Hearing in the Womb

Video 1: Life in the Womb Before Birth

Video 2: Womb Sounds

Reading: What’s it Like in the Womb?

Much has been made of the benefits of playing classical music to children because it supposedly enhances spatial development. Why not, some speculate, do the same for the unborn child?

Indeed, fetuses breathe in time to music they enjoy, according to Dr. Rene Van de Carr, a California OB-Gyn who teaches parents how to stimulate unborn babies through music and other exercises at the Prenatal University in Hayward, Calif. He is also author of “While You’re Expecting … Your Own Prenatal Classroom.”

Dr. Van de Carr claims such aural stimulation not only increases neural connections in the brain and enhances brain growth, but encourages parents to be more attentive and interactive and sets expectations for achievement later on. He suggests expectant parents stimulate their babies for about five to 10 minutes twice a day. The key is not to get too repetitive with any one activity or the baby will tune it out, he says.

Yet much of the hullabaloo over the so-called Mozart effect has been exaggerated, says Janet DiPietro, a developmental psychologist who studies fetal development at Johns Hopkins University. The research has been done primarily on adults, and the only children that have been studied were 3- and 4-year-olds, who were actually playing the music on keyboards rather than simply listening to it.

And many experts say the jury’s still out on whether it’s in-utero interventions — or simply genetics and a nurturing environment after birth — that make your baby smarter, more musically inclined or better adjusted.

“I tell people that if they like classical music then play it, but if they don’t, then don’t,” says DiPietro. “It think it’s irrelevant to the fetus, unless the mom likes to come home, put her feet up and turn on music that’s relaxing to her. That’s the way the baby gets the effect.”

Get Those Brussels Sprouts Outta Here

Your baby’s sense of touch begins to develop early in pregnancy as it explores the uterine wall, umbilical cord and even its own body parts, spending the most time touching its face. As early as the ninth week, your baby will respond when its lips or areas around the mouth are touched. By the eighth month, it moves towards the source with mouth open, the beginnings of the rooting reflex, which the baby needs to begin nursing and sucking on a bottle after birth.

Smell and taste are often hard to separate, so they’re described as chemosensations. Just try sucking on a Jelly Belly while plugging up your nose, suggests Julie Mennella, a psychobiologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. From about the fourth month of pregnancy, the fetus is gulping and inhaling a variety of foods you’ve eaten through the amniotic fluid, and by the third trimester, your baby can tell whether it’s bitter, sweet, sour or even garlicky, and will show preferences for certain tastes.

Researchers say that learning about tastes and smells in the womb are actually preparing your baby for life after birth. Not only are newborns comforted by their mother’s smell, which is likely introduced first through the amniotic fluid, but they’re already familiar in the same way with the taste of mother’s breast milk. Some animal studies even suggest that the more varied a pregnant mom’s diet, the more open the offspring will be to different foods.

Fetuses also begin to develop a sense of balance from their movements in utero. Not only are they gently tumbling and floating in the amniotic fluid, but your own movements will cause the baby’s position to change. Those movements stimulate a structure in the ear that helps the brain process information about motion and body position. By 25 weeks the fetus displays a righting reflex, which may be responsible for most babies turning head down before delivery.

This motion also stimulates emotional changes in your baby. You may notice that your baby is more still when you’re very active, and then at night becomes active when you’re still. Once your baby is born, you’ll probably find that when he’s fussy, you can quiet him by rocking him, reminiscent of the movements he experienced in the womb.

Your baby’s sight is the last sense to be developed and won’t be fine-tuned until after birth, but growth inside the womb begins early. The eye pockets form by about five weeks of pregnancy, and by the fourth month, the eyes are almost completely formed. Your baby’s eyelids won’t open until the seventh month, when the fetus will begin opening and closing them and rolling the eyes around, as if testing them out. A bright light can penetrate the uterus and may make the fetus more active.

Finding the Edge

They settled on BabyPlus, a “cardiac curriculum” developed by Seattle developmental psychologist Brent Logan. The 16-tape series of audio tapes deliver sonic patterns to stimulate the fetus’ nervous system and exercise its developing brain.

“We were looking for every possible competitive edge for our child,” says Kurt Meyer. “From a parent’s perspective, if you deprive your child of any opportunity to learn, you haven’t done your job.”

It’s hard to prove the effect BabyPlus had on Marie. But the couple is convinced the prenatal stimulation allowed her to sleep better after birth and reach developmental milestones, like saying words and understanding when others spoke to her, faster.

“We have a lady who watches her three days a week, a mother of two who watches three other children about the same age as Marie, and almost a week doesn’t go by when she hasn’t told us that Marie is doing something, where the other kids aren’t quite there yet,” says Meyer, who owns a commercial real estate company.

The BabyPlus system consists of a belt with two tiny speakers fastened onto the mother’s abdomen for two one-hour periods per day over 16 weeks in the second trimester. The series of tapes features an imitation of the mother’s heartbeat, only the rhythms get progressively more complicated and faster with each tape. The cost of the system is $180.

“Since we knew the mother’s blood pulse is serving as the fetus’ most elementary instruction, why not create a more intelligent heart, an orchestrated heart, that would be able to provide successive progressions of schooling?” Logan says.

He says stimulating additional brain connections early is particularly important since a significant portion of brain cells naturally die off in the later stage of pregnancy. “Like exercising a muscle, by getting the fetal brain to oscillate faster at more mature rhythms, you’re able to lock into place a more mature brain,” he says.

But Fifer and other experts say there’s no scientific data supporting these claims and worry that fiddling with this timing by amplifying sound with speakers or headphones into the womb could be disruptive to your baby’s sleep patterns, and even harmful. For most of the pregnancy, your baby sleeps about 95 percent of the time, even as you feel it moving or hiccupping.

He also worries the stimuli could confound the timing of brain development established through years of evolution. “The message is that it’s not a good thing to lose these extra brain cells, when in fact that’s how nature programs things … to make room for the connections and wiring that turn a brain into a mind,” says Fifer.

“We actually know very little about the developing brain and the environment it needs to develop well,” agrees DiPietro. “No one would argue that you wouldn’t stick a speaker next to a newborn baby when they’re sound asleep and blast music in its ear.”

The same goes for the fetus. “We have no idea what it’s doing to the developing brain, and to assume it’s a good thing is really foolish. It’s much more likely to be interfering with normative brain development,” DiPietro says. There’s even some research showing that fetus will tune out repetitive external stimuli.

DiPietro puts the concept of prenatal stimulation right up there with flash cards and early reading programs — that it puts even more pressure on parents to overstimulate their kids.

“When you start trying to create kind of a super baby before they’re even born, you set up a bad dynamic between parents and children,” she says. “You’re expecting a baby to be a certain way. Why not wait until the baby’s born, see who they are, then try to support their particular needs and abilities.”