I need access to a baby. I’ll need this child from the moment of birth up until about 5 or 6 years old or whenever they enter kindergarten(I know nothing about 'em). My experiment is this…I would like to see what effect listening to audiobooks nightly while in bed would have on the little one’s level of intelligence at that age. I once read that a child’s mind is like a sponge during those years, so, I wanna see for myself. I can load 'em up on all kinds of good stuff, from a foreign language or two, fairytales, simple children’s novels, dictionaries, travelogues etc, etc. The possibilities are endless and I’d be willing to take suggestions!
I’m really curious if this would work, so, can someone give me a kid for a few years? I promise I’ll give it back and probably in better condition than before!!
Sounds like a pretty good experiment. The results would probably be good but there has been much Baby Einstein controversy too…
I would…have to wonder.
Lots of things happen when you sleep, many of them important to what is called ‘sanity’ <or so I hear>. I would be equally curious as to what would happen if you let a person technically sleep, and dream, but kept bombarding them with outside stimuli that might affect just how those processes go on. Especially at that age. Might be a very good reason kids sleep a lot; it may take that long to process what they learn during the day; adding more to the mess might not be quite as useful as one might think.
Ok, where’s Stephen King; I have his next short story laid out, I think. =p
I had to wiki Baby Einstein to see what it was. I was very surprised to read the controversy section!
I wonder if my experiment would differ in that the child is not awake and staring at images with the potential to turn it into a halfwit. Mine takes place during sleep. Would the subconscious absorb anything?
I was going to write more but Highlander just came on t.v…
Forget it, then. Sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. Anyone planning on sending me a baby can cancel it.
Oh heck no, you should do it!
'cause now I’m curious as to what might happen that you weren’t expecting! >:)
It’s an interesting idea and has been studied before but I don’t think anyone has done any longterm studies or anything with infants. Wiki article. The technical name is sleep learning, or hypnopædia.
Sounds like a horrible experiment to me. There’s no control, and doesn’t appear to be any way to measure the results in any meaningful way.
Ok, take a statistically significant number of babies and raise them in an orphanage with sleep learning techniques. Take an equal amount of babies and raise them in an orphanage without. Compare the two groups and see if there’s a difference and identify any other possible variables that could affect their intelligences or aptitudes or whatever metric you use. Would that all problems be so easy to fix.
Audiobooks? That seems kind of passive. Why not teach him Klingon as a first language, you pansy? And in his bottle put prune juice–a warrior’s drink!
Yea, I was kidding if you take it literally.
This reminds me of an experiment I’ve been wanting to do on myself.
Whenever I go to sleep with the TV on; whatever is being played on the TV gets incorporated into my dreams.
I’ve always wondered if instead of leaving the TV on, if I put “Learn to speak Spanish” tapes on in a continuous loop; would any of it stick?
Wasn’t their a Flintstones episode that covered all this?
Your idea has merit, but when you add in Public School Education and Peer Pressure, everything will be flushed down the toilet when they discover video games and pokemon.
When I read the Thread Title, I immediately thought of this–
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20090706
I am a sick, sick man…
Not sure about Flintstones, but I vaguely remember a Dexter’s Lab where he tried something like this with French. The tape ended up stuck on a loop and in the morning the only words he could speak were “omelette du fromage!”
Homer Simpson tried it, but accidentally got the vocabulary builder instead of the weight-loss tape (“Subliminally Slim”):
“Disingenuous mountebanks with their subliminal chicanery! A pox on them!”