The busiest time in anyone's life happens before birth! Not only will your baby grow from the size of a blueberry to being a fully functioning human being, but every tissue and organ of her body will grow out of what was once just a single cell.

But there is far more to your baby's time in the womb than simply growing physically. All of your baby's senses are developing during his time in the womb. While sound will be his primary source of stimulation, touch, vision, taste and even smell will also help his brain to grow, as he begins learning about his parents and the outside world that will soon be his new home.

Until the advent of four-dimensional ultrasound technology – enabling us to observe babies moving in the womb in real time – our ideas about a baby's perceptions and experiences in the womb were extremely limited. Recent scientific research has revealed some startling facts about fetal development.

The issue of when to teach children to read is a hotly debated one. Increasing numbers of parents are teaching reading early, and increasing numbers of children are learning to read as preschoolers. Yet, there is no shortage of parents, educators and developmentalists opposed to this phenomenon. Some believe that early reading harms children, while others think children are cognitively not ready to learn to read until they start school. A commonly heard criticism is that it is wrong to “push” children to read before the age of five or six. Some would even like to see the general reading age pushed back to seven.It is our belief that teaching children to read at a young enough age frees them from the potential burden of learning to read in school. We believe that it is learning to read too late that actually causes the process to become burdensome.

Introduction
Most people have a dominant hand, a dominant foot and a dominant eye. And so it goes for the brain, and for most of us, the left hemisphere is dominant.

The school system generally rewards left-brained individuals, who think in a logical, linear fashion, and learn best through hearing. Right-brained people think in a non-linear, intuitive fashion, and learn best through seeing and feeling. At school, right-brained children will often be marked down for not showing the working used to reach their answers. What their teachers fail to realize is these children don't have the usual working to show, having reached the correct destination by an unorthodox route.

According to right-brain educators such as Glenn Doman and Makoto Shichida, accessing the right brain not only enables a child to learn more efficiently, it can even unlock genius-level abilities. It is not that right-brain teaching will give you a genius baby, but rather that there is a genius already inside every baby – if only we can access the abilities of the right brain.

What kind of genius babies are we talking about? Children with talents like speed reading and photographic memory – and the seemingly limitless powers of recall associated with them. Kids with the ability to produce an accurate drawing of something only once glanced at, or tell instantly that the number of items being shown to them is 97 – and not 98 or 96. Prodigious musical talents and the ability of perfect pitch also rely on the use of the right brain.

Seeing like Einstein

If any of the above rings a bell, it is probably because you are familiar with the phenomenon of savants – autistic or otherwise mentally deficient individuals with genius-level skills in specific areas.

According to studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, both geniuses and savants show greater-than-average activation in the right hemisphere of the brain. The left brain is responsible for verbal processing, which explains why savants (who commonly have damage to the left brain) typically experience difficulties with language.

The right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for visual and spatial processing, and the ability to "see" problems in multiple dimensions is one of the most prodigious talents of the greatest physicists. Interestingly, Einstein not only possessed this ability, he also suffered from language delays in childhood, inviting suggestions that he was a savant. So why can’t we all use our right brain the way Einstein did? Our left brain is dominant for a reason: by suppressing the activities of the right, it filters out a surfeit of data constantly bombarding our senses. This enables us to make sense of reality and avoid sensory overload. Without the left-brain filter, autism sufferers typically are hypersensitive to sensory stimuli and find ordinary social interactions overwhelming. The rest of us take for granted, for example, the ability to hold a conversation without being distracted by background noises. But because our perception of reality is controlled by the left brain, this means a great deal of the sensory input we receive is entering beneath the conscious radar, making it difficult to access that information at will.

The idea of right-brain teaching is to change both the way we learn and the way we recall data. The normal way to memorize information is to store it in our short-term memory (in the left brain) and use repetition to transfer it to our long-term memory (in the right brain). By bypassing the left brain and accessing our long-term memory directly, we learn faster. We can also learn to recall information normally not accessible because it has been received on a subconscious level – say, through speed reading. The only way to achieve this is by freeing the right hemisphere of the brain from its suppression by the left. In doing so, the right brain becomes activated – much as it is in a genius, savant, or young child!