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The basic answer, which is repeatedly being demonstrated in myriad new ways: babies know a lot more than most people used to think. They see more, hear more, understand more, and they are genetically prewired to make friends with any adult who cares for them. The implications of this research challenge some of the standard beliefs on how children should be reared, how they should be educated, and what they are capable of becoming as they grow up. Yale Psychology Professor William Kessen, who has been studying infants for more than 30 years, says in admiration of the newborn baby's zestful approach to life, "He's eating up the world." Harvard Psychology Professor Jerome Kagan, another pioneer, offers only one caveat about the new research: "Don't frighten parents! The baby is a friendly computer!"
Many parents do get frightened, of course, particularly when a flood of books and articles keeps telling them what to do and not to do—and above all not to get frightened. The current discoveries about how much a baby sees and hears and knows at the very moment of birth make the parental responsibility seem even more formidable. Most important, in a way, is that these findings are changing the way people actually see their own children, changing how they talk to them, what they expect of them. And these slow and almost imperceptible transformations can hardly help altering, in subtle and equally imperceptible ways, the babies themselves, and thus the adults they will some day become.
The traditional view of infancy was that of Shakespeare, who described the helpless newborn as "mewling and puking in the nurse's arms." Nearly a century later, John Locke proclaimed it as self-evident that the infant's mind was a tabula rasa, or blank tablet, waiting to be written upon. William James prided himself on more scientific observations but wrote in The Principles of Psychology (1891) that the infant is so "assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin and entrails at once" that he views the surrounding world as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion." As recently as 1964, a medical textbook reported not only that the average newborn could not fix its eyes or respond to sound but that "consciousness, as we think of it, probably does not exist in the infant."
Such views have been increasingly re-examined and revised during the past two decades, and this research has now grown into a substantial industry. From the Infant Laboratory at M.I.T. to the University of Texas' new Children's Research Center to U.C.L.A.'s Child Study Laboratory, there is hardly a major university without teams of researchers poking and prodding babies. The number of studies of infant cognition has tripled in the past five years, according to Psychologist Richard Held of M.I.T. A conference of experts in Austin last year heard more than 200 research papers ranging from "Sleep-Wake Transitions and Infant