我们在出生前学到了什么

[在平抑人口出生高峰会议上的讲话]文章标题：在平抑人口出生高峰会议上的讲话全市各条战线的同志们、朋友们：伴着新春的脚步，我们满怀喜悦与豪情迎来了2006年。过去的一年，全市的经济社会等各项事业有了较大发展...+阅读

My subject today is learning. And in that spirit, I want to spring on you all a pop quiz. Ready? When does learning begin? Now as you ponder that question, maybe youre thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten, the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher. Or maybe youve called to mind the toddler phase when children are learning how to walk and talk and use a fork. Maybe youve encountered the Zero-to-Three movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones. And so your answer to my question would be: Learning begins at birth.Well today I want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible, but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology. And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before were born, while were still in the womb. Now Im a science reporter. I write books and magazine articles. And Im also a mother. And those two roles came together for me in a book that I wrote called Origins. Origins is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins. Fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and its based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb. Now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me. I was myself pregnant while I was doing the research for the book. And one of the most fascinating insights I took from this work is that were all learning about the world even before we enter it.When we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that theyre clean slates, unmarked by life, when in fact, theyve already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in. Today I want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while theyre still in their mothers bellies.First of all, they learn the sound of their mothers voices. Because sounds from the outside world he to trel through the mothers abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled. One researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of Charlie Browns teacher in the old Peanuts cartoon. But the pregnant womans own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily. And because the fetus is with her all the time, it hears her voice a lot. Once the babys born, it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone elses.How can we know this? Newborn babies cant do much, but one thing theyre really good at is sucking. Researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples, so that if a baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mothers voice on a pair of headphones, and if it sucks on the other nipple, it hears a recording of a female strangers voice. Babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one. Scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them and resume their fast sucking when they get bored. This is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of Dr. Seuss The Cat in the Hat while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb. My forite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born. So fetuses are even learning about the particular language thats spoken in the world that theyll be born into.A study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mothers native language. French babies cry on a rising note while German babies end on a falling note, imitating the melodic contours of those languages. Now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful? It may he evolved to aid the babys survival. From the moment of birth, the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it -- its mother. It even makes its cries sound like the mothers language, which may further endear the baby to the mother, and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language.But its not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero. Its also tastes and smells. By seven months of gestation, the fetus taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning. The flors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus. Babies seem to remember and prefer these tastes once theyre out in the world. In one experiment, a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy, while another group of pregnant women drank only water. Six months later, the womens infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice, and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it. The offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flored cereal, and from the looks of it, they seemed to enjoy it more.