10 Things You Could Do Before You Were Born

It takes about 38 weeks for a fertilized egg to develop into a full term baby. When does the learning process begin for an individual? Is it before or after birth? There is plenty of evidence today telling us that this process of learning begins even while we were still fetuses. Some of the behavior we picked up from the womb can even last a life time.

1) Movements: you probably made your first movements around 8 weeks into gestation although your mum may not have felt you moving until about 16-20 weeks of the pregnancy. Ultrasound technology enables us to clearly observe the fetus in the womb. Some of us even sucked our thumb as children but one thing we may not know is that we probably started doing this as a fetus because a fetus can suck his/her thumbs from 20 weeks.
2) Handedness: Common patterns of behavior seen in adults are also seen in the fetus – e.g. handedness. You chose your more active hand to use while you were still in the womb. It’s been observed that fetuses that suck their right thumb rather than their left thumb are likely to be right handed children.

3) Breathing: Well, you weren’t actually breathing while you were still a fetus but you learnt the process and technique of breathing then. A fetus does not actually breathe in the womb. The mother breathes for the fetus, and essential oxygen is passed to the fetus through the umbilical cord but around 9 weeks of pregnancy, a fetus begins to make breathing-like movements. This means that when the baby is born, he/she will be able to breathe straight away.
4) Eye Movements: Your eyes started moving around the 14^th week of pregnancy and complex movements, similar to your eye movements now will have presented by the 24th week. In the last trimester of pregnancy, a fetus begins to have rapid eye movements.
5) Dreaming: the most reliable evidence that a person can dream is from a self-report and of course nobody could have asked you as a fetus if you could dream. So the issue of when an individual begins to dream is still a debate. However, fetus begins to have rapid eye movement (REM) sleep from as early as the 23 rd week of gestation. Typically, the REM sleep often indicates when a person is dreaming. Even though REM sleep has been detected in fetuses, scientists cannot know for certain if a fetus can dream because humans can still dream outside of the REM sleep stage.
6) Recognizing Sounds: As a newborn, it was possible for you to recognize music that you heard in the womb. The fetus begins to respond to sounds at about 20 weeks into the pregnancy. To begin with the fetus only hears low noises, but as development continues he/she starts to hear higher pitched noises too. Louder sounds can make the fetus startle and move about. The older fetus is able to discriminate between different voices and languages.
7) Urinating, Drinking and Tasting: You started emptying your bladder while still a fetus during the 10th week of pregnancy. Urine is passed straight into the amniotic fluid, the protective fluid surrounding the fetus in the womb. About five weeks later, the fetus starts to drink this same fluid. And as a fetus, you liked certain tastes more than others, and will drink more amniotic fluid if it tastes sweet.
8) Feeling Pain: Perhaps we may have wondered when it was exactly that we became aware of ourselves or started becoming conscious of signals coming from the outside world. We know with each other when someone feels pain because we can ask them and they can tell us. We cannot do this with the fetus, so we have to study when the brain develops enough to make this possible, and make an informed guess. If you touch the foot of a fetus at 12 weeks, he/she will move away, but it is extremely unlikely that the fetus is ‘feeling’ anything. This is just a reflex response like a knee jerk. From 26 weeks onwards it does seem likely that the fetus can hear sounds and feel pain too because the connection between the brain and the body which is a prerequisite for conscious experience will have been formed and functional.
9) Stress: At times we feel stressed or anxious maybe while playing a computer game or watching an action movie and this may even cause our hearts to beat faster. Such a response is also elicited by fetuses when the mother is stressed or anxious.
10) Yawning: Yawning is quite contagious and by reading this, you may even be triggered to yawn. But yawning even though contagious is something we begin to do before we are born. While some researchers have suggested that fetuses yawn, others have disagreed and claim it is simple mouth opening. But a new research has clearly distinguished 'yawning' from 'non-yawn mouth opening' based on the duration of mouth opening.