Academics are proposing a new and improved way to help researchers discover when consciousness emerges in human infancy.
When over the course of development do humans become conscious? When the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes was asked about infant consciousness by his critics, he eventually suggested that infants might have thoughts, albeit ones that are simpler than those of adults. Hundreds of years later, the issue of when human beings become conscious is a question which remains a challenge for psychologists and philosophers alike.
This kind of approach is desperately needed since babies cannot tell you what they are conscious of. Professor Bremner said:"It is really hard to establish when babies become conscious. This is mostly because infants can't report their experiences and, as most parents will know, can be rather uncooperative particularly when it comes to experimental tasks.
But Professor Bremner and Dr Taylor say that this ignores other markers of consciousness. Previous research has identified a separate cluster of markers. These include:Dr Taylor said:"One of the complicated issues is that it does not look like all the markers point to the same age for the emergence of consciousness.
"We think that by clustering this broad selection of markers, we may finally be able to answer the question which has given us pause for thought for thousands of years. But it's important to bear in mind that the answer may not be a simple one!"Science may be one step closer to understanding where consciousness resides in the brain. A new study shows the importance of certain types of neural connections in identifying ...
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