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BIG BRAINS
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A HI-TECH FUTURISTIC BABY LEARNING
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WOMB LEARNING
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Welcome to Womb Learning Articles — where science reveals how learning begins before birth. Explore powerful insights on prenatal brain development, fetal memory, and the hidden intelligence of the womb. Discover how early experiences shape a child’s future from the very first heartbeat.
While in womb, babies begin learning language from their mothers.
Previously, researchers had shown that newborns are born ready to learn and begin to discriminate between language sounds within the first months of life, but there was no evidence that language learning had occurred in utero.
“This is the first study that shows fetuses learn prenatally about the particular speech sounds of a mother’s language,” said Christine Moon, lead author and a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. “This study moves the measurable result of experience with speech sounds from six months of age to before birth.
“This is the first study that shows fetuses learn prenatally about the particular speech sounds of a mother’s language,” said Christine Moon, lead author and a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. “This study moves the measurable result of experience with speech sounds from six months of age to before birth.
Babies Learn to Recognize Words in the Womb.
Be careful what you say around a pregnant woman. As a fetus grows inside a mother's belly, it can hear sounds from the outside world—and can understand them well enough to retain memories of them after birth, according to new research.
It may seem implausible that fetuses can listen to speech within the womb, but the sound-processing parts of their brain become active in the last trimester of pregnancy, and sound carries fairly well through the mother's abdomen. "If you put your hand over your mouth and speak, that's very similar to the situation the fetus is in," says cognitive neuroscientist Eino Partanen of the University of Helsinki. "You can hear the rhythm of speech, rhythm of music, and so on."
A 1988 study suggested that newborns recognize the theme song from their mother's favorite soap opera. More recent studies have expanded on the idea of fetal learning, indicating that newborns already familiarized themselves with sounds of their parent's native language; one showed that American newborns seem to perceive Swedish vowel sounds as unfamiliar, sucking on a high-tech pacifier to hear more of the new sounds. Swedish infants showed the same response to English vowels.
It may seem implausible that fetuses can listen to speech within the womb, but the sound-processing parts of their brain become active in the last trimester of pregnancy, and sound carries fairly well through the mother's abdomen. "If you put your hand over your mouth and speak, that's very similar to the situation the fetus is in," says cognitive neuroscientist Eino Partanen of the University of Helsinki. "You can hear the rhythm of speech, rhythm of music, and so on."
A 1988 study suggested that newborns recognize the theme song from their mother's favorite soap opera. More recent studies have expanded on the idea of fetal learning, indicating that newborns already familiarized themselves with sounds of their parent's native language; one showed that American newborns seem to perceive Swedish vowel sounds as unfamiliar, sucking on a high-tech pacifier to hear more of the new sounds. Swedish infants showed the same response to English vowels.
UF research shows mother’s voice can inspire learning in the womb.
Mozart, Beethoven or even Shakespeare — pregnant mothers have been known to expose their babies to many forms of auditory stimulation. But according to researchers at the University of Florida, all a baby really needs is the music of mom’s voice.
Research published in the most recent issue of the journal Infant Behavior and Development shows that babies in utero begin to respond to the rhythm of a nursery rhyme — showing evidence of learning — by 34 weeks of pregnancy and are capable of remembering a set rhyme until just prior to birth. Nursing researcher Charlene Krueger, Ph.D., ARNP, and her team studied pregnant women who recited a rhyme to their babies three times a day for six weeks, beginning at 28 weeks’ gestational age, which is the start of the third trimester of pregnancy.
“The mother’s voice is the predominant source of sensory stimulation in the developing fetus,” said Krueger, an associate professor in the UF College of Nursing. “This research highlights just how sophisticated the third trimester fetus really is and suggests that a mother’s voice is involved in the development of early learning and memory capabilities. This could potentially affect how we approach the care and stimulation of the preterm infant.”
Research published in the most recent issue of the journal Infant Behavior and Development shows that babies in utero begin to respond to the rhythm of a nursery rhyme — showing evidence of learning — by 34 weeks of pregnancy and are capable of remembering a set rhyme until just prior to birth. Nursing researcher Charlene Krueger, Ph.D., ARNP, and her team studied pregnant women who recited a rhyme to their babies three times a day for six weeks, beginning at 28 weeks’ gestational age, which is the start of the third trimester of pregnancy.
“The mother’s voice is the predominant source of sensory stimulation in the developing fetus,” said Krueger, an associate professor in the UF College of Nursing. “This research highlights just how sophisticated the third trimester fetus really is and suggests that a mother’s voice is involved in the development of early learning and memory capabilities. This could potentially affect how we approach the care and stimulation of the preterm infant.”
Womb: The First Classroom.
Some of us may mistakenly believe that the process of education begins only when a child goes to school. This equivalence of the commencement of learning with formal education is unfounded - school is certainly imbued with learning, yet learning precedes the advent of the big yellow school bus. Learning begins much earlier, with our environment and community informing our values, ideas, and beliefs.
A growing body of evidence emphasizes, in no uncertain terms, the formative quality of our time in the womb. Even before our personhood is solidified, we evolve a nascent sentience. From prosody to polygons, we begin our journey of learning warmly ensconced in our mother’s womb. Yet, a core formative period of infant brain development may be overlooked in this bustle - that of nascent sentience, even before our personhood is solidified.
Each cell of the embryo is already engaged in processes of formation and differentiation which affect not just the body but the psyche as well. Advances in epigenetic study have also suggested that prenatal stress can cause fundamental changes in cell structure and functioning, thus altering personality and physiology. (Menzam-Sills, 2023) Carl Jung, a noted psychiatrist has, in his theory of personality, expounded on how at birth, the infant isn't a tabula rasa - rather, it already possesses the imprints of its ancestral past through a pre-existing storehouse of transpersonal remnants and archetypes. Hence, we are born with primordial images that have potentially pre-trained our cells to coalesce into certain cognitive patterns.
A growing body of evidence emphasizes, in no uncertain terms, the formative quality of our time in the womb. Even before our personhood is solidified, we evolve a nascent sentience. From prosody to polygons, we begin our journey of learning warmly ensconced in our mother’s womb. Yet, a core formative period of infant brain development may be overlooked in this bustle - that of nascent sentience, even before our personhood is solidified.
Each cell of the embryo is already engaged in processes of formation and differentiation which affect not just the body but the psyche as well. Advances in epigenetic study have also suggested that prenatal stress can cause fundamental changes in cell structure and functioning, thus altering personality and physiology. (Menzam-Sills, 2023) Carl Jung, a noted psychiatrist has, in his theory of personality, expounded on how at birth, the infant isn't a tabula rasa - rather, it already possesses the imprints of its ancestral past through a pre-existing storehouse of transpersonal remnants and archetypes. Hence, we are born with primordial images that have potentially pre-trained our cells to coalesce into certain cognitive patterns.
Baby talk
When babies are born, they cry in the accent of their mother tongue
Some restless infants don’t wait for birth to let out their first cry. They cry in the womb, a rare but well-documented phenomenon called vagitus uterinus (from the Latin word vagire, meaning to wail). Legend has it that Bartholomew the Apostle cried out in utero. The Iranian prophet Zarathustra is said to have been ‘noisy’ before his birth. Accounts of vagitus uterinus appear in writings from Babylon, Assyria, ancient Greece, Rome and India. The obstetrician Malcolm McLane described an incident that occurred in a hospital in the United States in 1897. He was prepping a patient for a c-section, when her unborn baby began to wail, and kept going for several minutes – prompting an attending nurse to drop to her knees, hands clasped in prayer. Yet another child is said to have cried a full 14 days before birth. In 1973, doctors in Belgium recorded the vitals of three wailing fetuses and concluded that vagitus uterinus is not a sign of distress. An Icelandic saga indicates that the phenomenon has been observed in other animals – ‘the whelps barked within the wombs of the bitches’ – vagitus uterinus in dogs, a foretelling of great events to come in Icelandic lore.
Educating Before Birth via Talking to the Baby in the Womb: Prenatal Innovations.
m>Education is the only major weapon that enables nations to progress socio-economically and gives a huge rise to their human development index. More so, it is considered to be the most fundamental requirement for poverty eradication, for addressing socio-political issues and for stabilizing peace and harmony among nations. Education is a lifelong process and does not have a preset parameter for its accessibility and provision (Sharkey, 1998). Learning is innate and natural and the human mind is set to learn since its conception. Additionally, in the recent era, investigations are focused on education and learning even before birth and extensive emphasis is now paid on experimenting on prenatal education by providing pre-birth interventions for babies inside the womb .
Study shows language development starts in the womb.
A month before they are born, fetuses carried by American mothers-to-be can distinguish between someone speaking to them in English and Japanese.
Using noninvasive sensing technology from the University of Kansas Medical Center for the first time for this purpose, a group of researchers from KU’s Department of Linguistics has shown this in utero language discrimination. Their study, published in the journal NeuroReport, has implications for fetal research in other fields, the lead author says..
Using noninvasive sensing technology from the University of Kansas Medical Center for the first time for this purpose, a group of researchers from KU’s Department of Linguistics has shown this in utero language discrimination. Their study, published in the journal NeuroReport, has implications for fetal research in other fields, the lead author says..
Probing Question: Can babies learn in utero?
From the moment of birth, an infant begins rapidly absorbing information, piecing together the framework of his or her future self. But what happens during all that time the bun's still in the oven? Does learning begin in utero?
Absolutely, says Rick Gilmore. "There's ample evidence that fetuses are picking up information from the outside world. They're especially receptive to sounds from the mother's body and the external environment."
Gilmore, an associate professor of psychology at Penn State, points to a well-known study conducted by Anthony DeCasper at the University of South Carolina that seems to prove the existence of prenatal learning. "Mothers were instructed to read Dr. Seuss out loud while they were pregnant," Gilmore explains. "When the babies were born, researchers tested to see if they recognized Dr. Seuss against other stories, and their mother's voice against other readers. In both cases, the infants were able to pick up on the vocal patterns they'd become familiar with in utero."
Absolutely, says Rick Gilmore. "There's ample evidence that fetuses are picking up information from the outside world. They're especially receptive to sounds from the mother's body and the external environment."
Gilmore, an associate professor of psychology at Penn State, points to a well-known study conducted by Anthony DeCasper at the University of South Carolina that seems to prove the existence of prenatal learning. "Mothers were instructed to read Dr. Seuss out loud while they were pregnant," Gilmore explains. "When the babies were born, researchers tested to see if they recognized Dr. Seuss against other stories, and their mother's voice against other readers. In both cases, the infants were able to pick up on the vocal patterns they'd become familiar with in utero."
Fetal Learning: a Critical Review.
Learning is defined as a change in behaviour that occurs as a result of experience. It is clear that the fetus can learn by means of habituation, classical conditioning and exposure learning. These types of learning will be discussed in relation to learning in the womb and the memory of learned material after birth. Furthermore, the potential function of learning prenatally is explored in terms of its relevance for perinatal development. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons,
Evidence suggests babies in womb start learning earlier than thought: study.
ORLANDO Fla. (Reuters) - Babies in the womb show evidence of learning by their 34th week, three weeks earlier than previously thought, new research has found.
"It really pushed the envelope" in terms of how early babies begin to learn, lead researcher Charlene Krueger, associate professor at the University of Florida's College of Nursing, said on Thursday.
The study, published in the journal Infant Behavior and Development, followed 32 women from their 28th through 38th weeks of pregnancy in an investigation to pinpoint when the ability to learn emerges.
"It really pushed the envelope" in terms of how early babies begin to learn, lead researcher Charlene Krueger, associate professor at the University of Florida's College of Nursing, said on Thursday.
The study, published in the journal Infant Behavior and Development, followed 32 women from their 28th through 38th weeks of pregnancy in an investigation to pinpoint when the ability to learn emerges.
Magnetoencephalographic signatures of conscious processing before birth
The concept of fetal consciousness is a widely discussed topic. In this study, we applied a hierarchical rule learning paradigm to investigate the possibility of fetal conscious processing during the last trimester of pregnancy. We used fetal magnetoencephalography, to assess fetal brain activity in 56 healthy fetuses between gestational week 25 and 40, during an auditory oddball paradigm containing first- and second-order regularities. The comparison of fetal brain responses towards standard and deviant tones revealed that the investigated fetuses show signs of hierarchical rule learning, and thus the formation of a memory trace for the second-order regularity. This ability develops over the course of the last trimester of gestation, in accordance with processes in physiological brain development and was only reliably present in fetuses older than week 35 of gestation.
Studying learning in the womb.
Research scientists who study the behavior of human infants believed until recently that the baby's world was, as psychologist William James wrote, a place of "booming buzzing confusion.' But the picture now emerging is quite different. Babies have been shown to respond to their environment from the first day of postnatal life. They can discriminate between objects that they see and can even recognize their mother's voice. How and when does a baby learn these things? A relatively new body of data indicates that the learning begins before birth. This idea suggests a whole series of questions about how and when an unborn baby can learn.
These questions are now being addressed by a small group of developmental psychologists and behavioral neurobiologists who are studying fetal learning by using established techniques that can measure learning in adult animals. Their research, says Norman Krasnegor, chief of the human learning and behavior branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland, is of great practical as well as theoretical importance..
These questions are now being addressed by a small group of developmental psychologists and behavioral neurobiologists who are studying fetal learning by using established techniques that can measure learning in adult animals. Their research, says Norman Krasnegor, chief of the human learning and behavior branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland, is of great practical as well as theoretical importance..
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