10 easy ways to build your 10-month-old’s brain

Before about 10 months, your baby’s primary need was to gather input, sense by sense, to learn about the world. Now your baby’s learning is more complex, and they’re ready for something child development specialists call “cross modal integration.” This means that your baby’s brain can now coordinate input from different sensory systems like sound, touch, and sight, and create new links between them in their brain.

How multisensory processing works

Let’s say your baby pulls the string of a guitar. Information about the look of the guitar and string will be captured by one set of nerve cells, the feel of the string will be captured by a separate set of neurons, and the sound produced by the string’s vibration will be “recorded” by yet a third set of neurons. For your baby to experience guitar playing the way an adult does, their brain must create a link between these three neural sets—sight, touch, and sound. This is an example of the kind of connection that’s happening all the time in your baby’s brain right now. 

10 activities to boost your baby’s brain connections

House tours are still a great way to give your child active experiences with meaningful objects and situations to further refine your baby’s sensory system. Bonus: they require no preparation or playthings 😉  Here are some ideas to get you started.

1. Run their fingers over the leaves of a house plant
2. Look out a window and talk about the weather
3. Turn the sink faucet on and help your baby run their fingers under the water
4. Point out loved ones in photos around the house
5. Explore different textures by touching fruits and vegetables
6. Open and close a creaking door
7. Pull out books and look at their covers
8. Observe the way a ceiling fan spins
9. Take something out of a cupboard and put it back in
10. Pump some baby lotion and let them help you rub it into your hands