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Forty years ago, Tony DeCasper developed a new psychology of childhood, which would transform scientific understanding of motives we share. By adapting an operant method to study the initiative of the infant seeking experience, he clarified how human actions are generated in measures of time in the mind. His method offered the newborn the opportunity to direct the sensations of their sucking movements to select experiences. He proved the fetus could learn the mother’s voice and appreciate the rhythms and melodies of her movements. With colleagues in the University of Carolina and in Paris he explored for the musical dynamics and emotions of narratives in shared life that animate learning of speech and language, and other cultural skills. With French colleagues, he recorded changes in heartbeat to detect the emotions of a fetus, and to show their enjoyment of songs and rhymes recited by the mother. Inspired by the courage and imagination of Tony’s life in science, we believe that the aesthetic and moral evaluations of human experience are an essential part of our autopoeitic nature, not only products of acquired reasoning and symbolic representation.