By the time our kids are teenagers it often feels like we’re not on the same wave length with them. But there are still (possibly rare) moments when we feel connected, and instinctively know when something is wrong.
Just the same as when they were babies and we would weirdly wake in the night just before they needed a feed.
Now new research suggests that this connection may, in fact, be a psychic one unique to mothers and babies.
In a new study being presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s (CNS) annual meeting in San Francisco this week, researchers from the University of Cambridge have found that babies literally sync their brainwaves with their mums’ to help them learn about their social environment.
In the study, cognitive neuroscientist Victoria Leongher and her team looked at how mothers’ emotional responses toward toys affected their infants’ decisions to interact with the toys.
Mothers wearing wireless EEG technology would react to a toy as their babies, also wearing wireless EEG, would watch them. The mothers would show either a positive emotion or negative emotion, which would influence whether the babies would choose to play with the toys. They found that where the mothers’ and babies’ brain waves were more strongly synced, there was a “higher likelihood of social learning by the infant”.
This syncing is known as neural synchrony – when brainwaves from two people follow predictable patterns with respect to each other.
Where the mothers had lots of eye contact with their babies, neural synchrony was greater.
Researchers say there is still much work to be done to learn more – however, it just goes to show, that mother-child bond runs even deeper than we thought.
