The Song She Heard Before She Was Born

In 2013, researchers at the University of Helsinki asked expectant mothers to play the same melody repeatedly during the final trimester of pregnancy. After the babies were born, the team monitored their brain activity while playing two versions of the song — the familiar one and a slightly altered version. Every infant's brain responded differently to the original melody, recognizing it, reaching for it neurologically, the way a hand reaches for something it has held before.

The babies knew the song before they ever saw the singer's face.

When David wrote that the Almighty knit him together in his mother's womb, he was not speaking in abstraction. He was describing a God whose attention does not begin at the delivery room door. The Most High was already there in the darkness, already shaping nerve endings that would one day feel wind, already forming the ears that would one day hear a mother's lullaby — and already knowing the sound of that child's first cry before the lungs had finished forming.

"How precious to me are your thoughts, O God," David marvels. "How vast is the sum of them." Not distant thoughts. Not general thoughts about humanity as a whole. Particular thoughts — about the curve of your fingerprint, the cadence of your laugh, the song already playing in the womb of your becoming.