Does Your Baby Experience Consciousness the Way You Do?

      The key concept of Daniel Bor’s The Ravenous Brain is how neuroscience understands consciousness and the role certain regions of the brain play in consciousness. One of the questions Bor focuses on is how we experience consciousness, by presenting research in vegetative state and brain damaged patients. Most of the research shows insight into how adults experience consciousness, but not so much into how infants experience consciousness. Babies respond to their mother’s voice and touch, but whether they are conscious of the stimuli such as their faces, and how they experience such stimuli is still a mystery. 

    In The Ravenous Brain, Bor very briefly presents his ideas on infant consciousness. He believes that infants do also experience consciousness, based on his observations of his daughter’s responses to certain stimuli. “What Do Babies Really Know?” by Kristof Koch in Scientific American sheds more light into this topic by comparing infant and toddler responses to the same stimuli which would indicate conscious perception in adults.

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      The results of the study suggest that 1-year olds have a similar response to that of adults, but with about 1/3 the speed of adults. Infants as young as 5 months have shown brain signatures, although they are much slower. These findings suggest that there is some consciousness experienced by infants; however, when this conscious perception starts and what it allows the infant to experience is still unknown. 

    Continuing this research in the developing infant brain with the advancement if neural technology can allow us to understand how infants process such information, and even how fetus may experience consciousness. These insights can have lasting implications on parenting and how a mother behaves during pregnancy.

References:

Koch, K. (2013). What do babies really know. Scientific American: Mind. 24(4).