Fast-Track Toddlers

Considering that there's essentially no science to support it, the Mozart effect has had a pretty good run. Parents all over the U.S. have been playing the Austrian composer's music to their infants and toddlers on the theory that it stimulates brain development. Even a few state governments have got into the act: Georgia and Tennessee are giving classical-music CDs to new mothers, and Florida has mandated that state-run day-care facilities play such music each day.

In fact, though, the original research behind this attractive notion said nothing about infants or even about intelligence, and it certainly made no claims about brain development. All it showed was that a group of college students did better on a battery of specialized tests shortly after listening to Mozart--and to make matters worse, no scientist has been able to duplicate those results, despite numerous attempts.

As a book to be published next month makes clear, neurologists know very little about how the brain develops in the first few years of life. In The Myth of the First Three Years, John Bruer, president of the McDonnell Foundation, based in St. Louis, Mo., argues that much of the advice parents are getting about how to make their very young kids smarter and more talented is based on gross exaggerations of brain science. So, he says, is the notion, suggested by some advocacy groups, that brain development all but shuts down after age three. Too much focus on this so-called critical period, he claims, in the form of programs like Head Start, may thus be misguided.

Surprisingly, most of his targets agree with Bruer--to a point. "It's quite true," says Dr. Charles Nelson, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, "that there aren't any studies looking at brain development in young children." And Matthew Melmed, executive director of Zero to Three, an educational organization whose advice-laden website is a target of Bruer's ire, acknowledges that "there have been some who have stretched the science."

But the experts point out that Bruer too has stretched his arguments far beyond what makes sense. "We may not have neuroscience research to back up a lot of what we believe about child development," says Dr. Patricia Kuhl, an expert on speech and hearing at the University of Washington. "But we do have a wealth of data over the past 40 years from developmental and cognitive psychology that tell us those early years are hugely important."

In most cases, the data address what happens when children are deprived of stimulation, not what happens when they get extra helpings. If kids aren't routinely exposed to language during the first year of life, for example--sign language, if they're deaf--they gradually lose the capacity to learn it at all. Similarly, kids who have uncorrected eye disorders early on will lose the capacity to coordinate the vision in both eyes. "We can't prove conclusively that these deficits involve the wiring of the brain," admits Kuhl. "But we're pretty sure it isn't happening in the big toe."

When it comes to emotional development, moreover, it's been demonstrated again and again that children whose parents rarely talk to them or pick them up or show them affection tend to be emotionally damaged for life. Do scientists understand the physical basis for such effects? No. Does that mean they aren't real? No.