Are Babies Conscious?
New York Times · LC · trust 52/100
Imagine that a scientist sits you in a device that can detect changes in the activity of your brain, and then plays a cycle of sounds. Over and over you hear three low tones, followed by a high one. Then your hear something different: four low tones in a row.
The scientist doesn’t have to ask you if you were aware of the change. That’s because our brains typically respond to an oddball sound with a brief, distinctive blip.
That blip turns out to be a surprisingly reliable marker of consciousness — that complex, mysterious state of being aware of one’s own thoughts and one’s existence in the world, which may also be present to some degree in other animals. People in a coma don’t produce this blip when they hear oddball sounds. Nor do people who are asleep .
Now imagine that the parents of a newborn bring their baby into the same lab for the same test. The tones play. Will there be a blip? Is that squirming, gurgling infant conscious? As humans, they are potentially conscious; we know that much. But in the moment, with their semi-developed brains and cognitive limitations — they can’t yet speak, focus their eyes, respond to instructions — they don’t seem to be conscious, at least not in the way adults are. Indeed, there’s an active scientific debate over whether newborns possess consciousness. Resolving it could help solve one of science’s most stubborn mysteries: what consciousness is, how it emerges and how we can know if another being possesses it.
Ask any researcher who studies consciousness, and they probably have a rough but useful definition. “Consciousness is a process of being receptive to the outside world and mixing that with our own internal world, to create the feeling of who we are and where we are,” said Dr. Topun Austin, a neonatologist at the University of Cambridge.
One thing seems clear: There was a time in our lives before which our brains were too rudimentary to support consciousness. Credit... Jane Stockdale for The New York Times We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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