Uterosound

The ear develops during pregnancy at an early stage. There is also clear evidence that some learning and adaptation occurs in-utero in many sensory organs, such as smell, sound and even sight. The latter is unique, since there is no light in the uterus; nevertheless, the neurons in the retina are activated in a specific way, called retinal waves, so as to (in my opinion) optimally adjust and "calibrate" the upstream neuronal processing. Hearing is known to be developed in-utero, since there is evidence that one and two days old babies show preference for their mother's voice than to other people voices. From this information, several attempts to introduce "sophisticated sounds" to the womb have been made, in a marketing pitch that "if you play Mozart to your unborn child, she will come out smarter".

However, there is an obvious obstacle in developing such a device: sounds travel and distort on their journey from the outside world, until they reach the fetus's hearing organs. Sounds travel differently in liquids than in air, i.e. the speed of sound is much higher. Furthermore, women's bodies are not a uniform liquid (although made mostly of water), since they have many non-liquid organs, such as bones, muscles, kidneys etc. Hence, there is no clear relationship between the produced sound from the speakers outside the body and the actual sound sensed by the fetus.

In recent developments, there are now unique tools that are capable of analyzing the travel of sounds inside such a complex system as the human body. There are several ultrasound operations made today in a non-invasive manner, that heat up and destroy malignant tissue inside the body using sound-waves. However, analysis of sounds in the audible range, which has a much lower frequency than ultrasound, is much trickier. Nevertheless, advanced numerical tools that solve the wave equation in random and inhomogeneous media (which is the human body), exist today.

The project I'm suggesting involves a unique combination of imaging tools, advanced numerical sound-propagation tools and inverse problem analysis. I'll explain the steps toward the goal, which is to play the fetus sound in-utero that are identical, from a neuronal perspective, to sounds she will hear when she is born.

1.      Produce high definition imaging of the entire abdomen, with all organs and positions. This can be done in a non-invasive non-radiative manner using MRI and ultrasound. The output of this stage is a clear 3D map of the organs inside the mother's belly, including the position of the fetus.

2.      Use advance numerical tools, with the unique 3D map of the body, to understand, predict and invert the propagation of sound in such a complex medium. In other words, one can now know what the fetus senses when we make sounds outside the uterus, but more importantly one can know which sounds to produce outside in order for the fetus to hear what we want.

3.      Given the fetus developmental age, augmented by its 3D map, one can ascertain the level of auditory processing occurring prior to auditory neurons firing. In earlier ages, there is virtually no processing, whereas in later developmental stages the inner and outer ear are already there and influence the distortion of sounds dramatically.

4.      Given the inverse transform, i.e. which sounds to produce in order for the fetus to hear what we want, and given the fetus's auditory processing, we can now decide which sounds to produce, outside the body, for the fetus to "hear" sounds that are similar to those that it will hear after it is born.

This project is based on a huge assumption, and have some moral issues: should we even try to produce sounds in-utero that are not natural to the development of the fetus? I believe that the brain is a learning organ and that everything "thrown" at it, it will learn and adapt. I thus believe that if we make sounds such that the developing brain "hears" similarly to those that it will hear later on, after delivery, then I think that it will learn much faster to recognize sounds, voices and other auditory cues when it is a new born baby.