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Conscious Babies

Conscious Babies

Last updated on: October 22, 2026 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Conscious Babies 2026-10-17T16:51:38-04:00 Gene Veith

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Christians tend to associate consciousness with the soul. So they have no problem thinking that a baby is conscious. Nor do most parents, who clearly perceive a difference when their baby is awake or sleeping, as well as the fact that their baby clearly responds in highly personal ways to them, to other people, and to their environment.

To many scientists, though, who assume that consciousness must require a certain level of neurological development, whether or not a baby is conscious has been a great mystery. Now, research is providing some answers. And, lo and behold, the research is indicating that babies are, in fact, conscious. Indeed, that babies in the womb are conscious.

This creates a measure of cognitive dissonance within some scientists who hold to the materialism of their profession and the pro-abortion ideology of their social class.

Carl Zimmer has published an article in the New York Times entitled Are Babies Conscious? He says that Darwin maintained that babies had not yet developed to a high enough level to be conscious. Other scientists began to take that belief for granted. The consequences are shocking. Notes Zimmer,

During surgery on newborns, for example, it was common not to use anesthesia; the drugs might damage a young brain — if babies weren’t conscious, what was the value of making them unconscious? As recently as the 1980s, doctors routinely withheld anesthesia from newborns, seeing no benefits that might offset the risks.

In the 1980s, scientists finally discovered that babies can feel pain! (See that linked New York Times article from 1987, with the headline Infants’ Sense of Pain Is Recognized, Finally!)

Of course, pain is not consciousness, as such, so the notion that babies are conscious was still much-disputed. But Zimmer describes some of the experiments that proved that they are. Researchers will hook up a subject to a device that measures brain activity and play a cycle of sounds: three low notes and one high night, repeating this pattern over and over. When the researchers then change that pattern–in this case, to four low notes–the hearer’s brain registers a “blip.” The subject doesn’t need to tell the researcher that the sound changed or say anything at all about it. The brain just works this way. “That blip,” says Zimmer, “turns out to be a surprisingly reliable marker of consciousness,” since the brain of a subject who is “unconscious”–asleep or in a coma–won’t make a “blip.”

Well, they’ve found a way to do this experiment on newborns–who of course can’t talk yet and so can’t tell researchers what they are thinking–and, sure enough, babies “blip.”

Another experiment hooked up babies to a device that can scan their brains for spontaneous activity and map out the connections between the different parts of the brain. There are certain patterns evident in conscious adults but that disappear when they are asleep or in a coma. And, sure enough, these markers of consciousness also show up in babies.

In fact, babies’s brains are more active than adults! Quoting neuroscientist Lorina Naci, who is researching the consciousness of infants, Zimmer writes,

By counting all the ways that the regions of a baby’s brain interact with each other from second to second, Dr. Naci and her colleagues have found that the baby brain actually exhibits more complexity than a waking adult’s. . . .

Dr. Naci speculates that babies may be conscious at birth, but in a way that is perhaps more open to the world. “The idea is that they have this capacity to perceive more of the environment in much richer and more diverse ways,” she said. “They could have a very different experience than we have as grown adults.”

The consensus on this question has changed. “In a survey of experts by Dr. Passos-Ferreira,” says Zimmer, “most estimated that infants have some consciousness by the time they are born. “There are still some skeptics about infant consciousness who think that it emerges later,” Dr. Passos-Ferreira said. “It’s a minority, but they’re still there.”

But what about babies before they are born?

As more markers of consciousness turn up in newborns, scientists have begun wondering what’s happening in the fetal brain, before birth.

Dr. Naci and her colleagues have found that some babies born prematurely also display networks of active brain regions that hint at conscious experiences.

Scientists are working to measure the faint magnetic fields produced by fetal brains. But nearly all of them are convinced that unborn babies cannot be conscious until their brains have developed neural connections, which don’t exist before 26 weeks of gestation.

That view retains the old assumption that consciousness is merely a physical function of the neurons in the brain, which some researchers are starting to question.

Photo by form PxHere, Public Domain, CC0

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