Post by Tamrin on Apr 27, 2012 18:11:36 GMT 10
Learning From Inside the Womb
How developing babies acquire skills before birth
[Excerpt - Article by Annie Murphy Paul, July 29, 2011 - Linked Above]
How developing babies acquire skills before birth
[Excerpt - Article by Annie Murphy Paul, July 29, 2011 - Linked Above]
When does learning begin? It’s a deceptively simple question. The answer that springs to mind may be the first day of preschool or kindergarten: the first time kids are in a classroom with a teacher. Or perhaps you’ve called to mind the toddler phase, when children are learning to walk, and talk, and eat with a fork. Maybe you’ve encountered the “Zero to Three” movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones, so your answer to the question would be: Learning begins at birth.
The correct answer may surprise you. You may even find it implausible — though it’s supported by the latest research from biology and psychology. And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we’re born, in the womb. When we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they are clean slates, unmarked by life — when in fact they have already been shaped by us, and by the particular environments we live in.
First of all, they learn the sound of their mothers’ voices. Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother’s abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month, are muted and muffled. One researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. But the pregnant woman’s own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily, and because the fetus is always with her, it hears her voice a lot. Once it’s born, it recognizes the sound of her voice, and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else’s.
How can we know this? Newborn babies can’t do much, but one thing they’re really good at is sucking. Researchers in these experiments rigged up a pair of rubber nipples so that if the baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother’s voice through a pair of headphones. If it sucks on the other nipple, it hears the voice of a female stranger. Babies quickly make their preference known by choosing the first one.
In these studies, scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them, and they’ll resume their fast sucking when they get bored. This is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they heard it outside the womb.
My favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day while they were pregnant recognized the theme song of that show once they were born. Fetuses are even learning about the particular language spoken in the world that they’ll be born into. A study published last year reported that, from birth, babies cry in the accent of their mothers’ native language. French babies’ cries end on a rising note, while German babies’ end on a falling note — imitating the “melodic contours” of those languages.
The correct answer may surprise you. You may even find it implausible — though it’s supported by the latest research from biology and psychology. And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we’re born, in the womb. When we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they are clean slates, unmarked by life — when in fact they have already been shaped by us, and by the particular environments we live in.
First of all, they learn the sound of their mothers’ voices. Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother’s abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month, are muted and muffled. One researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. But the pregnant woman’s own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily, and because the fetus is always with her, it hears her voice a lot. Once it’s born, it recognizes the sound of her voice, and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else’s.
How can we know this? Newborn babies can’t do much, but one thing they’re really good at is sucking. Researchers in these experiments rigged up a pair of rubber nipples so that if the baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother’s voice through a pair of headphones. If it sucks on the other nipple, it hears the voice of a female stranger. Babies quickly make their preference known by choosing the first one.
In these studies, scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them, and they’ll resume their fast sucking when they get bored. This is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they heard it outside the womb.
My favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day while they were pregnant recognized the theme song of that show once they were born. Fetuses are even learning about the particular language spoken in the world that they’ll be born into. A study published last year reported that, from birth, babies cry in the accent of their mothers’ native language. French babies’ cries end on a rising note, while German babies’ end on a falling note — imitating the “melodic contours” of those languages.