Parents often hear the warning: "If your child doesn't learn a second language early, they'll never be fluent." Adults, meanwhile, are told: "It's just too late for you to learn now." These claims are familiar and tidy, but misleading. Are they actually true? Is it better to learn a second language as a child or as an adult? The short answer is that it depends on what we mean by "better."
Expectant mothers lost an average of nearly five per cent of their grey matter, the tissue responsible for processing emotions, information, and empathy. This loss isn't a sign of decline as Lead researcher Professor Susana Carmona of the Gregorio Marañón Health Research Institute likened it to pruning a tree. 'Some branches are cut to make it grow more efficiently,' she explained.
Babies in the womb begin to respond to music by about eight or nine months, as shown by changes in their heart rate and body movements, said Dr Roberta Bianco, the first author of the research who is based at the Italian Institute of Technology in Rome. Previous research has also shown that aspects of musical memory can carry over from the womb to birth, she added. However, it was unclear how deeply different aspects of music were processed by such young brains.
For the study, a team from the Italian Institute of Technology played J.S. Bach's piano compositions for an audience of 49 sleeping newborns. This included 10 original melodies and four shuffled songs with scrambled melodies and pitches. While the babies listened, the researchers used electroencephalography - electrodes placed on their heads - to measure their brainwaves. When the babies showed signs of surprise, it meant they expected the song to go one way, but it went another.
Systematic developmental and neuro-phenomenological research is needed to understand childhood consciousness. Anyone who has spent time with young children knows they have a way of saying things that make you pause and reconsider what you thought you understood. Many report non-ordinary experiences-moments of "just knowing," feeling outside their bodies, or sensing a deep unity with the world around them. These accounts suggest a form of consciousness that is relational, pre-linguistic, and not yet organized around a solid, separate self.
What makes me even crazier is that I know they can listen. I know this because they do all the time, mostly when they aren't supposed to. I can't tell you how many times I've been having an adult conversation with my husband and/or friends and my two children-who haven't listened to a word I've said all day-suddenly have very thoughtful and detailed questions
Research on parentification - the process where children are forced into adult emotional roles - shows that many of the people we admire for their composure developed it as a survival mechanism. They weren't born calm. They were made calm, usually by environments where someone's emotional dysregulation demanded that a child become the steady one.
Mice with higher levels of parenting exhibit more prosocial allogrooming toward stressed adults. The medial preoptic area (MPOA), a brain area involved in parenting behaviour, bidirectionally regulates allogrooming toward stressed conspecifics. Allogrooming and parenting behaviours recruit a partially overlapping neuronal ensemble in the MPOA, are both controlled by an MPOAtoVTA pathway and are associated with dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens.
