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The Benefits Prenatal Right Brain Education
According to Shichida, through teaching words and sending images via heart-to-heart communication, babies will develop their potential to be born with great ability. These babies grow up with 6 characteristics:
- always calm and smiling
- seldom agitated
- does not wake up crying at night
- sociable and does not cling to his/her mother
- absorbs information fast and quick to understand things
- strong right brain ability
Practicing Prenatal Right Brain Education
The fundamental principle for practicing Prenatal Right Brain Education is to communicate love to your baby. This is an excerpt from Quantum Speed Reading by Yumiko Tobitani. It discusses the importance of prenatal education:
The fetus grows inside amniotic fluid that is like sweet and sour seawater. In this fluid, the fetus sucks its fingers, yawns, and sloshes about. The normal pH of amniotic fluid is about 7.8. But the pH can change. For example, if the mother decides to go shopping and forgets her purse, the ensuing tension is enough to drop the pH to 5 in a couple of seconds. A marital quarrel and its emotional energy are enough to drop the level down to 3 in a flash. These pH level decreases mean that there is more acidity in the amniotic fluid. The baby in the womb is happily sucking on a finger and suddenly the taste becomes sour. The amniotic fluid ceases to be a relaxing environment comfortable to the baby, and so its body stiffens up.
At the same time, the baby hears the sounds of mother’s beating heart, the pulsing sound of her blood flowing, her bones squeaking and creaking – all as a kind of background music. However, when the mother gets emotional, her beating heart speeds up, as does her blood circulation. The creaking of the bones gets harsher. Amidst this noise pollution and acidic amniotic fluid is no place for a mind to develop. This is the reason why prenatal education is so important.
What can you do?
Talk to Your Baby
Mothers should talk to their unborn babies. Fathers, too. For instance, when Dad is heading off to work, he can face Mum’s belly and say, “Ok, I’m off to the office now!”
Listening to Music
The ‘Mozart Effect’ was a phenomenon first suggested by a scientific study published in the journal Science in 1993. The study, involving 36 students, demonstrated that teenagers who listened to Mozart’s 1781 Sonata for Two Pianos in D major performed better in reasoning tests than adolescents who listened to something else or who had been in a silent room.
In a nutshell, if you play Mozart for your baby, it will increase your baby’s IQ. Although much research has been done, debunking The Mozart Effect, new research supports the benefits of music on the brain:
- Music seems to prime our brains for certain kinds of thinking, like spatial tasks because it turns on those pathways in the brain.
- Why Classical music? Because it has a more complex musical structure
- Classical music enhances the activity of genes involved in synaptic neurotransmission and dopamine secretion, both of which are important to memory and learning.
- Classical music reduces the activity of genes involved in neurodegeneration.
Prenatal Memory
Babies recognise musical pieces that they have heard before while they were in the womb. In fact, it has been found that babies listening to music they heard while they were in the womb tend to calm down more easily because they are soothed by the familiar music.
Here’s another example of the effect of playing music while your baby is still in your womb. It is an excerpt from Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina:
But once babies can perceive inputs like sounds and smells, starting around the second half of the pregnancy, they become precisely attuned to them. And they subconsciously remember. Sometimes it’s spooky, as legendary conductor Boris Brott discovered one day.
“It just jumped out at me!” Brott exclaimed to his mother. Brott had been at the podium of a symphony orchestra, conducting a piece of music for the first time, when the cellist began to play. He instantly knew he’d heard this piece before. This was no casual reminder of some similar but forgotten work: Brott could predict exactly what musical phrase was coming next. He could anticipate the flow of the entire work during the course of the rehearsal; he knew how to conduct it even when he lost his place in the score.
Freaking out, he called his mother, a professional cellist. She asked for the name of the piece of music, then burst out laughing. It was the piece she had been rehearsing when she was pregnant with him. The cello was up against her late-pregnancy mid-abdomen, a structure filled with sound conducting fluids, fully capable of relaying musical information to her unborn son. His developing brain was sensitive enough to record the musical memories. “All the scores I knew by sight were the ones she had played while she was pregnant with me”, Brott later said in an interview.
Babies do remember and it isn’t just the vague memory of something familiar. Even more amazing than this is Tobitani’s example of one child’s revelation to his parents one evening as he was beginning to grow sleepy and his brain began to shift to alpha wave patterns:
It was such a time that a child from one family said, “Mum, I remember talking to Dad when I was inside your tummy. I saw him from inside. And I saw two chimneys.” Because the family had moved just before this child was born, there was no way he could have seen the chimneys after birth. From the apartment where the family lived while he was in the womb, two chimneys could indeed be seen. When his mother asked how he knew about those chimneys, he replied, “Because I saw them from inside your tummy!”
When to Begin Prenatal Right Brain Education
According to John Medina, it is only in the second half of pregnancy that babies begin to perceive stimuli from the external world, therefore, somewhere around the fifth month is a good time to start. However, with regards to Prenatal Right Brain Education, it is never too early to start doing what you can to keep the womb environment as stress-free as possible. In other words, Mum needs to take care of herself and keep her stress levels as low as possible.