Research-backed
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Babies spend almost nine months inside a mother’s womb. Would you subsequently be surprised that you preferred your mother’s voice to those of strangers? Old wives’ tales have long said that babies in the womb can make out their mother’s voices and respond to them. Some mothers have attested to this tale with reports that they have stated increased signs of physical activity. This could be, say, kicking, in mothers right after they’ve talked to the baby or sung to them.
As soon as the foetus’ auditory functions start to develop, they begin to recognise their own mother’s voice in terms of its rhythm and speech patterns. Soon after the little one is born, it shall make more of an effort to identify its own mother’s voice than that of strangers (1).
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A study conducted in 2004 proved that those who were played recordings of their mothers’ voices had a decreased duration of hospital stay and improved their skills at oral feeding (2). When a baby is stressed, it has been known (and studied), that a mother’s voice can have a soothing effect (3). It has been known to regulate two different hormones in the body, cortisol and oxytocin. While cortisol is the stress hormone (which gets decreased by the mother’s voice), oxytocin is a social bonding hormone (which shows a marked increase upon playing the mother’s voice). Oxytocin has been known to create the difference between a person’s ability to form bonds with others and shying away from social interaction altogether.
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Studies have gotten advanced enough that the power of the mother’s voice can be mapped to the parts of the brain it directly affects (4). It perks up the anterior prefrontal cortex as well as the left side of the posterior temporal region. This can be remarkably higher than what would have been if they had been stimulated by a stranger’s voice. This sets the child in gear for primary speech processing.
When looking at older children, scientists had a few hypotheses of how their brains would respond. They expected that the part of the brain associated with voice processing would light up under the fMRI, but they were surprised at the results. The mother’s voice activated a plethora of brain regions wholly unexpected, including parts like the amygdala, an emotional regulation part of the brain. Other parts activated include the medial prefrontal cortex as well as the nucleus accumbens which are both a part of the major reward circuit. Additionally, the fusiform facial area that is responsible for facial recognition got triggered as well. Some scientists have claimed that this is akin to a neural fingerprint, where a mother’s voice enables certain parts of her offspring’s brain.
This neural fingerprint seemed to have a direct correlation with the child’s social abilities later in life. The number of connections that light up in these regions, on hearing the mother’s voice have a direct correlation to better social habits.
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This led to a lot of unanswered questions. What would the neural fingerprint of a child with social disorders look like? Can it be altered? How does one’s neural fingerprint change as one grows up? These questions are yet to be answered by science, but needless to say, we aren’t far away from the truth.
What is abundantly clear is the effect of a mother’s voice on a child’s cognitive development. So whether it’s a lullaby in the womb or a bedtime story to a newborn, keep that voice coming. Even if you don’t have an angelic voice that starlets on television possess, your voice shall always be angelic to your child.
