Now, a new study from the Institute for Psychology and the University of Amsterdam infers that a developing baby's brain is responsive to beats, a simple rhythm that is developmentally appropriate to the developing fetus. This is a more targeted approach to prenatal communication, rather than parents merely talking to the fetus as if it were a peer or playing advanced forms of music, such as classical.

Dr. Brent Logan, a developmental psychologist, director of the Prenatal Institute in Seattle and author of Learning Before Birth: Every Child Deserves Giftedness (AuthorHouse, 2003), likens it to the type of gradual teaching that is our general standard of learning. "A human can't absorb any concept that is too advanced regardless of his stage of development," says Dr. Logan. "My presumption is that there is an intuitive recognition of this and it's why, for instance, early nursery melodies are very simplistic and only vary by about three notes and why people speak in baby talk. We do not learn from the complex to the simple, but from the simple to the complex. Anything else just becomes white noise, like putting a dog in front of a TV."

Dr. Logan was one of the first prenatal researchers to propose a simple, yet targeted, prenatal-stimulation technique based upon the one consistent sound that fetuses hear regularly – their mother's heartbeat. The research out of Amsterdam seems to bolster his theories that these sounds offered prenatally have far-reaching benefits for the child.

Lisa Jarrett is one of his first converts. Jarrett first heard of Dr. Logan's theories in the early 1990s when her husband, who was a psychology major at Princeton, read some of Dr. Logan's research. Jarrett, too, was intrigued by the possibilities.

"This made sense to me when I understood why it made a bigger impact than music – not that music is bad, but it's too early for music; that's not what's relative to a child's environment," says Jarrett. "These sounds are developmentally appropriate – the only thing the baby hears regularly in the womb in the mother's heartbeat so it's not an advanced concept."

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