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Early Stimulation in Infants and its PossibleAdvantages
Identifying the Process
Dr Brent Logan of the Pre-Natal Institute, Oregon, USA believes that there are levels of dysfunction amongst normal people that can be improved to allow for the developmentof human performance. He has developed a programme for assessing human beingsand by the early 1990s he had stimulated, pre-natally, 10,000 children by means of asynthesised heart beat.He said that this has brought about physical and mental changes in the new born thatwere immediately obvious when compared with the norm. There were improvedlinguistic skills and the children have shown a 25% to 50% improvement on all tests of human performance. The programme consistently produced results which showed anIQ at age five years of 160.Another scientist, Dr Mikhail Lazarev, of the Children’s Rehabilitation Centre, at theMoscow Clinic, specialises in educational courses for the unborn, bases a similarprogramme on music rather than on pure sound. His work began with the enquiry
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from when can a child be stimulated in order to uncover its hidden reserves. Hisresponse was that it can begin in the womb. He developed a course of musical trainingfor the unborn child, and believes that the foetus’s contact with the outside world ismainly through sound. Using the precept that the most sophisticated form of sound ismusic, he found that patterns of musical vibrations help to organize the developingfetal brain. Sounds can be heard and remembered by the as yet unborn child from asearly as 20 weeks after conception.
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Professor Peter Hepper of Queens University, Belfast is a world authority on thepsychology of the fetus. He was rather sceptical of Logan’s claims and believed that hehas shown no theoretical basis for them He proposed scientific caution, finding itunacceptable to take Logan’s empirical results for granted. He felt that there was noproof that the assumed improvement in development of any particular child was theresult of the sound stimulation rather than to the qualities of the parent’s care andgeneral nurturance. However after much research of his own he was prepared toconcede that unborn children are capable of learning in the broadest sense.Dr René Van De Carr of Hayward, California did research experiments in maternalcommunication to the fetus by touch and talking and achieved comparable results tothose of Logan and Lazarev.Dr Marian Diamond of the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that 50% of thebrain’s nerves cells in the fetus die off before birth. She indicated that 50,000 cells persecond are being evolved during fetal development. This obvious over-productionmeans that many do not make connections and are therefore lost.Logan believed that by stimulating the brain of the fetus some of this loss ispreventable
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the key to saving the cells is, he says, through hearing, the mostdeveloped sense in the unborn child. The heartbeat is the first imprint on the hearingof the developing fetus and is equivalent, in the area of the womb, to 95 decibels. Thisprimal imprint is varied in its rhythm by synthesis and is used by Logan to ‘exercise’ thebrain. He reckoned that most of what the fetus heard in the normal course of events is“nonsense”, unless it relates to the primal imprint of the mother’s heartbeat.Hepper has shown that babies, immediately after birth, seem to prefer, or at least react,to the sound and smell stimuli that they have experienced during fetal life. He has
 
demonstrated this by showing particular responses in the new-born child to TV themetunes and to smells of the favourite food that the mother had consumed during herpregnancy. Rossi has indicated that infants can differentiate the smell of their ownmothers’ milk from that of other mothers.
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Hepper was not prepared to say how much human babies can learn from pre-natalstimulation, and points to other species that can learn in a similar manner but who‘switch-off’ to the stimulus after a very short time. He felt that this indicated that twominutes stimulation might be as valuable as an hour due to the habituation response.He had no hesitation in accepting that an enriched environment is of benefit to thefetus.Logan and Lazarev did some joint research on three groups of mothers: the first wereexposed to Logan’s system, the second to Lazarev’s system and the third, as a control,were exposed to unsystematic music. Both of the first two produced very interestingadvances in neuro-muscular developments. These included:
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relaxed body at birth
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hands open at birth
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eyes open at birth
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facial stares at birth
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first infant speech
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B+ 1.5, M 3, C 4
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first maternal voice response
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B+ 5, M 7, C 9
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first sound reaction
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B+ 11, M 35, C 27
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first playing
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B+ 17.5, M 22, C 20.5
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first gesture of fulfilment
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B+ 32.5, M 37, C later
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first verbal request fulfilment
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B+ 38.5, M 39, C later
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first points to body parts on request
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B+ 43.5, M 52, C later.Babies who had been stimulated pre-natally could lift up their heads two weeks earlierthan other children, they could sit up and stand up sooner, and walk ahead of time. Atsix months they could fixate on something, e.g. tunes on TV, and their concentrationdeveloped earlier. The M children (Lazarev’s programme) showed advantages in other areas such asemotional development and the ability to communicate and relate to other children. Itmight therefore be of benefit to use the two systems together; B+ (Logan) producingphysiological improvements and M (Lazarev) producing psychological advancement. There is of course an important corollary to this type of programme. If we produce alarge number of gifted children will their needs be fulfilled by the society which breedsthem? If not they will be exposed to a wretched existence (Lazarev). There are graveresponsibilities placed upon those who pursue this work.Logan intensified his research mainly in order to gain a new and higher standard of performance for those who would probably be achievers without the new stimulation.Consideration should be given to the economic value of this research from its use withthose who otherwise might be under-achievers. As it happens Logan’s apparatus for hisprogramme is not expensive and therefore it is not difficult for almost any family topursue his programme. It was taken up by those of very modest means who were onthe outskirts of American civilization, e.g. in the reservations. It proved here that it candemonstrate the value in terms of fetal mental development that it has shownelsewhere. In these circumstances it is even more important that children who areimproved pre-natally do not have to languish in what would be a less than challenging
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B+ = Logan’s subjectsM = Lazarev’s subjectsC = Control subjectsNumber = age in months atfirst occurrence
 
environment. Early learning activity has been shown to enhance the development of children, particularly the bright ones.
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However the work done with those of lowerintellect is also of substantial value. This is not only because the child is helpedintellectually, but by dint of the time spent working with the child by the parents, itincreases their interaction and promotes other benefits of a psycho-social nature.
Is There a Need for Change?
What has happened to the way in which children’s lives develop that has brought aboutinvestigations into ways in which they might be improved? Mowrer and Kluckhohnwriting in the 1940s had this to say:
In most mammals the behaviour of the mother toward newly born offspring isinstinctively tender, protective, and indulgent, which does much to cushion the shock of beginning a biologically independent existence. But since the instinctive control of maternal behaviour has largely disappeared in human beings, the treatment of theneonate falls almost wholly under cultural domination. While this fact makes fortremendously greater flexibility in determining the kinds of persons into which humaninfants may be made, it carries an attendant danger. If instincts have the disadvantageof being inflexible, they also have, given a stable and appropriate environment, a wisdomborn of countless generations of evolutionary selection. It is consequentlyunderstandable how difficult it is to insure that all human parents shall have acquired, onthe basis of 
individual
experience, comparable competence in playing the parental rôle.In those few remaining “primitive” societies in which the cultural patterns have beenslowly perfected, over hundreds of years and have not been disrupted by contact withWestern civilization, the problem of how parents should behave in their relationship withchildren hardly exists. Individual fathers and mothers may vary slightly from communitystandards, but there is little question about what is “ right.” In contrast, our own societypresents a welter of inconsistencies.
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 This would indicate that parents in Western civilisations are failing to follow theinstinctive engagements with their children in the way that earlier parents did. Theyare, or seem to be, putting
their 
needs before those of their children. This is bringingabout a lack of proper development, or at least a delayed development. As a result,researchers such as Logan and Lazarev have to find ways in which they can persuadeparents to give their children the sort of attention that they have been lacking. Thislack has been accumulating over several generations to the point where it has becomeestablished inter-generationally.
Conclusions
 
Some researchers have shown what might be an improvement in the potential of a childby means of dedicated early stimulation. At its applicable minimum this might be avery moderately priced and effective means of helping those whose environmentalcircumstances might otherwise provide them and their children with little hope for thefuture. It is a study that must be taken seriously, as any upgrading of abilities in partsof our society can only enhance all of it.One of the difficulties of such courses is the continuing need to educate further thosewho might benefit from them, and thereby inculcate a positive belief in the outcome.Many parents, and not only those in the third world, find that life poses so manyproblems that they are content to see each day out without any more added. What isrequired is a positive approach to this promising avenue of improvement by othermembers of society who are not so disadvantaged.
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