Abrupt changes in her diet during the perinatal period can confuse babies and upset breastfeeding. Traumatic events in neonatal intensive care are indelibly imprinted in memory and intrude on adult life, often in the form of fear. Edward, who was born prematurely and entered the NICU at 29 weeks, learned to fear the sound and sight of adhesive tape. He learned this from the experience of having sections of his skin accidentally pulled off during removal of monitor pads. When he was a young man, he still feared adhesive tape.
Babies can learn their mother's emotional state.
Experiments in Australia revealed that unborn babies were participating in the emotional upset of their mothers watching a disturbing 20-minute segment of a Hollywood movie. When briefly re-exposed to this film up to three months after birth, they still showed recognition of the earlier experience. Studies of a thousand babies whose mothers had experienced various degrees of depression during pregnancy themselves displayed depression at birth and in proportion to the depression scores of their mothers. An important message of these diverse findings is that memory and learning seem to be a natural part of being human, including the first nine months in the womb and the years of infancy, defined as the time before speech. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that life in the womb is extremely active and interactive and the womb is, in fact, a classroom.