DeCasper and colleague Melanie Spence then showed (using the pacifier-sucking-pattern detection system) that newborns typically don’t distinguish between the sounds of their mother reading a passage from The Cat in the Hat and from the rhythmically similar The King, the Mice, and the Cheese.62 But newborns whose mothers had read The Cat in the Hat out loud for hours during the last trimester preferred Dr. Seuss. Wow.
