Annie Murphy Paul: What we learn before we're born
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- Опубликовано: 28 ноя 2011
- www.ted.com Pop quiz: When does learning begin? Answer: Before we are born. Science writer Annie Murphy Paul talks through new research that shows how much we learn in the womb -- from the lilt of our native language to our soon-to-be-favorite foods.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at www.ted.com/translate.
As an adoptee this hit me very hard. I’ve recently been working on my adoption trauma in therapy - EMDR has helped me begin to heal those primal wounds. I was separated from my biological mother at birth. I had no idea what kind of trauma I had gone through until I gave birth to my daughter at 25.
My daughter followed my voice, was relaxed when I held her. She knew my voice, knew my heartbeat. I was able to calm her by just holding her - she was comforted by my voice, my heartbeat & my smells.
My children (4) all enjoyed foods I craved during my pregnancy. I’m gobsmacked by this Ted Talk! Thank you for sharing!! 🥰🥰🥰
I was always a hypersensitive child. I was constantly afraid that people were going to leave me. This presentation is so eye-opening.
I wonder if this also contributes to some of the 1st born, 2nd born personality stereotypes. During the 1st pregnancy women are usually learning and consuming as much new information about pregnancy and parenting (high learner) as they can. They are also exhausted and seek out more solitary time. With the 2nd born, the learning curve is considered conquered and the mom has the 1st child to take care of so is almost always in a social mode with little solitary time.
Thank you Ted , Thank you Annie Murphy Paul . I had to stop at 10:28 or so because my parents came from that winter , more so than that my wife came from Arnham NL , where the last battle was being fought . We just spoke about "The Hunger Winter" again tonight (day after memorial day lots of movies and documentaries) and it is still very prominent in her memory . Her older sister also retained a memory of asking her mother "why is everyone sleeping on the side of the road ?" They were not asleep .
Thank you! I'm tired of the "it's an addiction" and "quitting is too hard and stressful" excuse. My sister-in-law was an ex-junkie on 95 mg of methadone daily. Her pregnancy was not planned, but as soon as she found out she opted to lower her dose as low as her doctor recommended. That was 15 mg a day. She cut that dosage in half, just to be safe. She made it without giving in to the cravings, reminding herself her daughter's health was more important than some fix.
Yaaaas
I'm just an ordinary High School / Secondary School student in Singapore and have been following TED for quite awhile now . It would really be so much more interesting not to mention beneficial , to have these speech , or better yet to have them replace the reading periods during the morning hours .
Very enlightening speech! Thank you, Ms Paul.
I was really surprised at the revealing fact that PTSD can be transmitted to the next generation. And I can't help wondering, how about depression, panic disorder, and other mental diseases? Does DNA come into play? What about those who are unaffected by PTSD?
There's so much to be desired in terms of science progress!
I was born in 1948 to a poor family and difficult birth. I cannot stand to feel deprived. I feel relaxed after I go grocery shopping. I now have diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholestoral.
I'm sorry to hear this. You can relate to this I suppose. Did this I do open your eyes your understanding a bit?
Thank you, Ms Paul
very interesting topic, thanks TED
Wonderful. Used part of the content in my recent talk.
Great info-thank you!
good stuff :) thank you TED - love your lectures!
Thank you!
Always felt this, always knew it deep down.
Oh I knew about this. When my one sister was in the womb, her mother and father always had rock music on (specifically Kiss) and once born, she had an unusual liking to the band right off the bat.
@jdroker Cells themselves have memory, and the cells will be effected by the environment they are in, even before the nervous system. One example, cells will create more or less, of certain types of cell receptors based on feedback from the current receptors.
@jdroker Environmental signals are not just neurological. They include chemical, gustatory, olfactory, thermal, radiational and infrasonic waves. The mechanisms for last two are unknown due to failure to locate receptor/associated pathway.
Good Stuff, Great Talk!
fascinating quote:
10:45 Dutch Hunger Winter.
“But there was another population that was affected, the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege. Some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of still births, birth defects, low birth rates, and infant mortality.
But others wouldn’t be discovered for many years. Decades after the Hunger Winter researchers documented that people’s whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes, and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions. These individual’s prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways. They have higher blood pressure, poorer cholesterol profiles, and reduced glucose tolerance, a precursor of diabetes. Why would under nutrition in the womb result in disease later?
One explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation. When food is scarce they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart, and liver. This keeps the fetus alive in the short term. But the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs, deprived early on, become more susceptible to disease.
(12:10) But that may not be all that’s going on. It seems that fetuses are taking cues from the inter-uterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly. They’re preparing themselves from the kind of world they’ll encounter on the other side of the womb.
The fetuses adjust its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it. And the basis of the fetus’ prediction? Is what its mother eats. The meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation. This story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems. An adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival.
Faced with severely limited resources, a smaller sized child with reduced energy requirements will in fact, have a better chance of living to adulthood. The real trouble comes when pregnant women are in a sense unreliable narrators. When fetuses are lead to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty.
This is what happened to the child of the Dutch Hunger Winter. And their higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are the result. Bodies that were built to hang on to every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post war, Western diet. The world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world in which they were born.”
~Annie Murphy Paul
interesting thank you for sharing
Can I use this video in a project for school? TEDx
Despite her journalism background, she explained the science in a much more moving and poignant way than most researchers. This talk made me better appreciate my own mother and the wonders of pregnancy.
@sDrift7 I agree with some of your critiques, but I find the topic very interesting and enjoyed the talk despite the flower language.
Shuttt upppp
@jonathanbluestein You could provide any sources to learn more about this? Im having trouble finding any.
@Ilamarea Never mind thought, this is amazing and you should watch it all.
¿Alguien sabe el nombre del árticulo o de la investigación? / Does anyone know the name of the article or research?
Superb!
This is really good! I can appreciate my mother for some important contributions, like the way I like healthy foods, and don't like the taste of alcohol... GREAT STUFF, thank you!
maravilhosa! ameii!
أجمل شيء أن المقطغ مترجم إلى اللغة العربية 😍😍😍
@PoulFamily interesting hypothesis, never really thought of it that way.
Hickville, Pennsylvania. So many people here are so unintelligent it hurts.
some of this was featured on an episode of QI a couple weeks ago. Pretty intriguing stuff, but not as shocking as the start made it seem.
Garbage
if the scarcity of food during development makes you more prone to obesity and other related diseases, would having plenty have the opposite effect?
my existence counters all her points she made
@PoulFamily I'm a forth born with three older brothers... am I gonna be THAT stressed when I grow up?!
Interesting information. Not surprising. Its a shame the speaker used a script. Her use of long, perfectly punctuated sentence (our writing voice) was a real distraction in her speaking voice of the address. Does anyone at TED offer these people public speaking coaching?
@ToxinalX Had the name wrong It's Rudolf Diesel and you'll get plenty of links with that name. Sorry My bad.
Hacc course student required to watch this
Excellent lecture. If you think this is interesting. You may also enjoy the documentary "Zeitgeist Moving Forward" on youtube. My favorite documentary.
@intestinomedicino damn right man, well probably not possible to give him an edge right now but maybe in the future.
0:15 for those of you too lazy to watch the intro
Where do you live? I've never seen that before.
Just another example of the mystical nature of human existence!
@LUVYOUSTILL Your world is your world.
@jdroker well technically, the moment there is an environment, there is an effect that that environment has on even a single cell. Calling that "learning" is debatable.
There was a movement in the 1970's encouraging pregnant women to play classical music into a speaker strapped to the mother-to-be's belly. It was asserted that this will increase the child's I.Q. The governor of Michegan at the time, was interested in this theory to the point that he instigated a program of giving free Walkman cassette players and a strap on speaker to pregnant women, i.e., he made it a government policy to try to increase the I.Q. of the citizenry. A noble and desirable initiative for any responsible elected official as it is hard to argue for a government policy that will make the citizenry more stupid, at least an overt policy.
You want to hear how loud mom's voice is to the fetus, just sink down in a hot tub until your ears are covered with water, leaving your mouth above the surface and say something, anything. You will be surprised at how loud sound travels through water or a watery medium such as amniotic fluid or body tissue. The same goes for coughing, burping, stomach rumbling or flatulence. It is an audio rich ambience that should make prospective parents stop and think about what sorts of perceptions they are giving their future Einstein.
I knew I should have taken French at second trimester...
People in India already know about this , Read about Abhimanyu of Mahabharata to know the extent of this type of learning..(although its mythology) but its great fun reading about him and other character's capabilities too..Also, apart from these empirical qualities( west is good at measuring them..:) ) you can develop qualities like intuition etc too.
It's story time!
I'm going to talk both English and Dutch to my wife's belly now. The kid will come out bilingual!
Since the sounds the baby hears from outside of the womb are muffled, there will be little difference that talking to it from outside will make. Talking to the child throughout its development after birth would be much better if you wish for your child to be bilingual. If anything, the mother talking in both tongues will make the baby cry with the same accent, but there hasn't been any definitive proof that an outside influence will make a difference in language while the baby is still in the womb.
did they come out bilingual???
Whoa!
Took until 2:30 for her to finish prefacing her idea. Took me about half a second to read the title and not need that preface.
@Mystery207 What if you redefine scientist as someone using the scientific method?
@595o Existential Experience through observance of grammatical data and past linguistics applied through a mathematical formula of non consensuses
Everything this speaker mentioned is long documented in the fields of evolutionary psychology and epigenetics. The environment affecting the baby while in utero = epigenetics. One thing that author failed to mention: the women around the 9/11 incident and surrounding areas preferentially gave birth to females.
Antonio Kuilan thanks for your comment it may save me from watching the whole video.
Even babies can learn to skip the intro. 0:15.
I wish she could have done it without those papers.. It was so distracting that her eyes were all the time on the papers rather than audience
Since when did janeane garofalo know so much about babies?
The world is what you make of it.
@LUVYOUSTILL I did not mention the earth.
This isn't exactly groundbreaking. People knew about congenital alcoholism in the 90s. Why would it be shocking that diet, stress, and other environmental factors influence fetal development?
10:49 The guy in the glasses is sound asleep, while the women around him are highly attentive. Talk about what's important in men vs. women.
Ok?
goooooooooooood
Not exactly what I'd call learning. Memorizing sure, but then every time I add something to my computers hard drive, IE memory, it would then qualify as learning it. Hell any way of storing information associated with a series of reactions, simplistic stimulus and response, would then be learning. Not exactly accurate, particularly when it's "what we learn". What "we" exactly?
Strange thing about this video; you can sometimes tell which viewers are male and which are female by the comments they leave here.
What this woman hints at falls under the subject of epigenetics. Perhaps she had never heard of it before. I certainly agree with fetal learning, but she's really missing out on a really fascinating bit of genetic science.
@micahhewlett Is that important?
@jdroker And you are foetal origins expert, huh?
@faunos51 Not really. We should be able to discuss the potential learning of a fetus without impacting the abortion debate. Knowing how well a fetus can learn and is impacted by its environment is valuable knowledge for assisting those fetus's that aren't aborted to get the best possible start. I am pro-choice, very much so, and this doesn't change that all. That said I'm 8 minutes in and starting to get a little bored. So it's not the most extraordinary talk.
Interesting, but dragged on for a bit too much
I don't even have to scroll dow to know EXACTLY what fight is going on below this comment field.
@carlitosvodka yeah once we figure out exactly how it works, then we can think of something that actually has any effect not like all that expensive and useless trash. Clearly is not the aim of this talk but advertisement people always find a way to twist it all to make money and they always find the fools...btw this would go in tune with Freakonomics claims regarding decisions parents make.
Motz-art, Annie, not Moez-art. Interesting with thousands of implications.
reading out a presentation !! bad idea.
Marketing is going ape shit over this. Ads for the unborn will be the next big thing.
@Mystery207 Relativism much?
people will even out at 10 billion in a cuople years, and then the populations will regress, seems we are headed towards balance. and the forces controlling that are unstopable opposition is futile
Someone give this woman a teleprompter
@mamemimoma I really agree. She speaks much too slow.
Wait... this would mean that Luke would have been more susceptible to the dark side...
@ToxinalX Check out Adolf Diesel and his mysterious disappearance. Also make note that his first engine never ran on the petroleum based Diesel. We are lucky they got greedy and let his invention be used in trains.
in india it's already proved that child start learning from womb .all indian knows it. no surprise for me. u can take example of Abhimanyu from the epic story of Mahabharat
Excellent overview of the topic :)
@conillusionist I assume you mean miserable people such as yourself. I disagree, obviously. Tools like you and everyone else ( i include myself ) make the world pretty interesting.
I think this information was very fascinating, but she sounded so.. dull.
This whole "new research" hype is annoying. You don't need to lie by calling something "new" to make it sound more interesting. This info has been in my school's psyc curriculum for a long time.
If it's learning language, and taste, and smells, and music, and culture, is it still a fetus?
Lol why does the way she talk make me think of the babies as aliens :)
So its my moms fault that i'm fat. Gotcha.
Yes it is. There’s something called eating anything but junk food.
Wow... apparently it's super insulting to read something rather than have it memorized. Who the fuck knew?
as a guy who is anti-feminist, in anticipation of the pro-life arguments. If a pregnant women is goign through immense suffering at her third trimester, it may in fact be better to abort that child if the child will have severe complications in his or her later years.
Cries in Spanish
Yeah...I cry in my mother's accent to help me survive... Right...
Interesting Ted. The speaker needs to work on her public speaking skills though.
Shut up
I need to call my mother and give her hell! I'm a mess...
20 years ago, I was 9 years old and getting off a plane just coming to america. so, no. -pashka.tk
I'm not a child. I don't need someone to read to me. Please, next time, don't read verbatim from a piece of paper.
Prove it, at least show some video of testing
Fock you
@intestinomedicino yeah i guess you would like it if you were on the receiving end of the benefits
This isn't news everybody already knew this, especially older, African American women. but, that's an entirely different video.
dem high heels