Babies start learning even before they are born

So you are waiting for your kid to turn two and get into kindergarten before they begin learning. It turns out, you might be nearly three years late for that already. Increasing evidence shows learning begins way before your kid is even born or ready to start school. The same way cuttlefish learn to recognize […]

So you are waiting for your kid to turn two and get into kindergarten before they begin learning. It turns out, you might be nearly three years late for that already.

Increasing evidence shows learning begins way before your kid is even born or ready to start school. The same way cuttlefish learn to recognize prey before they even hatch, and birds memorise passwords in the egg to form a bond with their parents.

Babies in the womb do the same thing, research show. One study shows unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy. At birth, the babies can demonstrate what they’d heard even when they are only hours old.

The sense of hearing and the brain mechanisms that support it develop at around 30 weeks of pregnancy. So, the foetus inside is soaking up all what goes on outside the womb in the last 10 weeks of its stay there—music, voice, speech, even language.

Even at a foetal stage, “learning is already happening,” says Linda Richter, PhD, director of the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Human Development at University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

“All the sensory systems are being prepared to learn about a particular environment—the human environment.’

A mother’s voice is the first influence. The vowels in her speech are the loudest units—thing the mushy oohs and aahs—and foetus lock onto those sounds.

It isn’t just any sound but foetuses learn about the particular speech sounds of their mother’s language. They can identify those sounds when other speakers are around, distinguish them when the speakers talk in different languages.

The low down: an Igbo hearing baby will nurse more when Igbo words are in the air than when Hausa words fill his hearing.

So how does the human child’s brain work all these out? It is adaptability.

“We are born with certain propensities, and they are only given their final cut during pregnancy and the first two years of life, and this makes this period very important,” says Richter, who’s spent nearly 35 years researching this area of human development.

“The biology and the psychology of the individual is sculpted in this period. This sculpting forms a template so that all subsequent material is filtered through this template that is laid down. That is big science on its own and has been an enormous eye opener over the last 20 years.”

Epigenetics and microbiology have pushed the boundaries, and advances in scanning techniques have helped examine the brains of babies during pregnancy, after birth and in interaction with other people.

What all that has shown is the most important aspect to learning: the human experience.

“One has to learn to learn,” says Tarun Dua, who works in evidence, research and action for neurological disease and neuroscience at the World Health Organisation in Geneva.

“Once you get that, you can multiply your learning. It is the capacity to learn that has to be built.”

It could be anything from eye contact, a sound, a touch. Babies respond to all of it, and “learning is happening literally in huge expansive rate in the first three years of life,” according to Richter.

“When babies make eye contact with caregivers, that process organizes synaptic connections,” says Richter.

And language is formed in the trenches of this basic interpersonal communication. After birth, babies recognize family, share jokes with a toothy grin, laugh, you can even play with them, tease them, have them chuckle with dribble. Then there’s proto conversation: a baby burps and a mother goes, ‘what did you say?’. Baby burps again in response, and mother goes, ‘what are you telling?’

It is almost all involuntary, but then you notice your voice adapts to the baby’s pitch. “That language being formed long before the baby says mama or dada. Communication is already on,” says Richter.

So, don’t wait until school learning. That’s a whole different thing. The classroom is  now.