It has always been said that babies are like blank books that come into the world to gradually write their own pages and lately this belief is being broken because, in addition to genetics, which has an important role, it is being seen with different Studies and experiments that babies can learn things even before they were born.
The last study that has been done in this regard has tried to find out if the fetuses, even in the belly, were able to learn music. The amazing thing is that yes, Babies are able to learn nursery rhymes before birth and the most amazing thing is that at 4 months they still remember them.
The study of which I speak has been carried out in Finland and comes to add knowledge to those who already had about it, referring to the ability of newborn babies to recognize their mother's voice, the smell, the best acceptance of own language than other languages they have never heard, etc., seeing that they are also able to remember the songs they have heard inside the belly.
To do the experiment they took a sample of twelve pregnant mothers who indicated, already in the third trimester of pregnancy, to put a music CD that they delivered. On that CD, among other songs, was "Twinkle, twinkle, little star", that sounded three times throughout the reproduction and that they had to listen at least five times a week. Another group of twelve pregnant women were studied (and their babies at birth) without having to do anything special. The babies who listened to the CD, from the 29th week of gestation, got to hear the little star song between 138 and 192 hours (171 on average).
Once born, the researchers measured babies' brain activity by listening to "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and by listening to another similar song, with some changed notes. They saw that the babies who had heard the song during pregnancy they had much more brain activity when listening to it again than those who did not hear it. In addition, they observed that when the song they heard was the modified neuronal activation was lower.
To the four months they did the same test and realized that the same thing was happening, being greater the cerebral activity in the babies that more had listened to the CD during the gestation.
Eino Partanen of the University of Helsinki said this about it:
Although we have previously shown that fetuses can learn small details of speech, we did not know how long they could retain information ... These results show that babies are able to learn at a very young age, and that the effects of learning remain apparent in The brain for a long time.
As you can see, it seems true that they say that children are like sponges, prepared to learn as much as they can and as soon as possible, to be able to fend for themselves, surely, and thus ensure their survival. So capable of learning that they can do it even inside the belly, through the sounds they perceive.
More studies are missing to know how that learning can help a baby at developmental level (That is why they can develop better if they receive some stimuli already during pregnancy), but in the meantime I confess that it fascinates me to know that fetuses are able to learn songs before birth and that they remember them at four months.
