born at 28W. A week earlier, bioelectric activity had burst discharges. OH! myelination! Basically, uninsulated wires to insulated wires? but then there’s the gap –
“For example, a characteristic pattern of a very early stage of bioelectrical development (24–27 W) is the discontinuous bioelectrical activity with burst discharges (Dreyfus-Brisac, 1968). The EEG of a 27-week-old premature infant is mainly discontinuous; interburst intervals tend to decrease with increasing conceptional age, and the bursts are synchronous between hemispheres in 80–100% of recording epochs (Anderson et al., 1985). The main features of EEG maturation in preterm infants (29–38 W) are a progressive spatio-temporal differentiation, a decrease in discontinuous activity with burst discharges, and an increase in various rhythmic activities (Nolte and Haas, 1978; Cioni et al., 1992; reviewed in Kostovic´ et al., 1995).
The developmental peak of the SP (28–30 W) sees the onset of intense dendritic differentiation of layer III cortical neurons, concomitant with the penetration of various classes of afferent fibers in the CP. This suggests that ingrowing afferents may be involved in the induction of the dendritic differentiation of cortical neurons between 27 and 32 W. The ingrowth of commissural and associative corticocortical fibers may also explain the rapid increase in length and arborization of the basal dendrites of layer III cortical neurons during this period, as these neurons are both the main source and the target of corticocortical connectivity (Mrzljak et al., 1990, 1992) “