Meanwhile, the children whose brains showed stronger connections between all these regions at the sound of Mom’s voice also had the strongest social communication ability as assessed using the Social Responsiveness Scale.
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That’s a no-brainer. But it’s something of a revelation to observe specific regions of a kid’s brain lighting up in fMRI when Mom speaks-and to find that the strength of connections between regions predicts how adept the child will become at social communication.
“Many of our social, language and emotional processes are learned by listening to our mom’s voice”, study author Daniel Abrams, an instructor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, said in a university news release. Credit: ImagesFullHD ” We know that hearing [their] mother’s voice can be an important source of emotional comfort to children. “We didn’t realize the mother’s voice would have such quick access to so many different brain systems”, he added. Researchers have come up with scientific evidence on incredible mother-child bondage that has existed since time immemorial. This mechanism is only possible when kids hear their mom’s voice and not other women’s, the study concluded.
In the study, 24 children aged between 7 and 12 were involved who were being raised by their biological mothers.
Parents of the participants had to answer a questionnaire about their child’s ability to relate and interact with others.
Magnetic resonance imaging was used to scan the children’s brains as they listened to clips of the nonsense-word recordings.
Academics at Stanford University in California found kids’ brains are much more engaged by their mother’s voice than any other.
“The extent of the regions that were engaged was really quite surprising”, Menon said.
The researchers found the children could identify their own mother with 97 percent accuracy, even after listening to recordings less than 1 second long.
The researchers also looked at connectivity among these brain regions when the children heard the voices. And not surprisingly, the moms’ voices stimulated many more parts of the brain than just those that normally deal with auditory stimuli.
Regions that process information about the self, including the default mode network and areas involved in perceiving and processing the sight of faces, reacted in the same way. “Here, we’re showing the biological circuitry underlying that”. In future studies, the investigators hope to use this “neural fingerprint” to study the brains of children who have trouble communicating socially, such as children with autism, the researchers said.
According to Menon, he and his research team plan to conduct further studies that include children with autism as well as adults in order to compare the differences in how the brain lights up within individuals in each group.
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The findings were published May 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
