The Prenatal Institute
Brent Logan is renowned for his pioneering research in the field of prenatal stimulation. He is the director of the Prenatal Institute in Washington, USA, and has devoted much of his life to the study of fetal enrichment.
In 1995 he invented the BabyPlus system, based on more than 20 years of research into prenatal stimulation. In his book, Learning Before Birth, Logan explains the science behind BabyPlus.
The idea for BabyPlus sprang from the 1960s work of Lee Salk, an American psychologist who noticed that both right-handed and left-handed mothers instinctively held their babies on their left side, where the heartbeat is strongest. Further studies would go on to link prenatal stimulation with improved learning skills in babies after birth.
The BabyPlus curriculum consists of 16 lessons, each of which is played twice per day for several days. The lessons consist of a heartbeat sound at a constant rhythm, which plays for one hour and stops automatically. The rhythm is faster with each successive lesson.
What will this auditory exercise teach your little one? Arguably, one of life's very first lessons - discrimination. The sound of the heartbeat, the baby's constant companion, is joined by another, similar sound coming from the outside world. This sound becomes familiar - but then changes.
The baby learns to differentiate between the two sounds, and also notices that the new rhythm is increasing incrementally. To date, over 100,000 babies have been born worldwide after receiving Brent Logan's "cardiac curriculum." Some parents have credited the system with improving their babies' alertness and calmness after birth.