had been discovering since Piaget was that babies and toddlers are, in a sense, another species: fascinating and categorically different from adults. Instead of focusing on adults as the product of childhood development, the research suggested that offering babies and toddlers the most supportive care possible is the right thing to do because they are society’s most vulnerable people (and, arguably, its most delightful). “Children aren’t just valuable because they will turn into grownups but because they are thinking, feeling people themselves,” wrote Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl in The Scientist in the Crib. “Child abuse isn’t evil because it may produce neurotic adults but because it abuses children.”
Yet as Reiner clearly recognized, in the past American legislators and the public have been unconvinced by such idealistic sentiments. What did it matter what happened to children under three if they would never remember any of it as adults? What was the return on the investment? If neuroscience could prove that early childhood experiences had a measurable effect on the final product — the adult — then perhaps the public and Congress would understand that nurturing babies is good because it creates confident adults who can contribute productively to the workforce. Offering the very young high-quality, standards-based, government-supported daycare would be in society’s best interests in the long run. Conversely, neglecting or abusing young children would create angry, violent adults who deplete the tax base and threaten the quality of life. When Reiner made a call to the Clinton White House in the mid-1990s, he found a more than willing collaborator in Hillary Rodham Clinton.
THE BRAIN CONFERENCE
Reiner’s collaboration with the Clintons culminated in the White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, which convened in April 1997, to unprecedented press coverage and celebrity fanfare. In the months leading up to the event, Time ran a cover story entitled “How a Child’s Brain Develops and What It Means for Childcare and Welfare Reform.” Newsweek devoted an entire issue to “Your Child: From Birth to Three,” with Reiner and White House staff members as editorial consultants and Johnson & Johnson as the exclusive corporate advertiser. The special edition sold about a million copies worldwide, setting a record for the magazine; indeed, the issue was so popular that it went through several printings. ABC aired the prime-time special I Am Your Child, directed by Reiner and starring Roseanne Barr, Mel Brooks, Billy Crystal, Tom Hanks, Charlton Heston, Rosie O’Donnell, and Robin Williams.
White House planners divided the conference into two parts, the first of which was devoted to “the new brain research.” Only one neuroscientist spoke. Dr. Carla Shatz, a neurobiologist at Berkeley, summarized the existing research on infant brains, which was not new. She offered a Brain Wiring 101 talk, which covered much of the same ground as the Carnegie report by explaining that it was the brain’s job to build and then prune synaptic connections during the first three years and that loving caregivers along with life itself seemed to do an excellent job of facilitating this process.
The only other scientist who spoke at the conference was the clinical psychologist Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, the leading specialist on how infants acquire language. Kuhl described babies as eager communicators who required no special “input” to learn language, other than the typical mutually enjoyable interchanges of baby and caregiver. Her research had shown, Kuhl said, that while infants are born with the remarkable capacity to discriminate all the sound contrasts used in any language of the world, they begin to tune in particularly to the phonemes of their native language or the languages spoken regularly at home or in daycare. When President Clinton urged her to designate “some minimum threshold vocal interplay” or provide some evidence that leaving the TV on didn’t provide adequate verbal stimulation, Kuhl said that wasn’t possible. Kuhl was pretty confident that a recorded voice would not enhance language development because babies are so sociable and because that’s part of what helps them learn about language — to say nothing of love. Indeed, Kuhl’s 2003 experiment proved that nine-month-old American infants who were spoken to in Mandarin Chinese by a native speaker for less than five hours in a laboratory setting were able to distinguish phonetic elements of that language. In a companion study, Kuhl showed that another group of American infants exposed to the same Mandarin material via DVD or audiotape showed no ability to distinguish phonetic units of that language.
Within weeks of Kuhl’s comment at the 1997 conference, Aigner-Clark had launched Baby Einstein, complete with a soundtrack featuring disembodied voices speaking words in foreign languages. She told the press she had been inspired by Kuhl’s research.
THE MOZART EFFECT
A few weeks later, a former choral instructor named Don Campbell popularized the Mozart Effect in a book of that title, which claimed that listening to classical music is a panacea. The Mozart Effect was based on a research paper published in 1993 by the British journal Nature, in which two professors at the University of California at Irvine reported that after listening to eight minutes and twenty-four seconds of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, thirty-six college students scored eight to nine points higher on a set of spatial reasoning problems in the Stanford-Binet intelligence tests than students who had not listened to the sonata. The boost, which the researchers called the “Mozart Effect,” lasted ten minutes. The same researchers published a follow-up study a year later reporting that the effect could be produced only by listening to Mozart, not other music (namely, works by Philip Glass or British technopop). To determine if music in general could offer more lasting results for spatial learning in young children, the UC Irvine researchers also studied a group of three-year-olds in a Los Angeles public preschool program. Of the thirty-three children, twenty-two received eight months of fairly rigorous music training, including daily group singing instruction, weekly private lessons on electronic keyboards, and daily keyboard practice and play.
The researchers reported that when tested on a spatial reasoning task — putting puzzles together — “the children’s scores dramatically improved after they received music lessons.” The preschoolers who had not received the training showed no change in their spatial test scores. From this study, the researchers theorized that spatial reasoning, like musical performance, “requires forming an ideal mental representation of something which is eventually realized.” They said they had “shown that music education may be a valuable tool for the enhancement of preschool children’s intellectual development.”
The original Mozart Effect study seemed odd, and the results marginal and of dubious value. By 1999 follow-up experiments published in Nature and Psychological Science could not reproduce the findings, which the scientific community took to mean that the originally published Mozart Effect was an anomaly. No research had shown that the Mozart Effect applied to children, and the follow-up study suggested that music lessons, not just listening to music, was an engaging and complex activity that stimulated many cognitive functions. No research of any kind had been done on infants and toddlers.
But in the wake of the White House Conference and the national focus on zero- to three-year-olds, the promise of building better brains through classical music became a media virus. Don Campbell capitalized on the success of his book and the zero-to-three zeitgeist by starting a virtual publishing franchise, featuring CDs such as The Mozart Effect — Music for Children, which was a fixture on Billboard’s Top Classical Albums chart for over six months, followed by the chart-busters The Mozart Effect — Music for Babies and Love Chords — Music for the Pregnant Mother and Her Unborn Child, featuring baroque compositions and a twenty-four-page companion book. Copycats followed. Delos Records mined the effect with Baby Needs Mozart, featuring flutists Eugenia Zukerman and Jean-Pierre Rampal, pianist Carol Rosenberger, and clarinetist David Shifrin, and a follow-up, Baby Needs Baroque. Mozart and other classical composers inspired entire lines of baby toys.
Perhaps nowhere was the Mozart Effect more potent than in Georgia. In 1998 governor Zell Miller asked the state legislature to approve funding for classical music CDs to be distributed to all parents leaving the hospital
