Regina G. Barber

And so, Michaela, she wasn't surprised that quitting smoking would help the brain, too.

So it's not an overly surprising result, but it's surprising in that we didn't see that the effect kind of weakened with age.

Meaning quitting at any age seems to show a benefit.

Now, Michaela points out that the study can't definitively say good cognitive scores mean

like a lower risk of dementia.

But I talked to a physician who didn't work on the study, Neil Benowitz, and he's very optimistic about the findings, saying that cognitive tests are good predictors of dementia later on.

And as the weeks go by, the fetus can hear the sounds of the person carrying them.

Here's how Melissa Scala put it.

She's at Lucille Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.

Yeah, so preemie babies, those are born before 37 weeks.

They're at a higher risk for delays in language development.

Among very preterm babies, up to one-third can have problems with reading or speaking later on.

So Melissa and her colleagues tried an intervention using sound.

Sound.

Oh, I know.

Yeah.

So it did help, like compared to the control group who didn't get the recordings.

The babies in the intervention group had more mature white matter in key language areas of the brain.

And the researchers published these results in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience this week.

And research like this has changed preemie care at the hospital.