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The search for data is being steadily pushed back from childhood to earliest infancy and even before birth. One French obstetrician, for example, inserted a hydrophone into the uterus of a woman about to give birth and tape-recorded what the fetus could hear: the mother's loudly thumping heartbeat, a variety of whooshing sounds, the muffled but distinguishable voices of the mother and her male doctor, and, from a distance, the clearly identifiable strains of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
The obvious obstacle that long hindered scientific research on babies was that they could not talk,* could not tell what they saw or thought; the consequence was a widespread belief that they saw little and thought less. But that belief was based primarily on adults' dim recollections of their past. As early as the 1950s, a few psychologists were searching for laboratory methods to discover what babies could learn. Case Western Reserve Psychologist Robert Fantz made an important breakthrough in 1958 by demonstrating that babies' fascination with novelty could be turned into a form of silent speech. Specifically, Fantz watched infants move their eyes when he showed them two different objects; he carefully measured what they looked at and for how long. Given a choice, he showed, babies will look at a checkerboard surface rather than a plain one, a bulls-eye target rather than stripes, and in general they prefer the complex to the simple. Says Rutgers' Michael Lewis: "Out of such elementary observations, monstrously important consequences grew."
Once the basic approach was discovered, a whole world of previously untried research opened up; new technology made it possible to devise tests that would have been unimaginable a generation earlier. At the most rudimentary level, the videotape machine enables a psychologist to record a baby's wriggling and demonstrate that it often moves in rhythm with its mother's voice. At the most complex levels, surgeons at Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago can diagnose prenatal hydrocephalus (a brain-damaging excess of cerebrospinal fluid) in a fetus, then introduce a plastic tube into the mother's uterus and into the fetus' head to drain off the surplus fluid inside its brain. Guiding many of these technological innovations is the ubiquitous computer, which can synthesize a mother's voice as easily as it can measure eye movements or count the times that young Gery sucks on his nipple.
The first area to attract a number of researchers was the newborn baby's senses, which were once thought to represent little more than hunger to be fed. Systematic testing soon showed that babies not only perceive a good deal but have distinct preferences in everything. An Israeli neurophysiologist, Jacob Steiner, found that a baby as young as twelve hours old, which has never tasted even its mother's milk, will gurgle with satisfaction when a drop of sugar-water is placed on its tongue and grimace at a drop of lemon juice. More