Читать книгу Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong – and the New Research That’s Rewriting The Story - Angela Saini, Angela Saini - Страница 11

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A Difference at Birth

Girls and boys, in short, would play harmlessly together, if the distinction of sex was not inculcated long before nature makes any difference.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

‘We live in jeans, don’t we? They go with everything!’ coos the mother. Her six-month-old daughter is wearing the tiniest pair of jeans I’ve ever seen, and she herself is dressed head to foot in denim.

We’re sitting together in the baby lab at Birkbeck College in central London. It reminds me of a nursery, but a somewhat unusual one. A purple elephant decorates the door to a waiting area full of toys. Downstairs, however, a baby might be hooked up to an electroencephalograph that monitors her brain’s electrical activity while she watches pictures on a screen. In another room, scientists could be watching a toddler play, examining which toys he happens to choose. Meanwhile, in this small laboratory that I’ve been invited into, a baby is being gently stroked along her back with a paintbrush. She’s the thirtieth infant to be studied so far in this experiment.

‘She really just likes sitting and watching, taking it all in. I’m happy sitting and observing, myself,’ her mother says, bouncing the little girl on her knee. Researchers suspect that human touch like this has an important impact on development in the early years. They just don’t know how or why. So the goal of today’s experiment is to measure how touch affects a baby’s cognitive development. It’s one of countless ways in which children are affected by their upbringing, slowly shaped into the people they will become.

Cute though babies are, studying them this way is not as much fun as it might seem. It’s almost like working with animals. The challenge is to come up with clever experiments that get to the heart of their behaviour without accidentally reading too much into what they do. A stare can be meaningful or mindless, while even the most charming smile may just be wind. In this particular case, the researchers are using a paintbrush in their touch experiment because that’s the only way to control for the fact that parents stroke their children in different ways. With a brush, they can be sure it’s the same every time.