While appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, actor Nicolas Cage made a comment that perhaps unintentionally indicated he is aware that he was himself — a unique human being — while he was still in his mother’s womb. And Colbert, a pro-abortion Catholic, seemed to agree.
Colbert asked Cage, “What is your earliest memory?” To which Cage responded:
I don’t remember. Let me think. Listen, I know this sounds really far out and I don’t know if it’s real or not, but sometimes I think I can go all the way back to in utero and feeling like I could, like see faces in the dark or something.
I know that sounds powerfully abstract, but that somehow seems like maybe it happened.
Colbert asked, “Did these faces in the dark, were other people in there with you? Were these things that your prenatal mind was conjuring?”
Cage responded, “Now that I am no longer in utero, I would have to imagine it was perhaps vocal vibrations resonating to me in that stage. That’s going way back. So I don’t know. But that comes to mind.”
Colbert replied, “I buy it. I buy it. I do. You’re Nic Cage. Who am I to say you don’t remember being in utero?”
Research published in the journal Infant Behavior & Development revealed that humans begin to form memories and learn while in the womb. The study found that when preborn children were introduced to a passage read aloud by their mothers beginning at 28 weeks, they showed evidence of having learned and remembered the passage by week 34.
Another study published in the journal Child Development found that short-term memory is likely present in preborn children by at least 30 weeks of age. The researchers found that at 30 weeks, preborn children use a form of learning and memory called habituation, in which they become used to a sound and have a “memory” of it so that it no longer startles them after the first few times. They also found that at 34 weeks, the preborn child is able to “store information and retrieve it four weeks later.”
Further studies must be carried out to determine when exactly preborn children first begin to remember stimuli.
Read more here about how preborn children see, hear, and move.
