Learning In The Womb

To understand babies’ minds must be a challenging task. Most fully developed babies come out knowing how to suck for fulfillment, breath for oxygen and cry for awareness. Some may ask if there is any learning in the womb. By week six a fetus has some type of electrical brain activity, and by week eighteen of pregnancy a fetus can hear their first sounds. As times passes in a pregnancy the fetus hearing improves as well as the electrical brain activity. The fetus can hear sounds that we may ignore or an everyday bases such as gurgling of the intestines or phlegm in the lungs or even its mothers voice.

Are they retaining these sounds can be a difficult question to answer?In 1980 Dr. Anthony DeCasper preformed an experiment to see if there was learning in the womb. He wanted to see if the sounds a fetus hears while in the womb had effect on the development outside of the womb. He planned a research strategy that was able to reveal the prenatal mechanisms of learning and memory that establish the newborn abilities essential for the continued development of the infant. In his research he monitored the sucking patterns of infants with and without different stimuli’s, such as the mother voice. The experiment did produce evidence that newborns recognize maternal voices. This implied that a fetus brain can retain some sounds within the womb. He also discovered during the experiment that the infant recognized or preferred only the mothers voice. Evidence has been found that an infant can retain sounds within the womb, however can they recognize language? A professor of linguistics named Utako Minai was the head of a study to determine if a fetus could distinguish a difference between language. They did the study by detecting the change in the heart rate based off the change in the language. English and Japanese was used during the experiment because of the big rhythmic difference between the two.

Professor Utako had a bilingual speaker make two recordings one in English and the other in Japanese. These recordings were played in succession to the fetus while monitoring the heart rate. The results were a definite change in the fetus heart rate when the unfamiliar language was played. This study showed that language development starts in the womb. There is a lot of learning with in the womb. Several experiments have taken place to prove that a fetus can detect its mothers voice as well as the spoken language. However, with this information its hard not to wonder how well a fetus memory is. As adults we don’t remember being in the womb but the memory of our mother voices in the womb may still be familiar as an infant grows older. The voice of a mother that is remembered in the womb could help with comfort outside of the womb also remembering the scent of the mother sometimes helps with breastfeeding attachments. Memory with in the womb can be beneficial outside the womb. It is amazing at how functional a fetus is. By week 24 in a pregnancy the ears of a fetus are developing. They can hear sounds that the mother may not notice such as her heart beat. If a mother plays a song constantly during her pregnancy when the baby is born, he or she will be familiar to the song and may even see it as comfort. Parents can bond with there babies while in the womb by talking to them. It is proven that infants recognize their parents’ voices. The bonding of a child and a mother surely starts from the very beginning of pregnancy. The comfort and protection of the fetus is normally the mother’s main goal. A mother may not understand that her own emotional state can too be felt by her unborn.

There are a range of emotions a mother can feel while pregnant, joy, sadness, stress and happiness. With these emotions certain chemicals in the body are released. The chemicals can transfer to the unborn allowing it to feel the emotional state of the mother. When a woman is stressed she may have a raise in cortisol level and adrenaline, this can increase heart rate and blood pressure which are things a fetus can detect. A fetus is a powerful thing. Its many abilities are still not all known to this day. Learning, remembering, distinguishing and monitoring are only some of those astonishing abilities. The amount of growth with in 9 months of pregnancy is always surprising. A mothers physical and mental state has a huge impact on the development of an infant. So many skills start in the womb. As adults or even toddlers it is nearly impossible to remember our days in the womb yet we are still familiar with what we learn in the womb. Citation Fetal memory: Does it exist? What does it do? (n. d. ).