Does music affect fetal development?
No one knows for sure. There are studies indicating that fetuses can hear and react to sound by moving. But no one really knows what those movements mean, since experts can’t observe an unborn baby as easily as they could one who is out of the womb, explains Gordon Shaw, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Irvine. The baby’s reaction may be discomfort, he argues. “There are no studies on the effects of stimulation before birth on intelligence, creativity, or later development,” says Janet DiPietro, a developmental psychologist who studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Can playing music for my baby while she’s in the womb make her smarter? No research supports this conclusion. You may have heard that exposure to music makes kids of all ages smarter in math, but Gordon Shaw, who pioneered this type of research, says these studies focused on older children, not fetuses. For example, piano lessons may enhance children’s spatial reasoning skills (the ab
