This is an excerpt from Brain Rules by John Medina:
“It just jumped out at me!†Brott exclaimed to his mother. Brott had been at the podium of a symphony orchestra, conducting a piece of music for the first time, when the cellist began to play. He instantly knew he’d heard this piece before. This was no casual reminder of some similar but forgotten work: Brott could predict exactly what musical phrase was coming next. He could anticipate the flow of the entire work during the course of the rehearsal; he knew how to conduct it even when he lost his place in the score.
Freaking out, he called his mother, a professional cellist. She asked for the name of the piece of music, then burst out laughing. It was the piece she had been rehearsing when she was pregnant with him. The cello was up against her late-pregnancy mid-abdomen, a structure filled with sound conducting fluids, fully capable of relaying musical information to her unborn son. His developing brain was sensitive enough to record the musical memories. “All the scores I knew by sight were the ones she had played while she was pregnant with meâ€, Brott later said in an interview. Incredible stuff for an organ not even zero years old.
This is but one of many examples of how babies in the womb can pick up information from the outer world. As we’ll see, what you eat and smell can influence your infant’s perceptions, too. For a newborn, these things are the familiar comforts of home.
Babies can remember things they are exposed to when they’re in the womb but according to John Medina, the time for this is in the second half of pregnancy…
The developmental principle to remember is this: The brain spends the first half of pregnancy setting up its neuroanatomical shop, blissfully ignoring most parental involvement. (I am referring to well-intentioned interference. Drugs, including alcohol and nicotine, clearly can damage a baby’s brain during pregnancy.) The second half of pregnancy is a different story. As brain development moves from mostly neurogenesis to mostly synaptogenesis, the fetus begins to exhibit much greater sensitivity to the outer world. The wiring of cells is much more subject to outside influences—including you—than the act of creating them in the first place.
LOLz. I so know this first-hand with my youngest baby. He instantly perked up and focussed on a piece (Potstock’s Sarasate) that his brother suddenly played casually after he was done with his violin practise one day. Baby was only like 2 weeks old then. Then when I played a CD with that same piece(professionally played!), there was no similar effect, but when I played a recording I’d done of his brother practising some time ago, once again, he stopped and focussed.
This piece happened to be a piece that his elder brother had been practising for several months while I was pregnant but had stopped working on it by the time baby was born! The realisation that the baby actually recognised it was like so “wow”!.
I’m reading this book right now too and I have a copy for giveaway as soon as I finish are write the review. So far its very interesting. I’m getting lots of great ideas on how to help my next child in the prenatal stage, and hopefully I can get some ideas for my 5 year old too.
My thoughts are I wonder what would happen if I played Suzuki Violin to my next child during the second half of the pregnancy when John Medina suggest is the time the fetus can start processing sounds in the mothers environment. I play it all the time for my son to help him with his lessons, would it work to jump start a child in Suzuki lessons??
