Researchers found that the brains of infants are much more receptive to the voices and emotions than it previously thought.

Experiments have shown that even in sleep, infants distinguish human speech from other sounds, as well as the perceived emotional that they hear, according to CNews. It is expressed in various activity areas of the brain.

Children are born with is still very immature gray matter. In the first years of life it continues to take shape and becomes "complete" form only with puberty.

"Our results suggest that the temporal cortex of infants is much more mature than previously thought," - says Evelyn Merkur, who led the study. "Human speech - a very important social signal, and this is probably the reason for the early specialization of the brain for processing," - adds her colleague and co-author of an article published in Current Biology, Anna Blasi.

Study was made possible through the use of noiseless MRI scanner. The subjects were infants aged 3 to 7 months. While they slept, the researchers played the sounds of four types: emotionally neutral (coughing, sneezing), positive (laughter) and negative (crying), as well as various household sounds (the splash of water, noise) and watched as it affects the testimony of functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), reflecting the activity of certain zones of gray matter.

Found that the brain areas responsible for the processing of speech in adults and infants are activated in response to human voices. And for crying also activated areas responsible for perception of emotional stimuli. Various household as the noise does not cause particular brain activation.

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