“When does memory begin? We can’t consciously call up images from our infancy, but we surely learn important, lasting associations at very early ages. New work suggests this type of memory begins even in the womb.
In a study published in July in Child Development, researchers from the Netherlands reported short-term memory in 30- to 38-week-old fetuses. First they put a vibrating, honking device on the abdomens of 93 pregnant women. The fetuses quickly “habituated”—that is, they figured out that the noise was not dangerous. When they heard it again 10 minutes later, they did not squirm and their heart rates did not escalate.”
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For most parents this would be a Metro No S**t Sherlock Moment. Not one to brag but We used to play The Eels and Blur etc to my bump and I swear the little one was dancing around in there. With no surprise we seem to have an Indie kid.
cool. clever babies.
The little one\’s heart rates probably go up and down more often, also due to interaction with mums but also due to own activity. Not sure if I would call it memory, but for sure some type of interaction with its environment. But who interacts .. is it truely coming from the brain or is it plainly the body cells, the body itself. With ageing bodies start to respond more massive as well at times to things around them. But that might be more due to experience .. so coming originallly from the mind. Or maybe not .. maybe it is true bodies response to many things. We only climbed on top to control it. And have to give up control in the end again.
Voices btw, will sound different if you would hear them in the womb than when you hear them outside the womb .. would not recognize them I guess, way to different.
I hoped they were more advanced than goldfish! I played Brahm’s lullaby to my foetus/baby and she never remembered it but I imagine that Eastenders theme tune is part of her DNA by now.
at first i thought this meant there was a recall on fetuses…can we start a list?
Seems sort of obvious at that gestational age. I was born at 34 weeks, and I obviously had a memory for things I found pleasant and unpleasant (according to my parents). Would be interesting to know at which point this starts.
@spiderabc1 so many things wrong with your sentence. “for most parents” this is obvious? what? where are you getting that idea from? also, it isn’t obvious – in fact, it has been previously debunked that playing music to fetuses causes any reaction.
this is useful research and doesn’t boil down to simply “we play dem kids of us’ punk and now dey punk!”.
Not intending to piss on anyone’s chips, but all mammals are at the most adaptive stage of their existence, when they are in the womb, and it wouldn’t take that much of a chemical synapse to ‘learn’ that particular association. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if some plants could do it.
- Well, they would need a nervous system in the first place – Phillis
I love the idea of causing an Indie Kid – how cool is that. Also agree with your other comment – a No Shit Sherlock moment. Surely its bloody obvious that our brain is designed to absorb and learn. At what point does that begin to happen. Is that as important as making sure the right things are learnt – like tolerance, humility, openness, empathy and courage. Instead of selfishness, anger, hatred and bias. Watched the film – The Day The Earth Stood Still remake a couple of days ago. And thats how I feel about the human race myself included at times. We do have “another side to us” we do have other qualities and not everyone is full of hatred or nastiness, but really when you take us as a race – a whole race and say on average are we the best that we can be? I have to say from my limited perspective that we dont deserve what we have.
Does a venus flytrap have a nervous system? or perhaps the evolutionary equivalent? Not insinuating that a womb enclosed plant could be trained to respond to noise…
What they are demonstrating in this experiment is called habituation. Habituation has been demonstrated in things as small as locusts – I once saw a demo of this using a locust and an oscilloscope. It just means there is a nervous system present.
Sure it’s one of the building blocks of memory, but I’m not sure this experiment tells us anything new. Except maybe it encourages us to firm up what we mean by ‘memory’, as also in that fish experiment. Perhaps it would be more realistic to suggest that there is no such thing as memory in the sense that we like to think of as some sort of “playback” of the structures in minds, but rather there are brains which have more or less detailed things encoded in them (predators, faces, eidetic images, narratives, routes etc.). The interesting question is which animals link what to the hippocampus.
Psychology has been famously called the science of the bleeding obvious however in researching we manage to find applications for phenomena