Raj has published in many academic journals, writes for the national press and has appeared widely on television. He is married to an eye surgeon and lives in Central London.

We think of babies as very passive creatures, acted on by us - we play with them, we feed them. But psychologists have discovered that they're actually very actively involved in learning from the moment they're born, if not before.

It's been found that if parents regularly read a simple story to their baby in the womb, the baby recognises the story after birth and will settle more quickly when the story is read to it. Evidence suggests that, from as early as 30 weeks inside the womb, babies' brains are developed sufficiently for quite sophisticated learning and that there may be an evolutionary benefits for a baby recognising its mother's voice before it is born.

Before the 1960s psychologists believed that babies possessed only one or two basic drives, for example, the drive to eat and the drive to sleep. But, in an important series of experiments, a new drive was discovered - the drive to learn.

The psychologist Papousek found that he could teach babies to learn a complex, but quite specific, series of head movements required to turn on a array of lights if he rewarded them afterwards with milk. But then he discovered they were happy to learn without the reward. The babies seemed to enjoy learning with no other reward necessary than the successful completion of the task.

Now that we know children have a basic motivation to learn, this has important implications - perhaps we've been too tempted to excessively reward children for learning. From another branch of psychology called cognitive dissonance theory, it has been found that if we reward people too much for something they enjoy doing, they begin to take pleasure from the reward, rather from the original activity. This suggests that rewarding children for learning could take away from their basic pleasure of the act itself.

Parents and carers could learn an important lesson from this information. It seems to suggest that parents don't need to reward their children for learning tasks, but do need to give feed back about how close the child is to successfully achieving the task.