Talking, Rocking, May Make Baby Smarter

(Associated Press, July 18, 2000) -- All the times mom changed your diapers and rocked you to sleep may have made you smarter.

Canadian researchers say their experiments on rats suggest mothers' nurturing stimulates neural connections in their babies' brains. The offspring went on to score higher in Intelligence and memory tests. The researchers say the results can be applied to humans.

But some scientists caution against comparing rat and human mothers too closely, or attributing Infants' intelligence to relatively small differences in parenting styles. The study appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience.