Babies are often thought of as blank canvases with little ability to learn. Babies begin to process language and speech very early. They learn to hear voices while in the womb. Speech sounds are preferred over non-language sounds at birth.
It's not clear how the baby brain learns to process language. The learning process begins in the first few hours of birth according to our recent study.
A research team in China fitted babies' heads with a small cap to measure oxygen levels in the brain. We can use the cap to determine which areas of the brain were active.
Within 3 hours of the babies being born, the procedure was done. The baby had to wear a small elastic cap and shine a small amount of heat radiation through the head. In many cultures newborns are wrapped in a close-fitting blanket to ease the transition from the womb to the wild world.
Babies were exposed to pairs of sounds within three hours of birth. The vowels were played backwards.
In the case of isolated vowels, the difference is subtle. In our study, we found that adults were only able to distinguish between two instances 70 percent of the time.
The brain signals collected in the first three hours of birth did not differ between forwards and backwards, which surprised us. We should not have been so surprised.
After listening to these sounds for five hours, we were surprised to find that newborns were differentiating between forwards and backwards vowels. Their response to forwards vowels was quicker than to backwards vowels. Their brain responded to forwards vowels faster and more strongly than babies who remained silent, after a further two hours of sleep.
It only takes a few hours for the baby's brain to learn the difference between natural and unnatural speech sounds.
The brain regions involved in planning complex movements were involved in processing the vowels in the left hemisphere. It's similar to the pattern that underpins production in adults.
We were able to detect cross-talk between different brain areas in a group of baby participants that were exposed to speech sounds, but not in those who had not been trained. In other words, the trained babies' brains were communicating in a way that was not seen in babies who were silent.
Babies benefit from being talked to from the very beginning. The changing of the mind by the environment begins on the first day.
The findings can be considered in the context of a trendy concept in neuroscience. Embodiment is the idea that our thoughts and mental operations are not pre-programmed or operate mysteriously from some genetic code but rather build upon direct experience of the world around us through the sensory channels that start operating from birth.
Our brain has a tendency to learn based on its organization and function, but it is also able to feel the environment as soon as it is born, and this helps our internal representations of the world around us.
Encouraging more varied experiences will give the baby brain new ways to grow and develop.
The Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience is Guillaume Thierry.
Under a Creative Commons license, this article is re-posted. The original article is worth a read.
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