ddw@cornell.UUCP (06/12/83)
This business of children being affected by things happening around them
before birth sounds an awful lot like Scientology to me. Anyone know if
this Dr. Verny is a Scientologist?
David Wright
{vax135|decvax|purdue}!cornell!ddw
ddw@cornellotto@ihuxi.UUCP (06/13/83)
Why should pre-natal influences appear to be like Scientology? I think they can be grounded in ordinary, pedestrian neurophysiology. Neural mylination begins at around 6 months of pregnancy and continues until the child is around 2 or 3 years of age, if I recall my neurophysiology correctly. This means that the nerve fibers are beginning to process sensory input at resonably normal rates beginning then. Now what does it mean to say that sensory input is being processed? Is it reasonable to assume that a prenate is somehow inert, functioning on automatic pilot until the moment of birth and only then begins to form associations, memories, etc.? Or is it more reasonable to assume that the prenate is gradually arriving at consciousness and forming associations and memories as soon as its nervous system permits? I hold with this latter view. As soon as the nervous system is capable of sustaining transmission of action potentials from sensory receptors to the brain, that is when the prenate begins to perceive and learn about the world. What kind of sensory input is a prenate likely to experience? I think this is an exciting question to follow up on. Some years ago I heard about a doll what was very successful in calming down neonates. The doll was a Teddy bear, but it's most unusual feature was that it contained a cassette player that continuously played the sounds that had been recorded by a microphone placed in a mother's womb, i.e., it replayed the sounds a prenate would have heard. Neonates hearing this would quickly calm down and fall into slumber. Is it likely that prenates can hear more than the sounds immediately around them? the sounds of a mother's heart and lungs working? the thumps and bumps of a mother's walking? I would think so, and I would think simple experiments could be performed to determine what "outside" sounds were sufficiently intense to be readily perceived above the background noise of the mother's bodily functions. Somehow, rock music would seem to be one of the more likely candidates for such perception. What effect rock music might have on a prenate is hard to say, but it seems likely, to me at any rate, that such music could be heard by a prenate and built into whatever memories and associations are being formed at that time. Other candidates for such sounds, it seems to me, are the very low frequency sounds of speech. Low frequency sounds can be heard through barriers better than high frequency sounds, and spoken communication is likely to be nearly continuously available in the environment (as Mother talks to Father, Doctor, friends; listens to TV and radio, etc.). Are there any important patterns to be learned in the low frequencies of speech? Yes, indeed ... the typical rhythms of communication! Different cultures have different rhythms for individual sentences and for the give-and-take of different types of conversation. A prenate, monitoring the muffled sounds of such interaction, could already be acculturating itself, permitting itself *some* mastery over William James "blooming, buzzing confusion" of sensory perception after birth. By the way, my Ph.D. Dissertation was in this area, focusing on the problems of getting a computer to process sensory information the way neonates do. If you want to read more, locate a copy of "Automatic Extraction of Distinctive Features," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1981. George Otto Bell Labs, Indian Hill ----------------------
softech@micomz.UUCP (06/14/83)
Unborn babies are ESPECIALLY sensitive to everything that happens around them: within the woman's body, and in her immediate surroundings. This sensitivity is due to the fact that development within the womb can be steered and altered by minute "doses" of things that would not affect a grown up, because the foetus is so small and grows so fast (his weight increase is fastest before birth). Smoking, drinking, caffeine and other toxins all affect the baby's development to a degree. Caffeine, for example will increase the foetus heartbeat by a factor that is 8 times that of the increase of the mother's heart. Booze has the same effect (a friend of mine has chronic pancreatitis because her mother drank regularly during pregnancy). Influences from the environment outside of the mother's body have been studied extensively by the science community (and NOT Scientology, god forbid). In the area of auditive influences, I refer you to the (brillant) works of Dr Alfred Tomatis, a french audiologist that has devoted his life to the study of the role of sounds, and good hearing, in human health. In his book "L'Oreille et la Vie" (Ear and Life) he reports cases of babies that had actually learned the fundamentals of foreign languages before being born, and many cases of babies born with hearing deficiencies due to exposure of the mother to loud working environments. There is also evidence that babies of mother musicians (especially cellists, because the instrument is held close to the stomach) develop melodic and harmonic faculties at a much earlier age than when the father is the musician and the mother is not. There is much argument that these differences can be attributed to genetic factors, but Tomatis's figures seem to indicate that the acoustic environment the mother is exposed to has significant influence on the foetus, especially between months 4-9 of gestation. Richard "Turn that volume DOWN" Blouin. PS. If you want to know is Rock affects YOUR ears, the rule is as follows: If your ears ring or buzz after exposure, then some damage has ALREADY occured. Damage is usually loss of sensitivity to higher frequencies (above 10KHz). Repeated exposure of this sort always results in PERMANENT damage.
mark@umcp-cs.UUCP (06/14/83)
Scientology (of course) is the pits. Unfortunately, and completely by accident, this business about the intelligence of infants (even the unborn variety) is supported from many angles, including articles in Science (published by AAAS). If only there was a way to keep the scientologists from taking advantage of it... -- Mark Weiser
laura@utcsstat.UUCP (06/16/83)
for your information: A woman my mother taught school with was pregnant and sincerely believed "the secret life of a child". She tried to demonstrate that this was true in that her baby responded as the book dictated to various music and conversations. She also believed in some of dianetics, and which came from which source I forget, but she did a lot of things and was 100% convinced that she was one of the living proofs of these theories. When the child was born it was stone deaf. It has a genetic deformity in that the ear canal is missing. As a fetus, it couldnt hear a thing. Now the woman believes that some babies are to some extent telepathic.