Babies Rely on Mother's Voice and Heartbeat To Develop Healthy Brains

"The premature babies participating in Lahav’s study were born not too long—between 25 and 32 weeks of gestation—after the start of the auditory cortex’s development, so hearing and language capabilities had likely been affected. In an attempt to remedy that, the scientists recorded mothers of half of the infants reading Goodnight Moon and singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star . They also recorded those mothers’ heartbeats through a stethoscope. They removed high-frequency sounds like consonants, since those are mostly drowned out in the womb, and projected the resulting sounds into 21 infants’ incubators for 45-minute sessions totaling three hours per day."