Baby talk

Baby talk

Darshana Narayanan  

Vagitus uterinus occurs – always in the last trimester – when there’s a tear in the uterine membrane. The tear lets air into the uterine cavity, thus enabling the fetus to vocalise. Vagitus uterinus provided scientists with some of the earliest insights into the fetus’s vocal apparatus, showing that the body parts and neural systems involved in the act of crying are fully functional before birth.

Loud, shrill and penetrating – a baby’s cry is its first act of communication. A simple adaptation that makes it less likely that the baby’s needs will be overlooked. And babies aren’t just crying for attention. While crying, they are practising the melodies of speech. In fact, newborns cry in the accent of their mother tongue. They make vowel-like sounds, growl and squeal – these are protophones, sounds that eventually turn into speech.

Babies communicate as soon as they are born. Rigorous analyses of the developmental origins of these behaviours reveal that, contrary to popular belief – even among scientists – they are not hardwired into our brain structures or preordained by our genes. Instead, the latest research – including my own – shows that these behaviours self-organise in utero through the continuous dance between brain, body and environment.

Baby talk

Darshana Narayanan  

Rigorous analyses of the developmental origins of these behaviours reveal that, contrary to popular belief – even among scientists – they are not hardwired into our brain structures or preordained by our genes. Instead, the latest research – including my own – shows that these behaviours self-organise in utero through the continuous dance between brain, body and environment.
R

I think this claim begs the question, which is the self-evident fact that apparently planned organized purposeful behaviors of a baby must have some intelligent source beyond the nascent intelligence of the baby itself, information that must indeed be somehow "hard-wired" into the baby's many biological systems. This organized information constituting a pattern of behavior evidently planned to prepare for further development in growing up as a human being must have a source, and that source evidently must be stored somewhere. Where other than somehow in the genome whether in the genes or in the noncoding portion of the DNA? Then this self-organization would indeed be derived from information designed into the developing brain and body and be designed to respond in certain ways to the intelligently assumed likely environment.

I have tried in vain to find out Darshana Narayanan's qualifications.  She has an education from Princeton University and has published a couple of papers but that doesn't really mean much.  Her main claim to fame seems to be knocking the work of Israeli Yuval Noah Harari.  I'm still researching so this isn't my final opinion and I am riddled with personal incredulity concerning crying in an accent.  I have never heard any baby cry any differently to any baby from another country.  Red flags all around for me.