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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