What we learn before were born Annie Murphy Paul
my subject today is learning and in that
spirit I want to spring on you all a pop
quiz ready when does learning begin now
as you ponder that question maybe you’re
thinking about the first day of
preschool or kindergarten the first time
that kids are in a classroom with a
teacher or maybe you’ve called to mind
the toddler fades when children are
learning how to walk and talk and use a
fork
maybe you’ve encountered the zero to
three movement which asserts that the
most important years for learning are
the earliest ones and so your answer to
my question would be learning begins at
birth well today I want to present to
you an idea that may be surprising that
may even seem implausible but which is
supported by the latest evidence from
psychology and biology and that is that
some of the most important learning we
ever do happens before were born while
we’re still in the womb now I’m a
science reporter I write books and
magazine articles and I’m also a mother
and those two roles came together for me
in a book that I wrote called origins
origins is a report from the front lines
of an exciting new field called fetal
origins fetal origins is a scientific
discipline that emerged just about two
decades ago and it’s based on the theory
that our health and well-being
throughout our lives is crucially
affected by the nine months we spend in
the womb now this theory was of more
than just intellectual interest to me I
was myself pregnant while I was doing
the research for the book and one of the
most fascinating insights I took from
this work is that we’re all learning
about the world even before we enter it
when we hold our babies for the first
time we might imagine that they’re clean
slates unmarked by life when in fact
they’ve already been shaped by us and by
the particular
world we live in today I want to share
with you some of the amazing things that
scientists are discovering about what
fetuses learn while they’re still in
their mothers bellies 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 here starting around
the fourth month of gestation are muted
and muffled one researcher says that
they probably sound a lot like the voice
of Charlie Brown’s teacher and the old
peanuts cartoon but the pregnant woman’s
own voice reverberates through her body
reaching the fetus much more readily and
because the fetus is with her all the
time it hears her voice a lot once the
baby’s born
it recognizes her voice and it prefers
listening to her voice over anyone elses
how can we know this newborn babies
can’t do much but one thing they’re
really good at is sucking researchers
take advantage of this fact by rigging
up two rubber nipples so that if a baby
sucks on one it hears a recording of its
mother’s voice on a pair of headphones
and if it sucks on the other net bullet
here’s a recording of a female strangers
voice babies quickly show their
preference by choosing the first one
scientists also take advantage of the
fact that babies will slow down their
sucking when something interests them
and 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 during pregnancy
recognized the theme song of
of that show once they were once they
were born so fetuses are even learning
about the particular language that
spoken in the world that they’ll be born
into a study published last year found
that from birth from the moment of birth
babies cry in the accent of their
mother’s native language babies French
babies cries and on a rising note while
German babies end on a falling note
imitating the melodic contours of those
languages now why would this kind of
fetal learning be useful it may have
evolved to aid the babies survival from
the moment of birth the baby responds
most to the voice of the person who is
most likely to care for it its mother it
even makes its cries sound like the
mother’s language which may further
endear the baby to the mother and which
may give the baby a head start in the
critical task of learning how to
understand and speak its native language
but it’s not just sounds that fetuses
are learning about in utero it’s also
tastes and smells by seven months of
gestation the fetuses tastebuds are
fully developed and it’s all factory
receptors which allow it to smell are
functioning the flavors of the food of
pregnant women eats find their way into
the amniotic fluid which is continuously
swallowed by the fetus babies seem to
remember and prefer these tastes once
they’re out in the world in one
experiment a group of pregnant women was
asked to drink a lot of carrot juice
during their third trimester of
pregnancy while another group of women
pregnant women drank only water six
months later the woman’s infants were
offered cereal mixed with carrot juice
and their facial expressions were
observed while they ate it the offspring
of the carrot juice drinking women ate
more carrot flavored cereal and from the
looks of it they seemed to enjoy it more
a sort of French version of this
experiment was carried out in Dijon
France where researchers found that
mothers
who consumed food and drink flavored
with licorice flavored anise during
pregnancy showed a preference for anise
on their first day of life and again
when they were tested later on their
fourth day of life babies whose mothers
did not eat Ana starring pregnancy
showed a reaction that translated
roughly as yuk what this means is that
fetuses are effectively being taught by
their mothers about what is safe and
good to eat fetuses are also being
taught about the particular culture that
they’ll be joining through one of
cultures most powerful expressions which
is food they’re being introduced to the
characteristic flavors and spices of
their cultures cuisine even before birth
now it turns out that fetuses are
learning even bigger lessons but before
I get to that I want to address
something that you may be wondering
about the notion of fetal learning may
conjure up for you attempts to enrich
the fetus like playing Mozart through
headphones placed on a pregnant belly
but actually the nine-month long process
of molding and shaping that goes on in
the womb is a lot more visceral and
consequential than that much of what a
pregnant woman encounters in her daily
life the air she breathes the food and
drinks she consumes the chemical she’s
exposed to even the emotions she feels
are shared in some fashion with her
fetus they make up a mix of influences
as individual and idiosyncratic as the
woman herself the fetus incorporates
these offerings into its own body makes
them part of its flesh and blood and
often it does something more it treats
these maternal contributions as
information as what I like to call
biological postcards from the