Henry should be confused. What the hell is a toma? (Or since he is just a baby, simply, What is a toma?)

Measure how much time Henry spends staring not at the empty space, but at Claire. At Henry's age, it will be a lot. He understands ambiguity and social cues. He will follow her gaze, trying to figure out which object is a toma, and look back to Claire. She is his Google. You are his Google. Learn the look in his face; next time you see it, know that he needs more direction. Give it.

"I don’t have a formal background in science," Gallagher told me, "just a lifelong interest." He's a writer and former newspaper editor based in Wilmington, Delaware, where he lives with two sentient science projects of his own.

"When I was a kid I used to love those little Radio Shack 50-in-1 science project kits," Gallagher said. "You connect all the wires. I’ve always loved stuff like that, and now I get to do that, only on actual human subjects. That’s really how my longstanding interest led me to actually write the book."

All of the experiments in the book are based on academic research published in medical and psychology journals.

In another experiment, children began in one of two groups: One was called the quiet group and another was called the noise group. In the quiet group, the experimenter would repeat a nonsense word, over and over again. And then, after a period of time repeating this word, they would switch to a slightly different word.

"So it would be the difference between like 'bap' and 'dap,'" Gallagher explains. In the noise group, they would have nature sounds playing in the background while this was happening — the sort of "soothing" nature sounds you would get to help you fall asleep or something. Even in the case of these seemingly soothing sounds, it proved to be a distraction for the babies. And the babies in the noise group did not recognize the switch to the similar sounding word as well as the babies in the quiet group.

"So we can take away from this as parents," Gallagher said, "that babies really do need to have outside distractions reduced or eliminated in order to learn the best."

"Especially when it comes to language acquisition. So it’s kind of like an adult trying to pick up a new language, and if you have 20 conversations in the back it’s hard to concentrate on this new language you’re trying to acquire; same thing for babies. And parents can try to eliminate distractions, even seemingly soothing sounds can be distractions and we now know that can cause an issue."

I asked Gallagher if any of the 50 experiments particularly stand out in his memory as a favorite. He hesitated. "Well, here's one that's easy to re-create: Babies are shown different images of spiders, and one image all of the parts are in their proper order, in other images they’re scrambled up. It turns out that babies end up recognizing the basic structure of what a spider looks like, even in the first few months of life."

"The author of the study," he explained, "said we’re born with an innate knowledge of what a spider looks like, and it’s an evolutionary behavior that helps keep us out of danger."