{"id":1307,"date":"2010-09-07T01:11:16","date_gmt":"2010-09-07T05:11:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/liveaction.org\/blog\/?p=1307"},"modified":"2016-09-30T14:31:26","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T18:31:26","slug":"new-light-on-fetal-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/new-light-on-fetal-development\/","title":{"rendered":"Book on music sheds new light on fetal development, explores prenatal environment\u2019s effect on musical preference"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div><p><a href=\"http:\/\/liveaction.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/20-weeks2.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-787\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/liveaction.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/20-weeks2.jpg\" width=\"180\" height=\"270\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nMy current reading selection is fascinating from a musical perspective.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until chapter eight that the book connected with the Pro-Life side of me.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/This-Your-Brain-Music-Obsession\/dp\/0525949690\" target=\"_blank\"><em>This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession<\/em> by Daniel J. Levitin (2006)<\/a> is filled with information about how music affects our sociology, psychology, anatomy (it actually changes our brain composition), memory, and more.\u00a0 While it\u2019s overwhelmingly technical in some regards, especially to non-musicians, its section on musical preference gets down to a simple fact: From the time we\u2019re in our mothers\u2019 wombs, we\u2019re storing memories and creating preferences that can affect us for the rest of our lives.\u00a0 The following excerpt is from <em>Chapter 8: My Favorite Things.<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You wake from a deep sleep and open your eyes.\u00a0 It\u2019s dark.\u00a0 The distant regular beating at the periphery of your hearing is still there.\u00a0 You rub your eyes with your hands, but you can\u2019t make out any shapes or forms.\u00a0 [\u2026] Then you hear a different but recognizable sound\u2014an amorphous, moving, wiggly sound with a fast beating, a pounding that you can feel in your feet.\u00a0 The sounds start and stop without definition.\u00a0 [&#8230;]\u00a0 These familiar sounds are comforting, you\u2019ve heard them before.\u00a0 As you listen, you have a vague notion of what will come next, and it does, even as the sounds remain remote and muddled, as though you\u2019re listening underwater.<\/p>\n<p>Inside the womb, surrounded by amniotic fluid, the fetus hears sounds.\u00a0 It hears the heartbeat of its mother, at times speeding up, at other times slowing down.\u00a0 And the fetus hears music, as was recently discovered by Alexandra Lamont of Keele University in the UK.\u00a0 She found that, a year after they are born, children recognize and prefer the music they were exposed to in the womb.\u00a0 The auditory system of the fetus is fully functional about twenty weeks after conception.\u00a0 In Lamont\u2019s experiment, mothers played a single piece of music to their babies repeatedly during the final three months of gestation.\u00a0 Of course, the babies were also hearing\u2014through the waterlike filtering of the amniotic fluid in the womb\u2014all of the sounds of their mothers\u2019 daily life, including other music, conversations, and environmental noises.\u00a0 But one particular piece was singled out for each baby to hear on a regular basis.\u00a0 The singled-out pieces included classical [\u2026], Top 40 [\u2026], reggae [\u2026] and world beat [\u2026].\u00a0 After birth, the mothers were not allowed to play the experimental song to their infants.\u00a0 Then, one year later, Lamont played the babies the music that they had heard in the womb, along with another piece of music chosen to be matched for style and tempo.\u00a0 [\u2026] Lamont then determined which one the babies preferred.<\/p>\n<p>How do you know which of two stimuli a preverbal infant prefers?\u00a0 Most infant researchers use a technique known as the conditioned head-turning procedure [\u2026].\u00a0 Two loudspeakers are set up in a laboratory and the infant is placed (usually in his mother\u2019s lap) between the speakers.\u00a0 When the infant looks at one speaker, it starts to play music [\u2026], and when he looks at the other speaker, it starts to play different music [\u2026].\u00a0 The infant quickly learns that he can control what is playing by where he is looking; he learns, that is, that the conditions of the experiment are under his control.\u00a0 The experimenters make sure that they counterbalance (randomize) the location that the different stimuli come from; that is, half the time the stimulus under study comes from one speaker and half the time it comes from the other.\u00a0 When Lamont did this with the infants in her study, she found that they tended to look longer at the speaker that was playing music they had heard in the womb than at the speaker that was playing the novel music, confirming that they preferred the music to which they had the prenatal exposure.\u00a0 A control group of one-year-olds who had not heard any of the music before showed no preference, confirming that there was nothing about the music itself that caused these results.<\/p>\n<p>[\u2026] It appears that for music even prenatal experience is encoded in memory, and can be accessed in the absence of language or explicit awareness of memory.<\/p>\n<p>[\u2026] Lamont\u2019s results are important because they show that the prenatal and newborn brain are able to store memories and retrieve them over long periods of time.\u00a0 More practically, the results indicate that the environment\u2014even when mediated by amniotic fluid and by the womb\u2014can affect a child\u2019s development and preferences.\u00a0 So the seeds of musical preference are sown in the womb [\u2026].<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My current reading selection is fascinating from a musical perspective.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until chapter eight that the book connected with the Pro-Life side of me.\u00a0 This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin (2006) is filled with information about how music affects our sociology, psychology, anatomy (it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":12370,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false},"categories":[9455,3],"tags":[1106,1337,1336,1335,1338],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Book on music sheds new light on fetal development, explores prenatal environment\u2019s effect on musical preference - Live Action News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/new-light-on-fetal-development\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Book on music sheds new light on fetal development, explores prenatal environment\u2019s effect on musical preference - Live Action News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My current reading selection is fascinating from a musical perspective.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until chapter eight that the book connected with the Pro-Life side of me.\u00a0 This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. 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