"You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don't know much about it."
"Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult skill game ... before they became parents. They did nothing but play the game for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at the age of one year. Brought up institutionally. There was a control group—another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game."
"Go on."
"So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed tests on all two hundred."
"Learning the game, you mean?"
"Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. So far ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and the first year, the kids had picked up a predisposition to learn the patterns of the game easily."
"So?"
"So—during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the parental mind—probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't 'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious cultural mechanism of transmittal—and it's an analog of heredity. The kulturverlaengerung—and it can linger in a family line without becoming conscious for many generations."
"How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game...."
"If they hadn't, it'd still be passed on—as a predisposition-talent—to the third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a mirror-image of a mirror-image ... or a memory of a memory of a memory...."