by Darshana Narayanan at Aeon: Some restless infants don’t wait for birth to let out their first cry. They cry in the womb, a rare but well-documented phenomenon called vagitus uterinus (from the Latin word vagire, meaning to wail). Legend has it that Bartholomew the Apostle cried out in utero. The Iranian prophet Zarathustra is said to have been ‘noisy’ before his birth. Accounts of vagitus uterinus appear in writings from Babylon, Assyria, ancient Greece, Rome and India. The obstetrician Malcolm McLane described an incident that occurred in a hospital in the United States in 1897. He was prepping a patient for a c-section, when her unborn baby began to wail, and kept going for several minutes – prompting an attending nurse to drop to her knees, hands clasped in prayer. Yet another child is said to have cried a full 14 days before birth. In 1973, doctors in Belgium recorded the vitals of three wailing fetuses and concluded that vagitus uterinus is not a sign of distress. An Icelandic saga indicates that the phenomenon has been observed in other animals – ‘the whelps barked within the wombs of the bitches’ – vagitus uterinus in dogs, a foretelling of great events to come in Icelandic lore.
Air is necessary for crying. The coordinated movements of muscles in the stomach and rib cage force air out of the lungs and up through the vocal cords – two elastic curtains pulled over the top of the windpipe – causing them to vibrate and produce a buzz-like sound. These sound waves then pass through the mouth, where precise motions of the jaws, lips and tongue shape them into the vocal signals that we recognise. In this case, the rhythmic sounds of a cry.
Vagitus uterinus occurs – always in the last trimester – when there’s a tear in the uterine membrane. The tear lets air into the uterine cavity, thus enabling the fetus to vocalise. Vagitus uterinus provided scientists with some of the earliest insights into the fetus’s vocal apparatus, showing that the body parts and neural systems involved in the act of crying are fully functional before birth.
Loud, shrill and penetrating – a baby’s cry is its first act of communication. A simple adaptation that makes it less likely that the baby’s needs will be overlooked. And babies aren’t just crying for attention. While crying, they are practising the melodies of speech. In fact, newborns cry in the accent of their mother tongue. They make vowel-like sounds, growl and squeal – these are protophones, sounds that eventually turn into speech.
Babies communicate as soon as they are born. Rigorous analyses of the developmental origins of these behaviours reveal that, contrary to popular belief – even among scientists – they are not hardwired into our brain structures or preordained by our genes. Instead, the latest research – including my own – shows that these behaviours self-organise in utero through the continuous dance between brain, body and environment.
In the beginning, there is nothing. The world is formless and empty, darkness lies upon the amniotic waters. The embryo, still too young to be called a fetus, floats inside the amniotic sac of the uterus. It sees nothing. It cannot hear, smell or taste. It feels nothing – no heat, cold, pressure or pain. It cannot sense its own position or orientation. It cannot move.
In the seventh week of pregnancy, the embryo – c-shaped with a big head and tiny tail, eyes, ears, mouth, trunk and webbed limbs – begins to move. It measures about 10 mm from crown to rump – the size of a grape – and its heart, lungs, brain and spinal cord are forming. In that same week, the embryo begins to feel touch – which is the first of its senses to gain function. The world is no longer formless, or empty.
Movements trigger sensations, and sensations trigger movements. Through this cycle of sensorimotor activity, the embryo begins to discover its body, and world. It begins to develop vocal behaviour.
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