How do we become conscious beings? At what time and where does our consciousness appear? These perennial questions of philosophers and scientists have once again come to light in the light of recent research.
A team of neuroscientists and philosophers from Australia, Germany, the United States and Ireland have conducted a literature review that stimulates our thinking about early consciousness in newborns. The results of this research have been published in Trends in cognitive sciences.
For a long time, philosophers and scientists have been faced with the problem of determining the moment when consciousness began. When does a newborn baby become aware of the world around him?
Some suggest that this does not occur until many months after birth, while others argue that the first moments of consciousness may occur shortly after birth.
Tim Bain, a philosopher at Monash University in Australia, says: ‘Almost everyone who has held a newborn baby has wondered what it is like to be a baby. But of course we cannot remember our childhood, and consciousness researchers disagree about whether consciousness arises ‘early’ (at birth or shortly afterwards) or ‘late’ – at one age or even much later.’
A recent literature review has reinforced the idea that consciousness may begin much earlier than we thought. The study authors present four lines of evidence supporting that consciousness emerges closer to birth.
This evidence includes extensive brain connections, measures of attention, studies integrating information from multiple senses, and physical markers related to surprise and shifting attention.
“Our findings suggest that newborns can integrate sensory and developing cognitive responses into coherent conscious experiences to understand the actions of others and plan their own responses.” say Psychologist Lorina Naci from Trinity College London.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that consciousness is suddenly turned on at birth, but that we should expect a gradual awakening of experience that develops as synapses fuse, senses merge, and cognition builds models that can be challenged as new stimuli appear.
Questions about whether consciousness is piecemeal or complete, whether fetuses dream, or even how we can relate to a newborn’s own consciousness, are far from answered.
As brain scanning techniques improve and we can better map the complex tissues of neurological networks as they grow, we can come to understand consciousness as a continuum.
