BABIES IN THE WOMB

Why people yawn is a mystery. But yawning starts in the womb.

Past studies have used ultrasound images to show fetuses yawning, but some scientists have argued that real yawns were getting confused with fetuses simply opening their mouths.

So Nadja Reissland, a researcher at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, used a more detailed ultrasound technique to get images of fetal faces that could distinguish a true yawn from just an open mouth.

"They seem to open their mouths widely much less often than they yawn," Reissland says.

What's more, she found that yawning was common at 24 weeks but then dropped to zero at 36 weeks, according to a report by Reissland and her colleagues in the journal PLOS ONE.

Reissland believes that fetal yawning may somehow help trigger brain maturation, by acting as a kind of self-stimulation for the developing fetus.

"It could be that yawning is something which you need in order to have a functioning brain, which is a hypothesis," she says, adding that she would like to compare yawning in healthy fetuses, like the ones she studied, with yawning in fetuses that have medical conditions.

Reissland says she suspects that yawning has a different function for adults than for fetuses. Most studies on yawning have focused on its contagious nature. But some research suggests that children are immune from "catching" another person's yawn until about five years of age.

And Reissland says one study showed that babies don't imitate their mother's yawns, even though babies do imitate mouth movements such as smiles and pursed lips. "How is it possible that these babies can imitate mouth movements, but they don't imitate the yawning?" Reissland wonders.

Unborn Twins Interact in the Womb at 14 weeks Into Pregnancy

An Italian researcher is gaining more attention into his research published last October on twins and the relationships they develop — starting in the womb.

Umberto Castiello of the University of Padova, Italy published a report in the online journal Public Library of Science One (PLoS One) in October showing unborn babies have the ability to interact as early as 14 weeks into the pregnancy.

“We conclude that performance of movements towards the co-twin is not accidental: already starting from the 14th week of gestation twin fetuses execute movements specifically aimed at the co-twin,” Castiello’s team wrote.

They discovered unborn children have the ability to make directed contact with other human beings beginning before birth and they measured the movements of the babies towards each other and found the actions differed from incidental contact with each other or the uterine wall of their mother.

The Italian research team filmed video footage of twins at both 14 and 18 weeks along using a four-dimensional ultrasound, according to their report. The 14-week old twins touched each other head to head, arm to head, and head to arm. At the 18th week, they made more contact and, as the team wrote, began “spending up to 30 percent of their time reaching out and stroking their co-twin.”

Kinematic analyses described the movements as not reflexes but planned movements and were eventually very purposeful contacts to towards each others’ eye and mouth regions and that they took care when touching delicate parts of each other’s bodies. They were seen “caressing” the back of the sibling

“The results showed that the spatial and temporal characteristics of foetal movements were by no means uncoordinated, but depended on the goal of the different motor acts, suggesting a surprisingly advanced level of motor planning,” the researchers concluded. “We demonstrate that by the 14th week of gestation twin fetuses do not only display movements directed towards the uterine wall and self-directed movements, but also movements specifically aimed at the co-twin, the proportion of which increases between the 14th and 18th gestational week.”

Castiello explained that newborns appear to be already “wired” to interact socially with other humans soon after birth and he wanted to follow up on how, within only a few hours after birth, babies can imitate gestures of people around them and make other social interactions.

The ultrasound technique the researchers used allowed them to change the depth of visual field, the frame rate, and the sweep angle. The twin babies taped for 20 minutes each time, and the video recordings were digitized for offline analysis of the hand movements.

“Although various types of inter-twins contact have been demonstrated starting from the 11th week of gestation, no study has so far investigated the critical question whether intra-pair contact is the result of motor planning rather then the accidental outcome of spatial proximity,” they said. “Twin pregnancies provide a unique opportunity to investigate the social pre-wiring hypothesis.”

Citation: Umberto Castiello et al., “Wired to Be Social: The Ontogeny of Human Interaction.”

Research Shows Unborn Baby Can Anticipate Her Own Movements in the Womb

Using remarkable technology to eavesdrop on the unborn child, it seems as if every day in every way we find that he or she is a remarkable human being. One study builds on another on another, and so forth, showing ever-greater complexity.

Using 4-dimensional ultrasound, a few months ago researchers from Durham and Lancaster Universities published a study of 15 healthy unborn babies that showed how the child’s facial expressions develop and become more complex as the baby grows. On the scans you can see recognizable facial expressions including what can only be described as a smile, followed by even more complex multi-dimensional expressions.

Researchers interpreted the behavior as babies “practicing” facial expressions. The article was published in the academic journal, PLOS ONE.

Just this past week, publishing in the journal “Developmental Psychobiology,” researchers found that that babies get better at anticipating their own movements as they enter the later stages of gestation. Put another way, “For the first time, psychologists discovered that foetuses were able to predict, rather than react to, their own hand movements towards their mouths as they entered the later stages of gestation compared to earlier in a pregnancy,” according to Carolyn Buchanan.

Here’s how Buchanan summarized the way the way “psychologists at Durham and Lancaster Universities tracked movements in a total of 60 scans of 15 healthy fetuses (8 girls and 7 boys) at monthly intervals between 24 weeks and 36 weeks gestation.”

“In the early stages of gestation, fetuses were more likely to touch the upper part and sides of their heads. But as the fetuses matured, they began to increasingly touch the lower, more sensitive, part of their faces including their mouths.

“And by 36 weeks a significantly higher proportion of fetuses were seen opening their mouths before touching them. Researchers say this suggests that in later stages of pregnancy, the babies were able to anticipate that their hands were about to touch their mouths, rather than just reacting to the touch.”

Tiffany Burns

This is my hand. Holding my sweet baby, Ezekiel. I delivered him on January 20, 2016. His heart stopped at 11 weeks 2 days. He had a heartbeat. Such a sweet sound. He had life! He was not a blob. He was not just a clump of cells. He was formed. Perfect. Look at the details. His sweet fingers. Toes. I am blessed to be his mother. He lived to show others life!

Please feel free to share his LIFE with others. He's my sweet little missionary! ❤️

These images were created for a National Geographic special called In The Womb: Animals by Producer Peter Chinn. He used a combination of ultrasound technology, tiny cameras, and computer design to create these incredible images that replicate what fetal animals look like. This is an incredible window into the womb (or egg as the case may be), laying bare the mysteries of the beginning of life!