Parenting Trivia: A Baby's Cry and Laughter Can Affect One’s Memory

When a baby cries, a sudden signal is sent to your brain connections that disrupts whatever your brain has been thinking before it happened. The same thing happens when a baby laughs. Nonetheless, a study says that the crying and the laughing each has a different effect in anyone's cognition.

A study published in Plos One says that "the infant cries elicit a negative arousal bias that is distracting; they also identify, for the first time, the neural dynamics underlying the unique influence that infant cries and laughs have on cognitive control." The cries and the laughters both give way to the reciprocal relationship between attention and conflict processing. The experiments were done by studying the "influence of infant vocalizations on cognitive control, neural responses to the Stroop task were obtained by measuring electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs)". The researchers found the cry interference effect, in which task performance was slower with cry than with laugh distractors. Hence, crying produce greater intensity that results to more disturbance.

A dad named William C. Wadsack from Herald Democrat shared his experience with his baby boy whenever he is crying. He says that he is usually distracted by the cry and his memory is affected. He can hardly remind himself of the lyrics of the song that he wanted to sing for his son and usually endz up humming everything before the chorus comes. Wadsack also said that his memory is not that good especially when he is put on the spot even if he just receives easy questions.

Crying is actually good, according to a separate study published in a Harvard Health Journal. The study found that crying is normal and actually normative to let the babies sleep more. Crying should therefore be interpreted positively at times and not always considered as a disturbance.

Parents like Wadsack surely are compassionate with the little ones especially when they cry. However, it is still better to look at crying of babies on a brighter side. Let the babies cry and relax. Otherwise, the crying maybe related to any medical concern, especially when it the frequency and the length of it becomes alarming.