When Does Learning Begin? Essay Example

This TED talk focused on the fundamental question of “when does learning begin?” On the first day of preschool? kindergarten?  During the toddler phase when children learn how to walk and talk and use a fork? The day that are born during the 0-3 movement which asserts that the most important years to learning are the earliest ones? Although it seems impossible,  the latest scientific evidence from psychological and biological discourses reveal that learning begins when children are mere fetuses in the womb. This postulation is a very interesting one that many people would be hesitant to defend. As a mother herself and a writer of science, Paul (2011) takes a vested interest in this topic because it is a point of intersection between her work and her personal life. This argument thus implies that how a mother acts and the behaviors she engages in during pregnancy shapes the contours of her baby’s life once it is born, and a lot of this learning depends on the environmental conditions mothers are a part of.  This TED talk eschews the long-held notion that babies are born with a clean slate, or Tabula Rasa, and they have not yet been shaped or tainted by the outside world. Rather, newborns are already been shaped by their mothers and the world in which their mothers inhabited. Thus, the health and well-being throughout people’s lives is crucially impacted by the nine months spent in the womb.

New scientific evidence suggests that fetuses learn while in the womb in relation to sounds, tastes, and even culture. The sounds of their mothers’ voices travel through their abdominal tissue and amniotic fluid that surround the fetus. At 4 months gestation, voices at they hear from the outside world are muted and muffled, but the pregnant mother’s own voice reverberates throughout the body and reaches the fetus more readily since the fetus is always with the mother and the fetus constantly hears its mother’s voice. Various tests confirmed this observation, including the nipple sucking test, which I found absolutely fascinating that babies can recognize the cadence of their own mother’s voice. Newborn babies cannot do much but they are good at sucking, and they already recognize their mother’s voice when it’s born and is drawn to it. Scientists conducted a test in which a baby would suck a simulated nipple. When the baby hears something interesting, it slows down its rate of sucking. When the baby starts to lose interest and get bored, the baby sucks at a more rapid rate. Pregnant women who repeatedly read to their fetuses Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, newborn babies recognized that passage outside of the womb and retarded their sucking. For babies of pregnant women who watched soap operas while pregnant, the babies interestingly recognized the theme song of the soap opera when they are born. These experiments reinforce the argument that fetuses are learning about the language of the world they will be born into. From the moment babies are born, they cry in the same way/accent of their mother’s countries, which was very interesting that they could mimic the pattern of crying via melodic languages: Germans babies’ cries end on falling note, while French babies cries end on rising notes. This evidence suggests that a baby responds most to the person who is most likely to take care of it, and cries in mother’s language to endear baby to mother. Learning how to understand and speak its native language unequivocally begins in utero.

Beyond learning about language, babies also have fully developed taste buds and olfactory sensors function by 7 months of gestation. Flavors of the foods pregnant mothers eat find their way into the amniotic fluid which is continually swallowed by the fetus and once out of the womb the baby prefers these tastes. Paul (2011) cites various studies that bolster the notion that fetuses are taught by their mother about what is safe and good to eat in addition to learning about what culture they will be joining. Indeed, food is a central component of any culture and its most powerful expression. They learn about cultural cuisine in the womb such as the flavors and spices of culture’s cuisine prior to birth. With cultural learning taking place, it is important to remember that fetuses learn even bigger lesson while they are in the womb. To strengthen this part of the discussion, the speaker should have included more credible scientific studies in addition to interpersonal stories. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed this discussion because it elucidated just how crucial it is for pregnant women to eat the rights foods during pregnancy and to take care of themselves because of the transposition that takes place between mother and newborn

Fetal learning takes place on a macro scale as well. While some parents want to  enhance the learning of their fetus by playing Mozart on belly, in reality, the entire 9 month long process of molding and shaping that goes on is more visceral and consequential then just playing classical music to the womb. The food and drinks consumed, air pregnant women breath, chemicals they are exposed to, and the emotions mothers feels are also felt by a fetus in some fashion. They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself, and the fetus incorporates offerings into own body and make them a part of flesh and blood. Fetuses also  does something treats them as information, or as she calls them, “biological postcards,” from the world outside. Indeed, fetuses learn in utero learn questions that are more critical for their survival such as will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity, and will it be safe and protected or constantly in danger. This TED talk was very well-organized and the speaker was intelligent and articulate. The flow of the talk was logical, and she constructed and developed her argument in a very credible way with research, statistics, and ample empirical evidence on a topic based on relatively new research that should be lauded.