Does Consciousness Begin Before Birth?
Updated
When does consciousness first emerge in infants? Many insist infant (and fetal) consciousness doesn’t begin until around the baby’s first birthday, but another viewpoint maintains that consciousness begins in the womb before birth. Indeed, while pinpointing when and in what form consciousness begins is far from an absolute determination, new research has, not surprisingly, found compelling evidence suggesting that newborns and even late-stage fetuses possess the capacity for conscious awareness. Published in Cell in a review titled “Consciousness in the cradle: on the emergence of infant experience,” study researchers point to advanced brain connections, signs of attention, sensory processing, and behavioral reactions as evidence that the foundations of consciousness are already present around the time of birth, and we don’t know for how long before that, but it very well could be weeks or longer. One of the lead authors of the paper, Dr. Tim Bayne, Professor of Philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, pointed out that, although we were all once babies, infant consciousness remains mysterious because infants can’t tell us what they think or feel. Bayne remarked:
“Nearly everyone who has held a newborn infant has wondered what, if anything, it is like to be a baby. But of course we cannot remember our infancy, and consciousness researchers have disagreed on whether consciousness arises ‘early’ (at birth or shortly after) or ‘late’ – by one year of age, or even much later.”
While infant consciousness remains mysterious—very few humans, if any, vividly remember being an infant—their findings challenge the conventional belief that awareness only develops months after birth. Rather than appearing suddenly, consciousness likely emerges slowly as the brain’s sensory and cognitive functions develop. Undoubtedly, these insights challenge past practices and views, such as outdated medical approaches that overlooked infants’ ability to experience pain. With continued improvements in brain imaging, the researchers note that we may soon come to see consciousness as a gradual process that starts much earlier in life than previously thought.
The researchers noted four lines of evidence supporting the early emergence of consciousness. The first shows that key brain networks linked to consciousness (neural connectivity networks), like the default mode network (DMN, essential for higher-order cognitive processes), dorsal attention network (DAN), and executive control network (ECN), are active in newborns, and as indicated by other studies, they are also active in the fetal brain. In fact, a significant study involving 428 newborn infants found that these networks, along with their interactions, are present at birth or at a term-equivalent age for pre-term infants. This evidence suggests that the neural foundations for consciousness are in place from birth. Additionally, disruptions in the ECN in newborns were linked to later motor impairments, indicating these networks play a functional role early on.
The second line of evidence for the early emergence of consciousness, discovered by the study authors, involves attention. Attention, particularly top-down (voluntary) attention, which appears around 3–6 months, is closely tied to consciousness. Bottom-up (involuntary) attention, as observed in newborns through their eye movements, may also indicate early consciousness, although unconscious subcortical pathways could be driving it. However, a study has shown that stimulus-driven attention in 3-month-olds activates the same frontoparietal and cingulo-opercular networks as in adults, suggesting that attention mechanisms linked to consciousness may be functional by this age.
A third line of evidence noted by the researchers for early-onset accounts of consciousness comes from multisensory integration, such as the McGurk effect, where combined auditory and visual stimuli create a specific perceptual experience. This effect, which requires conscious perception, is consistently observed in 5-month-olds and sometimes as early as 4 months of age. The observation suggests that infants can consciously process integrated sensory information within months of birth, supporting the presumption of the early onset of consciousness.
And finally, a fourth line of evidence for the early emergence of consciousness exploits an auditory oddball paradigm (the ‘local-global’ paradigm). First developed in connection with disorders of consciousness, the local-global paradigm utilizes a P300 (or P3b) response, a late cortical response often associated with surprise and the reorientation of attention. This response is a strong indicator of perceptual consciousness. Studies have detected this response in 3-month-olds and even in newborns and fetuses past 35 weeks’ gestational age, using advanced techniques like magnetoencephalography (MEG). These findings suggest that the neural markers associated with conscious perception are present very early, potentially even before birth, reinforcing the case for the early emergence of consciousness.
The study authors also discuss the implications of early consciousness, particularly in medical and ethical contexts. Until the 1980s, infants were often operated on without anesthesia due to the incorrect assumption that they lacked consciousness. Thankfully, that practice has since changed. The study emphasizes that factors such as premature birth can affect the development of brain networks, potentially delaying the emergence of consciousness-related markers. It also notes that consciousness in infants likely depends on experience and environmental factors, which, in turn, shape how these early brain networks function.
The researchers note that the question of “what it’s like to be a baby” focuses on the nature of infant consciousness, assuming it exists, rather than when it begins to develop. Immature sensory systems limit infant perception. For example, at birth, visual acuity is low, with full color vision developing at around 3 months. However, studies show that infants as young as 2 months can respond to specific visual categories like faces and scenes, with neural connections forming as early as one week after birth. Auditory experiences may be richer early on, as newborns recognize their mother’s voice and exhibit sensitivity to music and language patterns, with some abilities present even in the fetus.
Moreover, the structure of infant consciousness differs from adults in both spatial and temporal aspects. Infants have lower visual resolution, struggling to distinguish objects in crowded scenes, compared to adults. Improvements are seen from 6 to 15 months, but they still do not reach adult levels. Temporally, infants process visual information more slowly, with phenomena like the attentional blink lasting much longer in 5-month-olds than in adults. They also perceive events as longer and incorporate sensory information over extended periods, suggesting, interestingly, that infant consciousness is less detailed but potentially broader in some respects than adult consciousness. These findings should certainly weigh heavy on current issues involving unborn children, including abortion and aborted fetal tissue in vaccines. Undoubtedly, one needs only look at a newborn infant to realize that this tiny, miraculous human is inherently more directly connected to consciousness than what can be discovered in a scientific study.
