Musical Baby

I'm convinced, at seven months, that Hannah is a musical genius. Here is the evidence: 1) when playing her baby piano, I played three tones (high C - G - low C) and she responded by singing the same tones! Only once, true, but still. 2) She has a demanding ear - while singing her to sleep the other night, I tried out a new song. She pulled out her soother, let out a cry, and tried to shove her soother in my mouth. Point taken. 3) My mom insists she has perfect rhythm. Whether Hannah's rhythm is perfect, or my mom's imperfect, I'm not quite sure yet. But I do know that Hannah loves singing (hers, daddy's and mine, but mostly hers), music, and the sing song rhymes of her children's books. This lead me to wonder if musicality is a innate human characteristic? And is it true that playing Mozart for babies (and fetuses in the womb) can increase intelligence?

First of all, let's put to rest the Mozart Effect. I think it was simply a commercial phenomenon to sell CDs and make mothers feel guilty. The original research (Rauscher, Shaw and Ky, 1993, Nature, 365:611) showed that a short exposure to Mozart increased participants' abilities to do spatial tasks. Participants were adults, and were given either muzak, Mozart, or silence to listen to, then given a spatial reasoning task. The tests showed that the participants who listened to Mozart had a temporary increase in spatial IQ. I have to emphasize three things: the effect was temporary, it was on spatial IQ only, and the participants were adults.

Undaunted, in 1997, Don Campbell published "The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit" followed in 2002 by "The Mozart Effect for Children: Awakening Your Child's Mind, Health and Creativity With Music." In these books, Campbell encouraged parents to play specially selected classical music to babies and children to increase their intelligence. The idea gained such popularity that Georgia governor Zell Miller proposed including funds in the state budget that would provide all Georgian children with a recording of classical music. (State representative Homer DeLoach said "I asked about the possibility of including some Charlie Daniels or something like that, but they said that they thought the classical music has a greater positive impact. Having never studied those impacts too much, I guess I'll just have to take their word for that.")

While few would dispute that listening to music can have a powerful effect on mood and relaxation, the supposition that listening to classical music has lasting effects on general intelligence just isn't supported by evidence. However, most mothers would agree that their children respond powerfully to music. In fact, 33 week fetuses are capable of recognizing music as different from background noise, and by 35 weeks slow their movements as if they are paying attention to what they are hearing (Kisilevsky et al. 2004, Developmental Science, 7:550). In a charming experiment, Hepper (1991) showed that 2-4 day old infants showed a decrease in movement and increased alertness when they heard the theme to a television programme their mothers had watched while pregnant (Hepper 1991, Irish Journal of Psychology, 12:95). The way that mothers talk to their infants has a musical quality - sing song, high pitched, and rhythmical - that infants respond to. So if babies are so responsive to music at such a young age, is musicality an innate, rather than cultural, human characteristic?

The science isn't clear on this and I had to wade through a lot of deeply turgid psychological papers to get any answer at all. (Notice that if it's psychology, it's turgid, but if it's biology, I have no problem with it? Talk about biases.) Evolution works on the premise that the trait in question can be inherited and has an adaptive value for the organism. So first of all, is music heritable? Music is important to all cultures around the world. This would suggest that it is more than simply a cultural phenomenon, because if it were, you would expect that there would be a few cultures that don't have music at all. So then if we accept that music is heritable, is it a trait that gives adaptive value? This question is a lot more difficult.

Long recognized by the designers of IQ tests, people come with different types of intelligence including linguistic, spatial, physical, emotional and general. I'm paraphrasing, I think I once read that there were as many as 12. It has been hypothesized that part of the evolution from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens involved an integration of these intelligences. In other words, what is characteristic of humans is a certain flexibility of the mind, making representation, inference, even poetry possible. It may be that because music involves aspects of language, movement, and emotion, that it helps the developing brain integrate these different arenas of intelligence. However, the lack of experimental evidence showing that music helps general intelligence makes that a harder argument to swallow. Alternatively, music may be a byproduct of the integration that happens naturally anyway (Cross, 1999. Is Music the Most Important Thing We Ever Did? Music, Development and Evolution. In: Music, Mind and Science, Ed: Suk Won Yi).

Predictably, I would like to run an experiment and re-evolve humans to determine which is true - but given a lack of time, employment and common ancestor, that's just not possible. So instead, I will keep singing to my darling little girl and imagine our ape-like ancestors, singing around a campfire, slowly getting smarter.

What a ride...

I wonder what she’s thinking. She stares intently at the toy hanging from her little baby gym, and works so hard to get her hands around it, then blows all her breath out her nose and starts to furiously flap her arms and kick, before doing it again. Now that she’s five months old I’m more confident attributing these little tantrums to excitement or frustration, but I’ve been speculating for months. Isn’t it strange that we know so little about those early years, about what it’s like? That artists, writers, have mostly ignored this mysterious time? There is a great book, called Baby in the Mirror by Charles Fernyhough, about this topic. It’s about a neuroscientist who studies early childhood development and has a baby himself, then writes a tender and sweet account of the first three years of his daughter’s life.

In my own first hormonal weeks with Hannah I worried about everything; whether she ate enough, grew enough, cried enough, cried too much, slept enough, slept too much, was she breathing okay, feeling okay, loved enough, dressed enough, held enough. She didn’t give me many cues to her inner state other than sleeping and wailing and precious minutes of awake time. Those waking times were a flurry of arm waves, big eyes, pursed lips and strange wiggles. She was a tiny alien with a completely new language. I expected gazing adoration, but she didn’t gaze in my eyes, she stared at my forehead. I didn’t realize that newborns’ eyesight is so poor that they are drawn to the area of greatest contrast, the hairline. As well as teaching me that, Baby in the Mirror gave me a precious, charming and incredible glimpse into how her consciousness was evolving.

Those early weeks were not only a sleep deprived haze for me, but a dream time for her – there is no difference between brain wave patterns during sleep and waking for a newborn. It is as if they are constantly in a dream. And what a dream! It’s hard to imagine how jarring that transition to the world must be. Babies don’t just come alive at the moment of birth – they have been preparing for that moment for months, with practice breathing, movement, swallowing, hiccups even. But imagine all the experiences that are new – vision, smell, cold, and the movement of their own limbs. Because their corneas are not yellowed with time, they see bluer, higher wavelengths than adults can, and their brains have not learned to distinguish sounds from their own echoes. The lack of processing available for all these new senses results in synaesthesia, which is the blurring between different senses. Smells may have colour and sounds may have tastes. What a green voice, a spicy sight! (Fernyhough 2009) This has been an incredible ride for me – but what a trip for her.