EXPERIMENT #1

Tiny Tunes

Think you have to wait until your baby is actually born to start running tests on it? Think again. Your first opportunity to turn your child into your own personal guinea pig comes well before your due date.

This experiment is intended to give you your very first glimpse into how your adorable little fetus's memory works. It can also give you a chance to start the parent-child bonding process early.

Because who really wants to wait until the kid's a full-fledged infant to do that?

So you're getting ready to have a baby. Congratulations! Fifteen years from now, your child isn't going to listen to a single word you say. But right now, while that little angel is still trapped inside Mommy's uterus, you have a captive audience. It doesn't matter what you say or how offkey you sing, your kid has nothing else to do these days but listen to you. And listening — and remembering — is exactly what she's doing.

It's true! By the third trimester, your baby's ears and other sensory organs have developed enough to allow her to hear sounds coming from outside her pregnant mommy's body. But in addition to simply hearing these sounds as they are happening, researchers performing experiments similar to this one have shown that newborn babies will actually remember them later as well. In these experiments, pregnant women were asked to read the same story to their babies every day for the last six weeks of their pregnancies. After the babies were born, the mothers read either the familiar story or a new story to their babies. The babies reacted differently depending on which one they heard!

So if you have a song you plan to sing with your baby or a special story you anticipate reading to her, don't wait until after she's born — you can start right now. Choose quiet times, use a loud, clear voice, and be sure to repeat the process many times. It might feel a little awkward to be reading a book out loud to an invisible baby or singing childhood songs to yourself (especially if the only times you remember to try this experiment are while you're shopping for groceries or standing in line at the DMV), but your baby will be listening, and she will remember what she hears. It's pretty amazing to think that by doing something as simple as talking to your unborn baby, you can create a shared experience that will begin to bond parent and child before you two ever lay eyes on one another.

You may feel your baby reacting to your chosen song or story while you're still pregnant, becoming more active and kicking or rolling around in the womb. Later, after your baby is born, you will be able to see her reaction when you sing the song again. Does she get extra active and kick around as you sing? When you start reading your story, does she suck faster on her pacifier or stop fussing to listen?

In our case, our daughter's reaction was unmistakable — even before she was born. When we were expecting our first baby, Andy would often sing the song "Mrs. Train" by the band They Might Be Giants to our little one, and we would watch as Amber's baby belly would bob around to the sound of the music. When our due date passed and Amber hadn't yet begun labor, our OB had us come in frequently for nonstress tests. During these tests we would sit in a quiet room for fifteen minutes or so while the baby's heartbeat was recorded in the form of jagged little lines printing out onto a never-ending spool of paper.

During one of these tests, we decided to entertain ourselves by having Andy sing the now-familiar song to the baby. As soon as he started, the baby's heart rate — which had been hovering steadily between 130 and 140 beats per minute — shot all the way up to 165. The chart rolling out of the monitor morphed from gently rolling hills into a series of extreme peaks, cliffs, and drop-offs. We were alarmed. Andy stopped singing. We felt like we had done something bad and we were going to get in trouble. When the doctor walked in to read the machine's output, we held our breaths. But she said that the baby's heartbeat looked great, "especially this part," pointing to the spikes Andy had helped create when he sang the song. The doctor explained that she liked to see changes in the baby's heart rate like that because it indicated that the baby was being active. When the doctor left, Andy resumed the song and the baby danced along to it (or so we can only assume based on the pointy heart rate chart and the colossal kicks Amber was feeling).

Later, when our daughter was about two weeks old, we laid her on the couch and Andy sang the familiar song again. She became immediately alert and excited, kicking and flailing her little arms around. We were able to see firsthand how she must have been reacting in the womb.

Most of us don't really think about unborn babies as real people. We wonder what gender they are and what we might name them, but we don't think of them as actual human beings that have already begun experiencing the world. But a baby...