I’m fascinated by the unknowns of infant consciousness at the moment. A little obsessed with it to be honest.
I’m fascinated generally, since the appearance of consciousness in very young children is, surprisingly, a mystery to even the most qualified experts, but also personally, as I’m aware of the great void at the beginning of my memories of me.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time daydreaming about what the experience of being an infant might feel like, as well as more focused meditations on my own earliest memories. My memory is famously crappy and full of holes, with great chunks of my teens and twenties that are lost to me, but I can get back to around aged six with one specific memory, and I also have a very strong image (confirmed by my mother), that actually dates to aged one or two.
Maybe you have more tangible memories from the young you, when you were four, maybe even three, but I think most people struggle to recall much from this age or before.
I’m beyond curious by this mystery child that is no longer available to me. I look in the mirror and I know they’re looking back at me, but I don’t know them. We share nothing. Who is this me? What were my thoughts and feelings before they were moulded and trimmed by the world around me. How much is still present in how I look, think and feel? How much is sleeping in my history?
The fact that this forgetting seems to be a universal aspect of being human is also too tantalising to gloss over. Why does our nature do this? Most of our mind and body functions have evolved or faded away for a reason; to make being human a little easier, to help us survive as individuals and as a species, to simplify the abundance of environmental information into a manageable ‘need to know’ summary. There isn’t much of us that’s by accident, so why do our minds scrub out, or so fiercely defend our emerging self? Is there something we mustn’t know? Is it impossible to operate as an independent, self sufficient being with the pure consciousness of an infant? Or is it, as some would say, because there is no consciousness there yet?
I was watching a baby engaging with their parent on a train a few days ago. The baby must’ve been around six months old, and their parent was doing all the usual peek-a-boo games, showing them things out of the window, smiling and cuddling with them. I must’ve watched for ten of fifteen minutes, and there was no doubt in my mind that this child was totally aware of what was going on around them. The language they were sharing, the games they were playing, the love and the care of their parent, the other passengers on the train.
There’s a really interesting paper on when consciousness develops in young children, ‘Consciousness in the cradle: on the emergence of infant experience’ *. Although it’s a little dry, it’s a thought provoking read. It maps out the theories from in-utero consciousness to late arriving consciousness at two and even three years of age; the spectrum of definitions of consciousness from crude to complex; and the physical developments and observable behaviours that point to its existence, or absence. It’s most interesting though, because it highlights that at this moment in time nobody really knows. Nobody really knows what consciousness is, and therefore nobody can really say when it arrives.
There’s growing evidence that nudges the likely emergence of consciousness, or at least awareness of oneself (a good enough definition for some), closer to the moment of birth, but it’s still far from conclusive and hotly debated.
One thing I notice though, is how the conversation is wholly fixed on the emergence of consciousness, not the ability to use it, or perhaps more radically to connect with it. What I mean by this, is that we should consider that consciousness doesn’t emerge in or from us as infants, rather, it exists independently from us and we develop the mental or physical tools to connect to it.
Since there’s no clear evidence as to what consciousness even is, and no consensus as to when we make, get or receive it, I think we should be open to this and all other possibilities. In fact, it seems a little boring not to be. I understand the consensus that scientific theories should be defensible, measurable, reproducible and free from flights of fancy, but it’s very possible that this convention stops us from exploring scenarios outside of our existing frameworks. If we insist that all exploration into the mystery of consciousness fits into our dominant language and cognitive models, it’s surely inevitable that we’ll miss more than we discover?
* Consciousness in the cradle: on the emergence of infant experience, Bayne, Frohlich, Cusack, Moser & Naci, 2023
Image by Tú Nguyễn