Consciousness in children can be “touched” as they grow up. Still, it remains a great mystery.
Have you ever wondered How do we know if a newborn baby is conscious? There is no doubt that the baby is awake. His eyes are wide open, he’s writhing and grimacing and, most importantly, he’s crying. However, this is not the same thing as being conscious, feeling pain, seeing red or smelling mother’s milk.
Although an infant lacks self-awareness, the infant processes complex visual stimuli and engages with sounds and images in its world, preferentially looking at faces. The child sees only patchesbut the basic thalamo-cortical circuitry needed to support simple visual and other conscious perceptions is present.
Also language skills in children they are shaped by the environment in which they grow up. Exposure to the sounds of mother’s speech in the muffled confines of the uterus allows the fetus to pick up sounds and voices so that the newborn can distinguish his mother’s voice and even her tongue from others. A more complex behavior is limitation: if the dad sticks out his tongue and waves it, the child mimics his gesture by combining visual information with feedback from his own movements. It is therefore likely that the child has a basic level of non-reflective, present-oriented consciousness.
When born in infants and children
Consciousness requires a sophisticated network of highly interconnected components thanks to nerve cells. The physical substrate of him, the thalamic-cortical complex which supplies consciousness with its highly elaborated content, begins to be present between the 24th and 28th week of gestation, although one line of research suggests that fetuses of 35 weeks have a certain level of consciousness.
Approximately two months after EEG rhythm synchrony, many of the elements of the process necessary for consciousness are ready. At this point, preterm infants they can survive outside the uterus with proper medical care. And because it’s much easier to observe and interact with a prematurely born baby than with a fetus of the same gestational age in the womb, the fetus is often thought of as a preterm baby, like an unborn infant. Throughout, suspended in a warm, dark cave, connected to the placenta that pumps blood, nutrients, and hormones through its growing body and brain, the fetus sleeps.
Invasive experiments on rats and baby lambs show that the third trimester fetus is almost always in one of two sleep states. Called active sleep and peaceful sleep, these states can be distinguished using electroencephalography. Breathing, swallowing, licking and moving the eyes but no body movement in the active sleep; no breathing, no eye movement, and tonic muscle activity in the peaceful sleep. At the end of gestation, the fetus is in one of these two sleep states 95% of the time, separated by short transitions. From all this evidence, the neonatologists concluded that the fetus sleeps while its brain matures.