The newborn’s brain: Why does it react more to crying than to the human voice?
A recent scientific study, in which the University of Deusto has had a prominent participation, has shed light on early neurological development. Contrary to the popular belief that human speech occupies a privileged place in the baby’s brain from birth, the research reveals that the crying of other newborns generates a much more intense brain response.
The findings, published in the prestigious journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, were led by an international team of experts in cognitive neuroscience. Researcher Irene de la Cruz Pavía represented the Spanish academic institution in this analysis that challenges established paradigms regarding neonatal auditory perception.
A revealing experiment
To reach this conclusion, the scientific team compared the brain responses of two different groups:
- 25 babies between one and four days old, born at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris, who were already familiar with the French language from their prenatal stage.
- 27 Italian-speaking adults, with no prior knowledge of French, to ensure that auditory processing was similar to that of the newborns by not understanding the meaning of the sentences.
Using non-invasive neuroimaging techniques, researchers measured the brain activity of both groups when exposed to recordings of crying and spoken phrases. The results were conclusive: while adults showed greater brain activation in response to language, newborns exhibited a significantly more powerful neural response to the crying of their peers.
The finding is particularly striking if we consider that, from an acoustic perspective, speech is a much more familiar stimulus for the baby due to the auditory experience accumulated during the last trimester of pregnancy.
What is the reason for this response?
The scientific community points to a possible explanation based on the capacity for self-production. Researchers suggest that both babies and adults react with greater intensity to stimuli they are capable of replicating. In the case of newborns, crying is their primary tool for communication and action, which would explain their high neurological sensitivity to this specific sound, even surpassing the familiarity they have with the human voice.
