Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!genrad!decvax!harpo!floyd!cmcl2!philabs!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn From: donn@sdchema.UUCP Newsgroups: net.misc Subject: Re: Re: Rock Music Considered Harmful to Unborn Children Message-ID: <601@sdchema.UUCP> Date: Wed, 15-Jun-83 19:00:07 EDT Article-I.D.: sdchema.601 Posted: Wed Jun 15 19:00:07 1983 Date-Received: Fri, 17-Jun-83 13:07:14 EDT Lines: 71 References: sdchema.591 micomz.166 cvl.377 ihuxi.438 Umm... Perhaps my rather sarcastic presentation led some innocent people to miss the fact that the article I quoted is just full of utterly preposterous statements. + "Rock'n'roll is particularly upsetting to the unborn child..." Why rock'n'roll? No evidence is presented that rock and roll per se can be told from any other kind of music, much less that children in the womb can understand the aggressive lyrics. (In fact music with a loud, regular beat might actually make such a child happy, for all we know. I have a friend who says that when she was pregnant she used to play Led Zeppelin all the time, loud, and she could feel her child bouncing away in time with the music, and then after the child was born he always cheered up when he heard LZ. Is this "evidence" any better or worse than the evidence in the article?) + "[O]ne mother ... suffered a broken rib at a rock concert because of her unborn child's strenuous kicks..." It is implied here that the child kicked a rib and broke it. How the child's foot could reach high enough to get to a rib, much less get enough momentum to break it, is unfathomable. If you read between the lines it seems much more likely that the mother fell down or something. Also, since when did babies kick only at rock concerts? + "[H]er baby perked up when [MASH] came on after he was born..." Does anyone seriously believe that a baby in the womb can hear the difference between the theme to MASH and any other bit of music? Consider the problem that the baby has all the noises of the mother's body to ignore, plus the problem that most of the high frequency information (such as the melody) won't make it into the womb... plus the fact that the baby's cognitive capability is as yet of a very low order. I certainly wouldn't place any credence in prenatal musical tastes based on this sort of information. + "[H]e actually relates a conversation his mother had when she was seven months pregnant saying she wanted an abortion." Just amazingly silly. This same child probably didn't understand the simple instruction "don't potty in your pants" until two years old, yet he understood what abortions were before he was born. (And don't tell me that the child remembered the sounds without understanding them -- adults have a terrible memory for sentences they don't understand, and fetuses... ? Argh.) + "[S]he had a daughter who was born angry. It turned out that during her pregnancy she had prayed twice a day for a son." How did the daughter figure out that "son" meant a boy and that she wasn't one? You can't even argue here that the problem was some "anger" hormone the mother secreted, because even the mother did not know the child was a female. This is pseudoscience, plain and simple. All the evidence is anecdotal; it isn't even in the form of case histories. Where are the experiments? Where are the controls? Where is the statistical analysis? Absolutely nothing that Verny or the author of the article says would lead me to believe that prenatal infants understand language or music, especially when there is no evidence that babies acquire even one-word sentences before several months of age. The possibility that some of these effects are due to experiences AFTER birth never seems to occur to ANY of the participants, which is particularly galling. I'm sorry -- I thought the LA Times article was so badly done that it was actually funny. Donn Seeley UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn UCSD Linguistics Dept. sdamos!donn@nprdc