[Narrator]

Once you know what to look for, it's hard not to see synchrony everywhere, including in the conversation we were having right at that moment.

[Michael]

And are we dancing right now?

[Vicky Leong]

So, Michael, unfortunately, you and I are not in the same room, which somewhat reduces our capacity to coordinate. But certainly, even with just hearing each other, we're listening, and we're responding, and we're pausing, and we're not talking over each other. So there is already one element of a dance which is taking turns in conversation, and that's one part of the dance. Of course, the more modalities we can bring into play, if we can also be gesturing or we can be seeing each other or we can be smiling and laughing, that just enhances the complexity of the dance.

[Narrator]

Had the video worked, or had Vicki and I been in the same room? Our dance may have been more dynamic. But by using words and listening closely, we were able to fill in a lot of the gaps. Babies, however, arrive in the world without language, so they rely on other signals to make their connections. A voice, a face, a touch, a smell. And according to Vicky, all of those signals help build the connection between a child and their caregiver.

[Michael]

I had this experience When I became a father, where I suddenly realized how dependent on language, formal language, I had become to communicate. And while I was training her to acquire that language, I felt like she was training me in communication without it.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Michael]

I was curious, what do you think about this as a scientist?

[Vicky Leong]

Yeah, I find that process wonderful. I had a very similar epiphany working with very young children with special needs, which is relearning and rediscovering the senses, which I had forgotten that you can use to communicate with. And that whole world of non verbal communication, it challenges you to distill things down to their essence. And that for me, is one of the joys, because that is maybe the most primitive and the most pure form of a human connection, and we can create it with so little.

[Narrator]

Long before Vicki started measuring synchrony in a laboratory, she encountered that special kind of connection somewhere else, in a classroom for children with special needs.

[Vicky Leong]

Yeah. So life never quite pans out to be the way that you predict it to turn out. So I was on track many, many years ago now to be a doctor. I was enrolled in Cambridge University as a medical student. But somewhere towards the middle of my second year, and coming into my third year of studies, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. And so I decided to pause my medical training. I went back to Singapore and spent some time taking care of my mum. And that gave me the space and the time to reevaluate my career plans and to ask myself what really matters to me. And I realized at the heart of it, it was about serving people and understanding people, in particular, children. And so my very first job, having graduated out of Cambridge as an undergraduate, was to be a special needs teacher in a school that was supporting children with severe intellectual disabilities. So I came into the job thinking, oh, I've got a Cambridge undergraduate degree in medical sciences. I must be able to teach these children something. And the irony of it all was, by the first three months, I felt completely and utterly inept. All my higher levels of learning and my degrees did not prepare me for what these children needed to receive from me, which was fundamentally to understand them and to be able to connect with them, to establish a bond of trust and to communicate at their level. And that was where I started to become curious about what it takes to establish a human connection. What are the bare essential ingredients? If I can't use complicated words, what can I do? Oh, okay. A reassuring touch on the shoulder, a calm demeanor, looking them in the eye, you know, expressing positive affect, responding in a prompt way when they want something from me, even if I don't completely understand what they want. And I started to build those building blocks of communication right from ground zero and discovering that as essentially the ingredients for building that emotional bond. And I think, little did I know I was also in some senses discovering the ingredients of how you establish synchrony and connection with young children.

[Narrator]

The children Vicky worked with taught her something that would eventually become the foundation of her research. Before a child learns from you, they have to connect with you. And Viggy wanted to know whether that connection was leaving a trace inside the brain.

[Michael]

I want to ask how you came to decide you wanted to measure what was happening inside of people when they were having these experiences of connection.

[Vicky Leong]

So teaching in a special needs school obviously gave me the motivation and the eye opening moments that I to spark my curiosity. Right. So, okay, there's something quite special going on with these young children that goes beyond words and goes beyond complex understanding. There's something quite fundamental about the way we connect with each other as humans. So that, in a nutshell, is probably what I took away most strongly from those years as being a special needs teacher and then honing my own senses to be sensitive to what I'm doing. How was my gaze being patterned? How am I speaking? How am I modulating my emotions and my voice? But I also realized that my curiosity about this needed to be satiated beyond just in some senses, mastering the use of them. I needed to understand the how and the why.

[Narrator]

Vicky's question was, if synchrony is happening between two people, can we see signs of it in their brains?

[Vicky Leong]

I became curious about trying to measure whether the brains of two people who are coordinating with each other might also show signs of coordination between them. And I wasn't the first person to ask that question, but possibly I was the first to attempt this with very young humans babies because of my background in special needs education and my sense that this was something quite fundamental as a human capacity. So the lab that I had set up back in 2015 was the first to attempt to, to measure in a very young baby, as young as 9 months of age, whether there were signs of brain to brain synchrony between that child and an adult that they were interacting with.

[Narrator]

There was just one problem back in 2015. Nobody had ever done this with babies before.

[Vicky Leong]

This was a bit of a punt in the dark. We had no other methods to follow because no one had published this yet. So we didn't know how to do it. We didn't even have the right equipment. That was purpose Built for it. We had to adapt a lot of the equipment for adults to be used with children, and we had to build the entire lab and the setup ourselves. So a lot of it was constructing things ourselves from the ground up. But we got to the point where we were lucky to be able to perform the first successful measurements of brain to brain synchrony between babies and adults and to show that there was a significantly measurable level of coupling and that this was indeed changed or modulated by cues like eye contact.

[Narrator]

Vicki had started with a hunch that the small things caregivers do without thinking, a look, a smile, a touch, a moment of attention, might be doing far more work than we realize. She started to see evidence that those moments were indeed showing up in the brain itself.

[Michael]

Can you take me into that first experiment? So there's a parent and there's a baby and there's two EEG caps. How do you set it up, Santa?

[Vicky Leong]

Yeah. Okay. So essentially, when we do these brain to brain synchrony measurements, all your notions of having a script and step one, step two, step three, step four, basically have to go out the window because you're dealing with a very unpredictable young human. I think all of us have babies who probably know this because what you're working with is a time limited offer, as it were. So the challenge is to put the baby in the best possible mood. And the moment that the cap goes onto the child's head, you know that the mood of the child will immediately diminish because nobody likes sitting there with a slightly damp cap on their head. And so you have a rapidly running out window of time to complete the data measurement. And so what we normally do is we try and put the cap on the child as quickly as possible and usually whilst distracting them doing other things. So one of my postdocs used to wear these very elaborate glasses so that the child would become endlessly fascinated with her face while she very quickly put the cap on their head and very quickly added the gel under the electrodes so that they would be distracted and not pay too much attention to what we were doing with their caps on the heads. And basically, it's a game that we have to devise. We have to make the whole thing a bit of a song and dance so that they feel like they're part of a gaming activity rather than a structured series of step A, step B, step C. And so that was the scene pretty much in the lab, which is we were set up to look very much like a living room in a home. So very Unlike most EEG labs, which are a bit more clinical and stripped down, we had sofas, we had carpets, we had toys everywhere. And the baby would come in and be sat straight away on a sofa and be introduced to some of our toys. We would start getting them warmed up. And then when we thought they were in a reasonably good mood, that's when the capping would begin.

[Narrator]

Listening to Vicky describe the lab, it struck me that everyone in the room was doing exactly the thing they were trying to study. Paying attention, following the baby's lead, adjusting their behavior in response, trying to get onto the same wavelength.

[Michael]

So when you interview potential postdocs, do you interview them for their performance dancing skills? Is that a qualification that's required in Victoria Leong's lab?

[Vicky Leong]

Well, thankfully, no. But, you know, it is true that I do brief them very clearly on the fact that working with children is very different to working with adults. And they have to be willing to be a bit silly and to have a bit of fun and to have sports spots and bits of drool all over them. It's not prerequisite, but I do find that if they're willing to be a bit more relaxed and enjoy being with children in that setting, they do tend to acquire better data.

[Michael]

I'm curious, what's the most kind of funny or ridiculous thing a baby's done that ruined an otherwise perfect experiment?

[Vicky Leong]

I would say that the funny thing is more what the adults try and do to keep the child in play. So, like I said, all my postdocs probably have their own special tips or tricks, so one of them does have special glasses. There's another one who deliberately wears quite chunky jewellery that she doesn't mind the child grabbing me. When I was doing this myself, I sang to all the children. So my magic trick, as it were, was once I could tell that they were boiling over a little bit, I would just break out in song and sing any nursery rhyme that came to mind. And so you would find in the middle of a session, a child's just about to go off their mood is just about to go off a cliff. And then I start singing and the mum starts singing and my postdoc starts singing and the whole thing becomes like a campfire chorus.

[Michael]

Is there a go to song? Do you have, like, what's your go to?

[Vicky Leong]

Yeah, yeah. So babies enjoy many different songs, but generally the upbeat ones work better. And so usually it's like the wheels on the bus go round and round or you put your right hand in, you put your right hand out, those Work better than Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, because when the channel's a little bit on edge already, you know, those slightly slower tempos don't seem to work so well. You do need something positive and upbeat

[Michael]

and what's going on when I'm singing a nursery rhyme to my daughter's older now, but when she was little, like what's going on in our brains, according to your research.

[Vicky Leong]

So that's a great question and leads into one of the things we do recommend that parents be very comfortable doing, which is singing to your child, reading nursery rhymes to your child, or reciting poetry to your child. And one of the reasons for this is that the acoustic wave that you're generating, so the speech signal, the song signal, when you're singing a nursery rhyme or you're reading something quite poetic, that speech pattern is itself really rhythmic. And rhythm is good because it gives a predictable structure to the interaction. It allows the child to know what's coming next. It allows us to clap along to the beat or to predict when things end. And all of that helps to drive the, what we call entrainment between brains. Entrainment is one of the processes that we think is supporting synchrony. Not the only one, but it's where your brain starts to follow a predictable beat. And that's one of the ways we think that parents can establish synchrony with their child by giving and creating this strongly rhythmic context through song or through nursery rhymes. There is also elements of synchrony which are based on shared knowledge or shared understanding or prediction. And to my mind, there are also elements which are more state based. I described, you know, sharing an emotional state. Emotion is a really powerful way of generating synchrony. And that doesn't have that rhythmic pulsing structure. You are in a positive or in a not very positive state. But somehow sharing that state of emotional congruence also creates synchrony.

[Narrator]

Nursery rhymes, eye contact, shared understanding, shared emotions. Vicki started to see synchrony everywhere. The challenge, however, was getting the data to do the science.

[Michael]

In one conversation, you described good EEG data as perfect nectar.

[Vicky Leong]

Did I? Okay, you must remind me what context.

[Michael]

Well, what I wanted to ask is, do you remember the first time you saw this brain to brain synchrony in the data and what that, you know, what that was like for you?

[Vicky Leong]

Ah, okay. So I think I described good EEG data as nectar because it's so hard to come by. So I already mentioned the theatrics that we have to put up to some extent in order to collect just a few Minutes, in many cases, just a few minutes of what is usable data by the end of the processing pathway. So, you know, getting the data is just the first step. After that, it go through a very rigorous series of checks and cleaning. And, you know, a session that lasts 45 minutes can sometimes yield 3 minutes, 5 minutes of data at the end of the day that's usable. That's why I think I use nectar to describe that collection of EEG data, because it is a distillation of just the good stuff, and it's really hard to come by. But the first time that we convincingly saw heightened levels of synchrony in a clean way, which is basically to say, okay, we've matched for everything else that we can think of to match for. We've controlled for everything else that we could think of, controlling for data length, child's attention patterns, et cetera. And realizing that that finding stood up to all that scrutiny, that was exhilarating, because up to that point, it had been a hunch. We thought we could measure this, and we thought it would be responsive to something like eye gaze, but we didn't know until very much down that road whether that hun would be correct. So the first time we saw that, it was exhilarating because I think we had done something that no other team at that point had been able to do, which was empirically establish that you can measure synchrony between a child and an adult.

[Narrator]

Once Vicki had figured out the recipe for pure nectar, it became easier to ask more complex questions. Instead of what does synchrony look like in the brains of a parent and child, she could ask questions about the underlying mechanisms, not whether synchrony occurs in moments of eye contact or shared gaze. But what is it about these behaviors that brings two brains together?

[Vicky Leong]

In our first experiment, we saw that in a sustained context where the adult was either looking at the child the whole time or looking away from a child the whole time, those contacts elicited measurable different levels of synchrony. So we suspected on the basis of the first experiment that it might be more that effect that we were picking up here. That gaze was acting as an ostensive cue to the child, which is, something was signaling to the child that this is relevant, learn this. And therefore the synchrony was high because the child had, in some senses, unlocked or turned on a particular learning pathway.

[Narrator]

It took Vicki and her team several more years, but eventually they were able to prove this hypothesis, that eye contact and gaze help convey a message to children. Get ready. Focus your mind. Learning Is about to happen.

[Vicky Leong]

We replicated the same type of experiment where we had an adult speaker communicating with a child, and we were changing the level of eye contact that she was giving the child. But unlike the first experiment, where it was just singing nursery rhymes, in the second experiment, we gave the child an opportunity to learn novel words. So we created three of these languages, all with nonsense syllables in them, but we paired them with three different levels of eye contact, either full eye contact, partial eye contact, Or a situation where the gaze was completely unavailable and the eyeglasses were dark. And we found some really interesting trends. So, first of all, although the babies were attending equally to all three languages, they only learned the language when they could see the speaker's eyes.

[Narrator]

The babies paid attention in every condition, but attention wasn't enough. Learning only happened when they could see the speaker's eyes. Eye contact was a way of telling them, this is for you. And that message helped them to absorb the new words.

[Vicky Leong]

But then, of course, as you probably predict, we did the brain to brain synchrony measurements, and lo and behold, the level of brain synchrony was predictive of the learning. That selective learning effect synchrony was high between the speaker and the child when the child could see their eyes, and that was correlated with the strength of learning. And when the child couldn't see the speaker's eyes, There was no or not significant levels of synchrony between the speaker and the child. So that study was the first empirical link that the synchrony is tied to a selective ostensive learning mechanism in the child's brain.

[Narrator]

Before a child learns from us, they have to know we're talking to them, not just hear us, not just see us, but feel a connection.

[Michael]

And is it too far to go to say that the mom's brain is able to help the baby's brain focus for longer?

[Vicky Leong]

I think we certainly saw evidence of the mother's responsiveness doing that. So when she saw her baby becoming interested in something, what did she do? And, of course, her brain generated some kind of a signal. And we did see that the moms who had that larger response, their baby, also seemed to sustain their attention for longer at the object. And what we think was happening is those mothers who had a larger neural response probably were also doing very helpful things to help their baby stay focused. So maybe they were joining in with the child and pointing out features that were interesting. Look at that wheel. And basically joining in with the child's attention Rather than trying to take the child away and do something else. So, yes, I think parents have an incredibly important role in helping the child to focus. And one of the best ways that you can do this is by joining in with your child when you see that they're interested in something and helping them prolong and extend and expand their interest in that toy or the book or the object.

[Narrator]

Vicki made a compelling case that us parents wield a lot of power when it comes to helping our kids focus on that simple things like rhythm, gaze, and eye contact can make them feel connected and prime them to learn. But this podcast is not about how children learn. It's about how parents learn and what we learn and whether these learnings can extend into other parts of our lives. So I asked Vicki if she could help me flip the script.

[Michael]

We talked a bunch about how parents play this role in their children's learning, but I'd like to take a few minutes to flip it and to ask, in your experience, in your research in this state of synchrony, what are the parents learning? What are they being trained in by the babies?

[Vicky Leong]

Yeah. So parents are on a steep learning curve in terms of how to interact with their children. This is no surprise. I think all of us would have experienced this. And it also tells us that not all the cues that I mentioned are equally effective in getting the child to focus. So, for example, and this is probably something that varies on a child by child basis, you know, some children will respond quite quickly and quite reliably when their name is being called, compared to, let's say, when you point and indicate something. And other children may prefer a more tactile form of communication. So this is something I do think that, you know, every parent and every child will negotiate and learn between them what is the best modality and patterning of communication. And what we do see is that these cues are used to different levels of efficacy overall, but also across each dyad. So I think that's one of the things that parents do kind of find fun to learn in our playbook, which is realizing which tools work, which tools maybe don't work, and basically learning what is the most effective way of communicating with your child.

[Narrator]

I found myself thinking about all the things we call parental instinct, the sense that, you know when your child is tired or overwhelmed or becoming sick or about to ignore you completely. But what Vicki's research suggests is that much of that instinct may not be instinct at all. It may be learning, but learning so fast and so subtle that we may not even notice it's happening.

[Michael]

One of the big ideas of this

[Narrator]

podcast is that the Experience of becoming a parent and getting trained by our kids gives us superpowers.

[Michael]

So I wanted to ask you to

[Narrator]

imagine, in this case, the audience is my 86 year old mother, Linda.

[Michael]

And based on your research and your

[Narrator]

experience, what kinds of skills and abilities might she have developed?

[Vicky Leong]

So I like the way that you're calling it a superpower, because of course, every parent is developing skills and capabilities that they didn't know they had. So that's a wonderful way of thinking about it. I would say that one of the superpowers I think of becoming a parent that I think is really relevant to discussion today is rediscovering how to play and the joy of play and the benefits of playing with your child. Because although I've talked a lot about what we're measuring, you know, it's these cues and this exchange of give and take of words and gaze and touch and emotions. Actually, what are they doing? In most cases they are playing. And I will tell you that that's probably one of the best ways to establish a strong positive connection and to generate a moment of high synchrony is to play and to enjoy yourself. And so amidst all that technicalities, the superpower there, I think is, is enjoying being in the moment with your child. And I think parents have that unique privilege to rediscover that at a later stage of our lives, because sadly, as we become older and we have to function as responsible adults, maybe play gets sidelined. We forget how to play, or maybe some of us may feel guilty about playing because we need to be responsible adults. But being in the presence of a young child with that unadulterated joy shining through, you can just enjoy yourself and play all over again. For the parent, I think the benefits there are maybe underestimated because not only are they enjoying themselves with the child and maybe having some stress relief and wonderful moments to treasure and share, but I also think that they are, in some senses, rediscovering some secrets to longevity. Now, I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said, we don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing. And the idea there is that one of the ways to keep young and keep being young is to keep discovering the joy of playing. And I think our children are one of the most wonderful playmates that we could have. And enjoying that process with them is an incredible privilege.

[Narrator]

It's a surprising answer. After all the talk of brain waves and learning pathways and synchrony, the superpower Vicki comes back to is play. Not because play is A break from learning, but because for a child, and maybe for adults too, play is learning. And as it turns out, my mom seems to have gotten the memo.

[Michael]

Hello?

[Mike]

Mike. Hi. How are you?

[Michael]

Good. Where are you? What's going on?

[Mike]

I'm at the supermarket. I. I'm buying some cheese.

[Michael]

What kind of cheese?

[Mike]

You know, different types of cheese to put on crackers when my friends come over for drinks.

[Michael]

I'm talking to somebody who studies synchrony between parents and children.

[Mike]

What do you mean?

[Michael]

Like when parents and children are feeling connected. What does that look like?

[Vicky Leong]

Under.

[Michael]

Under the skin? How do they do that?

[Mike]

They.

[Michael]

They put these caps on their heads and. Why are you laughing? They measure. They measure the electrical activity in their brains.

[Mike]

Yes.

[Michael]

Yes, what?

[Mike]

Yes, we had synchrony when you were little.

[Michael]

How'd you know I was gonna ask that?

[Mike]

I've always been able to read your mind.

[Narrator]

Okay, back to play. Other than a tool for learning, what else might play offer us? Bigger humans.

[Michael]

Do you think that the rediscovery of joy through play that we get taught by babies and toddlers, is that a skill set or a mindset that is useful for us in other parts of our life? At work, in leadership, as friends, are being trained in something that we can then use in many environments?

[Vicky Leong]

Well, I will certainly say that the benefits probably extend beyond the parent child relationship. I think the benefits of that go well beyond the immediate family sphere. I do think that the benefits for mental well being are there. I think if we play as a regular part of our lives, I think we're just probably happier people and that probably will carry over into our other relationships. It may also make you more playful at work. And I'm a firm believer that, you know, some of the best creative moments, whether you're a scientist or an artist, come when you're having fun. And so maybe rediscovering how to play with your child just be a bit silly. Never mind about the rules, make it up as you go along, be a bit dirty. Some of that element of just, you know, letting go of the rules and restrictions a little bit and going the flow a little bit may help in some contexts. I know, at least for me as a researcher, whenever we bring our toys into our meetings, and we do very rarely because we're building some toys right, and we have to test it ourselves. Whenever I bring the toys into the meeting, all these professors just become their child selves and they can't help themselves. We pick up the toys and we, you know, we squish them and we Talk to each other in childish words, and we pretend and we play. And sometimes some really good ideas come out of that much more relaxed context. So I know that, for me, personally, that that play element is really important in my work.

[Narrator]

Play sounds simple, but underneath it sits a set of essential skills. You have to pay attention to other people, read their cues, figure out how to connect with them, express yourself, improvise. When put like this, play stops sounding like something childish and starts sounding like the exact set of skills we need to be healthy, happy adults interacting with

[Vicky Leong]

very young babies and forming that initial connection. It's more about the emotional state, and we have a better range of modalities and senses that we bring to bear in that context. And so I think even if we don't actively use the other senses in communicating with other adults, we may be more sensitive to emotional cues or maybe more sensitive to what gestures and postures. So I do think that because parents have to, in some senses, unlearn their reliance on just what the child is saying, because they won't be saying things until they're about a year of age anyway. And we have to, you know, pay attention to a broader range of cues like the emotional states and just small physical movements. We may become, therefore, better able to read those cues in other people. And as you say, that may allow us to then connect more effectively.

[Narrator]

One day, when Mila was about 2, she was on our small terrace, and she noticed a bunch of ladybugs with some tiny wooden sticks and a selection of leaves from the plants, and she built them a little ladybug house. In this case, Melania and I were not the ones to help Mila focus or to convey to her that something was important. We were not the ones to offer a rhythm over which the dance of synchrony could take place, nor the ones to establish a sense of shared understanding. In this case, she was the one. She was the one telling us that something mattered, that there was an opportunity to learn. And before we knew it, all three of us were entranced, working together to build a ladybug house. I bet that if Vicky was there, she would have slipped some plastic caps on our heads. She would not have needed her funny glasses, nor would she have had to sing us nursery rhymes. I suspect that if Vicky had been there, we would have given her at least five minutes of pure nectar. Over the years, parents learn a lot about when to speak, when to wait, when to point something out, when to follow instead of lead. They learn a lot about what captures this particular child's attention what comforts them, what excites them, what reaches them. In other words, they learn a lot about what it takes to find synchrony. And maybe that's the training. Spending years trying to understand another mind. Spending years practicing the steps in a dance with a familiar rhythm but an ever evolving melody and constellation of steps. Spending years relearning how to play and why it matters. Victoria described parenting as a kind of dance. 2 Nervous systems learning to move together. Next time on Birth of a Parent, Demetrius Zigalatas will explore another kind of of choreography, the rituals and routines that help parents navigate uncertainty.

[Demetrius Zigalatas]

Well, I always start my day with my coffee ritual. I will make my coffee in exactly the same way. I have to use a very specific mug and I will make my coffee. And half of the time I won't even drink it. So it is the process that counts, not the outcome. That's why I would call this a ritual.

[Narrator]

If you'd like to support this series, the best way is simply to follow Birth of a Parent on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for listening.

[Vicky Leong]

This podcast is part of Early Childhood Matters, the storytelling platform published by the Van Leer Foundation.