A new study suggests that the mother’s voice activates important parts in the brain of their children. Researchers came to the conclusion that the mom’s voice reaches to processes in the brain related to communication abilities, social skills and feelings.
Previous studies have shown how the mother’s voice could calm babies, but what remained a mystery is how this sort of “magic” can be done and the extent of the effect of the mother’s voice sound in the brain of their children. This is exactly what tackles the study from Stanford University.
“We know that hearing [their] mother’s voice can be an important source of emotional comfort to children. Here, we’re showing the biological circuitry underlying that,” stated the lead author of the study, Daniel Abrams.
Researchers found how specifically the mom’s voice is capable of turning on children’s brain regions in which emotions, reward, social skills and facial recognition are involved. This mechanism is only possible when kids hear their mom’s voice and not other women’s, the study concluded.
The test was carried on children aged between 7 and 12, who have been raised up by their biological mothers. Moms have been asked to record some unintelligible sounds and when their kids heard it, scientists realized they could recognize their mother’s voice with a 97% of accuracy, even if the sounds moms produced were nonsense ones.
“The extent of the regions (of the brain) that were engaged was really quite surprising,” Vinod Menod, a psychiatry professor at Stanford University, said.
Contribution to autism’s investigation
The study showing the biological mechanism in kids’ brain while hearing their mom’s voice might be a contribution to future investigations related to autism or other socio-linguistics disorders.
“This is an important new template for investigating social communication deficits in children with disorders such as autism,” affirmed Menon.
Source: Live Science