"Are your ears painted on?"
It's a question we were probably all asked as teens, and have possibly asked as adults, but there's a reason why this happens at a certain stage of life - kids' brains simply don't register your voice the way they did in pre-teenage years.
New research out of Stanford University on adolescent brains suggests the reaction we have to certain voices changes over time, making our mother's voice feel less valuable. In other words, the mother's voice no longer generates the same neurological reaction.
The study shows that around age 13, kids' brains change from focusing on their mothers' voices to favour new voices, part of the biological signal driving teens to separate from their parents.
Psychiatrist Daniel Abrams from Stanford University is the lead author of the study.
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