According to researchers, a wider area of a child’s brain is activated when children hear their mothers than when they hear other voices.
The study carried out by researchers from Stanford University is the first to evaluate brain scans of children listening to their mothers’ voices.
According to lead author of the study, Daniel Abrams, PhD, instructor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences: “Many of our social, language and emotional processes are learned by listening to our mom’s voice.”
Decades of research have shown that children prefer their mother’s voices: In one classic study, 1-day-old babies sucked harder on a pacifier when they heard the sound of their mom’s voice, as opposed to the voices of other women. However, the mechanism behind this preference had never been defined.
“Nobody had really looked at the brain circuits that might be engaged,” senior author Vinod Menon, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said. “We wanted to know: Is it just auditory and voice-selective areas that respond differently, or is it more broad in terms of engagement, emotional reactivity and detection of salient stimuli?”
To conduct the study, the children’s brains were scanned via magnetic resonance imaging while they listened to short clips of the nonsense-word recordings, some produced by their own mother and some by the control mothers. Even from very short clips, less than a second long, the children could identify their own mothers’ voices with greater than 97 percent accuracy.
“The extent of the regions that were engaged was really quite surprising,” Menon said.
“We know that hearing mother’s voice can be an important source of emotional comfort to children,” Abrams added. “Here, we’re showing the biological circuitry underlying that.”
“Voice is one of the most important social communication cues,” Menon said. “It’s exciting to see that the echo of one’s mother’s voice lives on in so many brain systems.”
The power of a mother’s voice is indeed extraordinary.
S.O.Z