Learning begins in the Womb

     The powerful need that a baby has to learn is matched by an unusual ability which unfolds gradually in the infant brain. Its helplessness acts as a powerful motivator to figure out how to survive in its new environment when it can no longer depend on the peaceful, protected life in the womb where learning had already started. Investigators into the development of infant learning and memory have discovered the fetuses are not only listening to what’s going on outside the womb, but are already capable of some basic kinds of learning and remembering. In other words, even before we’re born, we’re forming memories.

     Any mother knows that her baby prefers her voice to that of any other person. That isn’t just motherly conceit. Even before three days of age, newborns are capable of telling their mother’s voice apart from other women’s voices. Not only that, they’re so fond of their own mother’s voice they’ll do whatever’s in their power to hear it. Psychologists know this because of experiments in which a newborn infant is permitted to “produce” a voice turn on a recording of a woman reading a story by sucking on a specially-rigged pacifier. If it’s their own mother’s voice they turn on by sucking, they’ll do so more vigorously and frequently than if it’s the voice of some other woman.