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Mother's voice can light up many parts of child's brain, reports a recent study. Researchers have come up with scientific evidence on incredible mother-child bondage that has existed since time immemorial.

Researchers from Stanford University Medical Center found in their study that different parts of child's brain light up when they listen to their mother's voice than to any other woman. They have also noted that different regions of the brain beyond areas of hearing respond when the child hears mom's voice.

The connection between the brain and mother's voice recognition is said to have an important role to play in the child's social communication ability. The brain regions stimulated while listening to mother's voice include the areas of reward processing, emotions, social functions, face recognition and detection of personally relevant information.

"Many of our social, language and emotional processes are learned by listening to our mom's voice," said lead author Daniel Abrams from Stanford University in the US, according to Life Hacker. "But surprisingly little is known about how the brain organises itself around this very important sound source. We didn't realise that a mother's voice would have such quick access to so many different brain systems," Abrams said.

The researchers included 24 children aged between 7 and 12 that are raised by their biological mothers in the study. The investigators also made sure that kids involved in the research had no developmental disorders.

For the purpose of the study, the researchers recorded three words uttered by every child's mother and that of two other women. When they were played the children could spot their mother's voice with 97 percent accuracy though the recordings ran less than a second. The children's brain was scanned using MRI throughout the process. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We wanted to know: Is it just auditory and voice-selective areas that respond differently, or is it broader in terms of engagement, emotional reactivity, and detection of salient stimuli," added Vinod Menon, a professor at Stanford University, reported The New Indian Express. "The study can be an important new template for investigating social communication deficits in children with disorders such as autism," Menon noted.