Children's brains start learning new things almost immediately.
Scientists from Great Britain and China found out , that babies are able to recognize speech sounds in the first hours after birth. This is due to the fact that their brains immediately begin to learn something new, reports Science Alert.
We often think of babies as a blank slate, with little capacity for learning in the first weeks of life. But in reality it is not so. Even in the womb, children learn to distinguish voices and some sounds of speech, and soon after birth they prefer speech sounds to non-speech sounds.
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< p>But exactly how a child's brain learns to process sounds remained a mystery. In a new study, scientists observed babies in the first hours after birth. Special caps covered with sophisticated light-emitting devices designed to measure tiny changes in oxygen levels in the babies' brains were placed on their heads. Detectors in such a cap helped determine which areas of the baby's brain were active.
With this procedure, babies were monitored for the first three hours after birth. At this time, infants were exposed to sounds that they were supposed to be able to distinguish. These sounds included vowels, which were then played in reverse order. The researchers note that adults could distinguish that the order of the sounds differed only 70% of the time.
In the first three hours after birth, newborns could not distinguish between the forward and reverse order of the sounds they heard. But after listening to them for five hours, the babies already distinguished between direct and reverse order. Their response to forward vowels became faster than to backward vowels. And after another two hours, during which they were mostly asleep, their brains responded to the forward vowels not only faster, but also more strongly compared to the babies who were taught the other vowels or the babies who were left in silence.
What's more, the scientists noticed that brain regions of the superior temporal lobe (the part of the brain associated with auditory processing) and the frontal cortex (involved in planning complex movements) are involved in the processing of loud sounds, especially in the left hemispheres This resembles the circuitry underlying language comprehension and production in adults.
What's more, the researchers found that connections between these areas were present in children who listened to sounds, but absent in those who did not. that remained in silence.
Scientists conclude that you should talk to newborns already in the first hours after their birth. They emphasize that children begin to learn something new already in the first moments after being born.
