Brain complexity: baby brains under study (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, January 18, 2018, 17:39 (2501 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Every organism on earth has to experiment and learn how to use the brain (or brain equivalent) they were born with,

DAVID: The focus on first sapiensis is to look at the gap in years until the brain they were given was more functionally used.

DAVID: As for newborn babies, they have all the instictual behavior you imply and all the automatic (autonomic) functions or they would not live. The differences in your grandsons are very apparent to you now, but not the day they were born. The differences appeared as they developed their brains and understood they had a self and were separate from the outside world. Child studies show this. From a 'thought' standpoint, they start blank.

dhw:Sorry, but you’re wrong, although interestingly the differences have changed quite dramatically during this first year of their existence. Ezra was needy and Sonny was placid right from birth. After a year, this has changed. Ezra is more confident and less needy than Sonny, though neither can yet articulate his thoughts. One could spend hours theorizing about it, and of course there may well be further changes. I don’t know what you mean by a “thought standpoint”, but I emphasized that one must not equate consciousness with self-consciousness. I am not saying that newborn babies or even toddlers have anything even approaching the same degree of self-consciousness as a teenager or an adult. My point was that your account was over-simplified, because I do not for one moment believe that the self is a complete blank/zero at birth - hence the concept of nature versus nurture. Newborn babies are not born with identical blank selves, but the self they are born with may well change.

Just as you noted above everyone has to learn how to use their newborn or supplied brain. The point you miss is the baby starts at zero knowledge and zero out of uterine use, and the other point is they have different genomes which supplies differing parameters for s/s/c development. Of course the twins developed differently. What they are born with is a consciousness mechanism for their brains to use and learn to use it. They each started at zero.