The baby distinguishes sounds around the sixteenth week of pregnancy and reacts to these sounds by accelerating its heart rate, feels sounds that come from outside the uterus. But it is around the sixth month of gestation that the future baby recognizes the voice of its mother and the difference between other voices.
After birth, the baby’s hearing continues to develop and is essential for language acquisition. But a curious aspect about the development of hearing has to do with the power that hearing the voice of its mother has on the baby.
The mother’s voice is, together with the mother’s touch and smell, the most effective combination to calm and comfort the baby. In fact, we know that when a mother talks or sings to her premature baby while undergoing medical intervention, her expression of pain decreases. Oxytocin levels were also found to increase when the mother spoke to her child.
The super powers of the mother’s voice
These super powers go far beyond hearing. According to a Stanford University study, children’s brains are much more committed to their mother’s voice than to the voices of women they don’t know.
The brain regions that respond most strongly to the mother’s voice extend beyond the auditory areas to include those involved in processing emotions and rewards , social functions, processing information about personality and about facial recognition.
Mom’s voice activates many different regions in the baby’s brain
Decades of research have shown that children prefer their mothers’ voices from birth, but the areas of the brain that are activated by doing so have not been analyzed.
The brain regions that were more involved with the children’s own mothers’ voices than with the control voices included auditory regions, such as the primary auditory cortex; regions of the brain that handle emotions , such as the amygdala; regions of the brain that sense and assign value to rewarding stimuli , such as the mesolimbic reward pathway and the medial prefrontal cortex; regions that process information about oneself, including the network by default; and areas involved in perceiving and processing the sight of faces.
“The voice is one of the most important social communication signals,” said study author Menon. “It is exciting to see that the echo of the mother’s voice survives in so many brain systems.”
In Babies and more | Early stimulation exercises for your baby from 0 to 6 months, Early stimulation exercises for your baby from 6 to 12 months
