Tag: memory in uterus

In Maha Bharata,one of the Great Epics of the Hindus, Lord Krishna teaches details a special form of army arrangement called Padma Vyuha( patterned after the Lotus,;once the warrior enters the army will engulf him). to Arjuna ,who was sitting by his wife’s side who was pregnant(she was Krishna’s sister).As soon as Krishna finished teaching Arjuna the process of entering the Padma Vyuha, the conversation stopped and both went about their daily chores.
Later after a few years, Arjuna’s son goes to war along with his father and enters into Padma Vyuha,who was the only one ,apart from Arjuna , to know how to enter, and perishes as he did not know as to how to get out of it.What was taught while he was in the womb is explained here.
When does memory begin? We can’t consciously call up images from our infancy, but we surely learn important, lasting associations at very early ages. New work suggests this type of memory begins even in the womb.

In a study published in July in Child Development, researchers from the Netherlands reported short-term memory in 30- to 38-week-old fetuses. First they put a vibrating, honking device on the abdomens of 93 preg nant women. The fetuses quickly “habituated”—that is, they figured out that the noise was not dangerous. When they heard it again 10 minutes later, they did not squirm and their heart rates did not escalate. “It’s like getting used to a New York train sta­tion,” says lead author J. G. Nijhuis, a professor of obstetrics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. “It is a learning capability to distinguish safe from unsafe stimuli. It is a primitive form of memory.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=recall-in-utero&sc=CAT_BS_20100115