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scientific fact was going to be discovered using a combination of mouth sucking and reading The Cat in the Hat, I would have suggested you change your brand of beer. But in the early 1980s, that’s exactly what happened. During the final six weeks of pregnancy, women in a study were asked to read the Dr. Seuss book out loud twice a day. That’s a lot: Total infant exposure
was about five hours. When the babies were born, they were given a pacifier hooked up to a machine that could measure the strength and frequency of their sucking. Rates of strength and frequency can be used to assess whether an infant recognizes something (a form of pattern-matching). The babies then heard tapes of their mothers reading The Cat in the Hat, a different story, or no story at all. Sucking rates and patterns were measured at all points. What the researchers found was astonishing. The babies who had heard Dr. Seuss while in the womb appeared to recognize, and prefer, a tape of their mother reading The Cat in the Hat. They sucked their pacifiers in a pattern triggered by her reading that book, but not a different book or no book at all. The babies recognized their previous in-womb auditory experience.
    We now know that auditory perception begins at a much earlier age than that of the babies tested in this amazing result. Tissues involved in hearing can be observed just four weeks after conception. Hearing begins with the emergence of two structures that look like miniature saguaro cacti sprouting from either side of your baby’s head. They are called primordial otocysts, and they will form a great deal of your child’s hearing apparatus. Once this territory is established, the next weeks are devoted to setting up house, from internal hairs that look like tiny whiskers to the canals they line, which look just like snail shells.
    When do these structures hook up to the rest of the brain, allowing babies to hear? The answer should be familiar by now: not until the beginning of the third trimester. At 6 months, you can supply a sound to a fetus in the womb (mostly clicks) and listen in astonishment as the brain weakly fires back electrical responses! In another month, this crackling call-and-response increases not only in intensity but in speed of reaction. Give it another month or more, and everything has changed. Now you have a pre-term infant who can not only hear and respond but can discriminate between various speech sounds like “ahhhh versus “eeee”, or “ba” versus “bi”. We once again
see this paratrooper pattern of establishing the territory first, then hooking things up to central command.
    Babies can hear mom’s voice in the womb by the end of the second trimester, and they prefer it to other voices at birth. They respond especially strongly after birth if mom’s voice is muffled, recreating the sonic environment of the womb. Babies even respond to television shows their mothers watched while still in the womb. One funny test exposed pre-term infants to the opening jingle of a particular soap opera. When these babies were born, they would stop crying the moment they heard that jingle (controls had no such distinguishing response). Newborns have a powerful memory for sounds they encountered while still in the womb in the last part of gestation. Re-exposing them to these comforting familiar sounds after birth is another way to smooth their transition into life on this cold, unfamiliar planet.
    After the sixth month, your baby can smell the perfume you wear, and she can detect the garlic on the pizza you just ate.
Smell: 5 weeks
    The same thing is true of smells. Just five weeks after fertilization, you can see the brain’s complex wiring for smell. But, as with the other senses, the perception is not available simply because the machinery is there. Between the second and sixth month of life in the womb, babies suffer from an acutely stuffy nose. The nasal cavities are filled with a giant plug of tissues, probably preventing