Psy - Here is What The Brain Can Remember From Infancy (Even When Consciously It’s Gone)

Psy - Here is What The Brain Can Remember From Infancy (Even When Consciously It’s Gone)

The astounding power of the unconscious to store information we’ve consciously forgotten.

The echoes of a ‘lost’ mother tongue can be seen in the brain decades after the language was last heard, a neuroscience study finds.

The girls in the Canadian study were between 9 and 17-years old when tested and were adopted at an early age by French-speaking families from Chinese parents.

Their exposure to Chinese had, therefore, been minimal and they certainly had no conscious recollection of their mother tongue.

Lara Pierce, the study’s first author, explained the study’s rationale:

“The infant brain forms representations of language sounds, but we wanted to see whether the brain maintains these representations later in life even if the person is no longer exposed to the language.”

The French-speaking girls adopted from Chinese families were compared with bilingual girls who spoke Chinese and French as well as another group born and raised with just French.

The results surprised the scientists:

“It astounded us that the brain activation pattern of the adopted Chinese who ‘lost’ or totally discontinued the language matched the one for those who continued speaking Chinese since birth.

The neural representations supporting this pattern could only have been acquired during the first months of life.

This pattern completely differed from the first group of unilingual French speakers.”