17 ms·

Babies are pre-wired to perceive the world

127 points by hardmaru 7y ago

dntbnmpls 7y ago
It's pretty self-evident. You don't teach a baby to see, make sound or hear. Babies will perceive and respond. Of course the powers of perception will continue to develop but we know babies aren't born into this world tabula rasa. Not only that we know that fetuses can perceive the world. We know fetuses recognize its mother's voice in the womb. https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97635 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97635 And premature babies benefit from hearing their mother's voice. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/shouldstorm/201909/the-power-mothers-voice https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/shouldstorm/201909... The only mystery is the neurological mechanism of how the brain is and gets wired.
- scotty79 7y ago
  > It's pretty self-evident. You don't teach a baby to see, make sound or hear. It teaches itself and if you keep a baby in the darkness for enough time after birth and only later introduce it to the light and images it will not be able to see. We might be prewired but a lot of building, configuring and pruning is going on with our neural networks in response to stimuli. Without stimuli we fail to develop many functions.
  - polyterative 7y ago
    "Without stimuli we fail to develop many functions" well put
  - drewbug 7y ago
    > if you keep a baby in the darkness for enough time after birth and only later introduce it to the light and images it will not be able to see Is that true?
    - simiones 7y ago
      It has not been tested on human children most likely (and hopefully!) but it has been tested and is true on other mammals.
  - simiones 7y ago
    I think this was also the spirit of the GP's post: there is obviously a lot of pre-wiring at least in the perception area of the brain. If there weren't, it would be impossible for the neurons to learn how to control and interpret the extremely complex input from the eye in the mere days it takes. Also, if there weren't pre-built wiring of some kind, you would not expect to see the same arbitrary definitions of objects develop in all people (I realize object perception comes a little later than simple sight). Of course, just as you say, like almost any other physiological process, if you do not expose those pre-built structures to enough stimuli, they will atrophy. This is especially true in the early developmental period.
  - asynch8 7y ago
    Do not think that it's true you won't be able to see. There is at least one case where someone was blind from birth due to birthdefect, fixed later in life via surgery. Sure took him time to get used to everything or connect the image he is seeing with the object he knew by word and have felt.
  - posterboy 7y ago
    The question still is how? i.e. in this case which parts fail?
  - parkaboy 7y ago
    Totally. Great example is the famous paper from Held+Hein from 1963: https://marom.net.technion.ac.il/files/2016/07/Held-1963.pdf https://marom.net.technion.ac.il/files/2016/07/Held-1963.pdf Not humans but kittens. Punch line: the group that was able to receive sensorimotor feedback entrained a much better sense of spatial perception than the group that didn't. Probably why babies are always making noises and touching shit during critical period plasticity is for sensory training/refinement (among other things) Edit: I don't think there is a binary in terms of brain development pre/post birth. Of course if the baby sufficiently developms in womb it will start to get sensorimotor feedback from within the womb...
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  > fetuses It's not as if the baby somehow magically changes into something else when he or she passes the birth canal.
  - empath75 7y ago
    Magically, no, but there is a distinct difference from the state where it is enveloped by the mother's womb, physically attached the placenta, drawing nutrition from the umbilical cord, lungs filled with amniotic fluid, to a breathing, crying, eating, independent baby. And of course prior to that, it was a fish like creature with a tail and gills, and prior to that a blastocyst. A baby also doesn't magically transform into a toddler, and a child, and teenager, and a man, and a senior citizen and a corpse, either. And yet somehow we manage to maintain different terms for these stages of life without confusing anyone unduly.
    - zdragnar 7y ago
      > independent baby Yet, we also don't dehumanize people who are on life support in hospitals. In context of the debate around start of life and abortion in the US, at least, both baby and fetus are heavily loaded terms whose meanings are divorced from actual science. Edit: for example, CNN recently retracted certain wording on an anti-infanticide bill for babies born during botched abortions. I believe the wording was something along the lines of "fetus that was born".
OliverJones 7y ago
Maybe this is a old parenting legend ... but I've seen it myself. Try grinning at a newborn baby. She'll grin back. It seems to be a reflex, and it seems to fade away after a few days' life.
- missosoup 7y ago
  We have hardware dedicated to mimic what we observe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
- rafaelvasco 7y ago
  Some babies respond very emotionally and even cry when hearing certain songs, which weren't heard by the mother while gestating;
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Most newborn babies hardly smile at all. First smile is something you typically wait weeks for, and even then it’s more like a face twitch, unprompted by anything smile-worthy happening around.
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    Mine smiled for the first time after about a week. It wasn't a long one, but was a typical joker-like full face smile that I can't even do myself. They do display emotions in their face at ferocious pace, no filter like adults - and so far they correspond to overall situation pretty well. As for smile-worthy - one of his personal gods just came to him to see up close (aka papa checking how is he). If that isn't a happy moment, I don't know what is.
  - narag 7y ago
    FWIW, my son smiled when we first met, minutes after he was born.
- neutronicus 7y ago
  My experience with my son was the opposite. He was largely unresponsive through the first month of his life, and then very suddenly developed the ability and seeming desire to mimic smiles around one month. And I was there for all of the first seventy two hours
yqx 7y ago
> "It all boils down to this philosophical question: Are humans special? Do they have parts of their brain predestined to become these special things?" Livingstone says. "Or can we explain it using low-level principles we’ve inherited from lower animals?" I found this remark by Margaret Livingstone, quoted in the article, very surprising. What if anything does innate functional specialization have to do with whether "humans are special"? How does the presence of such specialization distinguish us from "lower animals"? Perhaps the reasoning goes that what might make humans special is the presence of human-specific innate specialized brain mechanisms. But while not everyone might agree, I tend to think the difference may be more related to subtle neuro-anatomical differences (such as number of neurons) rather than the presence of specialized "brain modules". We know brains are highly context sensitive and plastic, and judging by Livingstone's earlier quote, she agrees. So why is the charged question of human exceptionalism (which she already seems to accept given the reference "lower animals") suddenly linked so strongly to the presence of innate specialization?
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > subtle neuro-anatomical differences (such as number of neurons) rather than the presence of specialized "brain modules" Killer whales, long-finned pilot whales and short-finned pilot whales each have more neurons than humans [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
  - posterboy 7y ago
    They have more body to control, too. Surprisingly, certain birds have a very high brain to body size ratio.
- leftyted 7y ago
  > But while not everyone might agree, I tend to think the difference may be more related to subtle neuro-anatomical differences (such as number of neurons) rather than the presence of specialized "brain modules". "Specialized brain modules" seems like an unfair way to state the argument. The article mentions "maps" or "scaffolding" that "drive the final organization of the brain," which is a bit more subtle. But doesn't she allow for the possibility that something like "number of neurons" could drive human difference? What else could be meant by: > Or can we explain it using low-level principles we’ve inherited from lower animals I agree with you that the source of the human-animal distinction isn't relevant to the question of whether the distinction is worth making. I think the distinction is worth making regardless of the source of the distinction (though the "higher" and "lower" language seems silly).
ngcc_hk 7y ago
Structure or pre-wiring. You have an eye and some Neurons. They can’t be totally random. There would be some structure. But is this pre-wiring. Can it be changed later?
- posterboy 7y ago
  Randomly initialized weights do work for neural nets. I'm not much into AI tho. Think of it like this: You can make a rather arbitrary nonsense claim and still hope for a response that corrects it, or has something interesting to say at least. Alas, I am not the response one would hope for the most-- not offering a map to the kingdom either, while a connectome alone isn't worth much anyway.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jugg1es 7y ago
I think that this 'pre-wire' concept is one that humans abhor on some level because it reduces the feeling of autonomy (or free will). But we are biased against it to our peril. When we look around the animal kingdom, we are bombarded with examples of how other animals are born knowing how to walk, or even weave spider webs. Why would humans be any different? We are most likely pre-wired with pathways that facilitate learning in specific ways that enable our brains to develop specific skills, such as speech. Although, it would be pretty great if we could pre-wire ourselves to know how to use a toilet.
- _sbrk 7y ago
  I don't think that it is at all difficult to suppose that we humans have a sort of "Boot ROM" to get us started in the world. This basic brain wiring pattern is then patched, if you will, over many decades to make us the person which we will eventually become.
  - tsumnia 7y ago
    Right, but I believe OP's argument is more align to the idea that some things are "nature" and others "nurture". Further, which perceptions of the world are prewired will always be a hotly debated topic.
  - posterboy 7y ago
    Yes, a "Boot-ROM", bleep, bloob, blergh. You are basically saying we are born with a brain and corresponding nervous system. That's a deep insight, but nothing fundamentally novel.
- narag 7y ago
  Is it really a feeling? What I find weird id how it's supposed to be defined in the genome.
  - magicalhippo 7y ago
    You can get pretty complex behavior almost entirely due to the structure of the neural net[1], and judging by the rest of our bodies, building non-trivial structures is something the genome is quite capable of. [1]: https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/exploring-weight-agnostic-neural.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/exploring-weight-agnostic-...
fctorial 7y ago
Isn't that obvious.
- ailideex 7y ago
  Yeah ... this seems like a bit of a truism. Humans evolved in "the world". That implies that we are at least somewhat adapted to said world. What would be surprising is if we were not somewhat adapted to perceive the world. Saying that we have some adaptations to perceive the world is about as novel as claiming water is wet.

127 points by hardmaru 7y ago

It's pretty self-evident. You don't teach a baby to see, make sound or hear. Babies will perceive and respond. Of course the powers of perception will continue to develop but we know babies aren't born into this world tabula rasa. Not only that we know that fetuses can perceive the world. We know fetuses recognize its mother's voice in the womb. https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97635 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97635 And premature babies benefit from hearing their mother's voice. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/shouldstorm/201909/the-power-mothers-voice https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/shouldstorm/201909... The only mystery is the neurological mechanism of how the brain is and gets wired.

scotty79 7y ago
> It's pretty self-evident. You don't teach a baby to see, make sound or hear. It teaches itself and if you keep a baby in the darkness for enough time after birth and only later introduce it to the light and images it will not be able to see. We might be prewired but a lot of building, configuring and pruning is going on with our neural networks in response to stimuli. Without stimuli we fail to develop many functions.
- polyterative 7y ago
  "Without stimuli we fail to develop many functions" well put
- drewbug 7y ago
  > if you keep a baby in the darkness for enough time after birth and only later introduce it to the light and images it will not be able to see Is that true?
  - simiones 7y ago
    It has not been tested on human children most likely (and hopefully!) but it has been tested and is true on other mammals.
- simiones 7y ago
  I think this was also the spirit of the GP's post: there is obviously a lot of pre-wiring at least in the perception area of the brain. If there weren't, it would be impossible for the neurons to learn how to control and interpret the extremely complex input from the eye in the mere days it takes. Also, if there weren't pre-built wiring of some kind, you would not expect to see the same arbitrary definitions of objects develop in all people (I realize object perception comes a little later than simple sight). Of course, just as you say, like almost any other physiological process, if you do not expose those pre-built structures to enough stimuli, they will atrophy. This is especially true in the early developmental period.
- asynch8 7y ago
  Do not think that it's true you won't be able to see. There is at least one case where someone was blind from birth due to birthdefect, fixed later in life via surgery. Sure took him time to get used to everything or connect the image he is seeing with the object he knew by word and have felt.
- posterboy 7y ago
  The question still is how? i.e. in this case which parts fail?
- parkaboy 7y ago
  Totally. Great example is the famous paper from Held+Hein from 1963: https://marom.net.technion.ac.il/files/2016/07/Held-1963.pdf https://marom.net.technion.ac.il/files/2016/07/Held-1963.pdf Not humans but kittens. Punch line: the group that was able to receive sensorimotor feedback entrained a much better sense of spatial perception than the group that didn't. Probably why babies are always making noises and touching shit during critical period plasticity is for sensory training/refinement (among other things) Edit: I don't think there is a binary in terms of brain development pre/post birth. Of course if the baby sufficiently developms in womb it will start to get sensorimotor feedback from within the womb...
otabdeveloper4 7y ago
> fetuses It's not as if the baby somehow magically changes into something else when he or she passes the birth canal.
- empath75 7y ago
  Magically, no, but there is a distinct difference from the state where it is enveloped by the mother's womb, physically attached the placenta, drawing nutrition from the umbilical cord, lungs filled with amniotic fluid, to a breathing, crying, eating, independent baby. And of course prior to that, it was a fish like creature with a tail and gills, and prior to that a blastocyst. A baby also doesn't magically transform into a toddler, and a child, and teenager, and a man, and a senior citizen and a corpse, either. And yet somehow we manage to maintain different terms for these stages of life without confusing anyone unduly.
  - zdragnar 7y ago
    > independent baby Yet, we also don't dehumanize people who are on life support in hospitals. In context of the debate around start of life and abortion in the US, at least, both baby and fetus are heavily loaded terms whose meanings are divorced from actual science. Edit: for example, CNN recently retracted certain wording on an anti-infanticide bill for babies born during botched abortions. I believe the wording was something along the lines of "fetus that was born".

OliverJones 7y ago

Maybe this is a old parenting legend ... but I've seen it myself. Try grinning at a newborn baby. She'll grin back. It seems to be a reflex, and it seems to fade away after a few days' life.

missosoup 7y ago
We have hardware dedicated to mimic what we observe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
rafaelvasco 7y ago
Some babies respond very emotionally and even cry when hearing certain songs, which weren't heard by the mother while gestating;
xyzzyz 7y ago
Most newborn babies hardly smile at all. First smile is something you typically wait weeks for, and even then it’s more like a face twitch, unprompted by anything smile-worthy happening around.
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  Mine smiled for the first time after about a week. It wasn't a long one, but was a typical joker-like full face smile that I can't even do myself. They do display emotions in their face at ferocious pace, no filter like adults - and so far they correspond to overall situation pretty well. As for smile-worthy - one of his personal gods just came to him to see up close (aka papa checking how is he). If that isn't a happy moment, I don't know what is.
- narag 7y ago
  FWIW, my son smiled when we first met, minutes after he was born.
neutronicus 7y ago
My experience with my son was the opposite. He was largely unresponsive through the first month of his life, and then very suddenly developed the ability and seeming desire to mimic smiles around one month. And I was there for all of the first seventy two hours

yqx 7y ago

> "It all boils down to this philosophical question: Are humans special? Do they have parts of their brain predestined to become these special things?" Livingstone says. "Or can we explain it using low-level principles we’ve inherited from lower animals?" I found this remark by Margaret Livingstone, quoted in the article, very surprising. What if anything does innate functional specialization have to do with whether "humans are special"? How does the presence of such specialization distinguish us from "lower animals"? Perhaps the reasoning goes that what might make humans special is the presence of human-specific innate specialized brain mechanisms. But while not everyone might agree, I tend to think the difference may be more related to subtle neuro-anatomical differences (such as number of neurons) rather than the presence of specialized "brain modules". We know brains are highly context sensitive and plastic, and judging by Livingstone's earlier quote, she agrees. So why is the charged question of human exceptionalism (which she already seems to accept given the reference "lower animals") suddenly linked so strongly to the presence of innate specialization?

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> subtle neuro-anatomical differences (such as number of neurons) rather than the presence of specialized "brain modules" Killer whales, long-finned pilot whales and short-finned pilot whales each have more neurons than humans [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
- posterboy 7y ago
  They have more body to control, too. Surprisingly, certain birds have a very high brain to body size ratio.
leftyted 7y ago
> But while not everyone might agree, I tend to think the difference may be more related to subtle neuro-anatomical differences (such as number of neurons) rather than the presence of specialized "brain modules". "Specialized brain modules" seems like an unfair way to state the argument. The article mentions "maps" or "scaffolding" that "drive the final organization of the brain," which is a bit more subtle. But doesn't she allow for the possibility that something like "number of neurons" could drive human difference? What else could be meant by: > Or can we explain it using low-level principles we’ve inherited from lower animals I agree with you that the source of the human-animal distinction isn't relevant to the question of whether the distinction is worth making. I think the distinction is worth making regardless of the source of the distinction (though the "higher" and "lower" language seems silly).

ngcc_hk 7y ago

Structure or pre-wiring. You have an eye and some Neurons. They can’t be totally random. There would be some structure. But is this pre-wiring. Can it be changed later?

posterboy 7y ago
Randomly initialized weights do work for neural nets. I'm not much into AI tho. Think of it like this: You can make a rather arbitrary nonsense claim and still hope for a response that corrects it, or has something interesting to say at least. Alas, I am not the response one would hope for the most-- not offering a map to the kingdom either, while a connectome alone isn't worth much anyway.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jugg1es 7y ago

I think that this 'pre-wire' concept is one that humans abhor on some level because it reduces the feeling of autonomy (or free will). But we are biased against it to our peril. When we look around the animal kingdom, we are bombarded with examples of how other animals are born knowing how to walk, or even weave spider webs. Why would humans be any different? We are most likely pre-wired with pathways that facilitate learning in specific ways that enable our brains to develop specific skills, such as speech. Although, it would be pretty great if we could pre-wire ourselves to know how to use a toilet.

_sbrk 7y ago
I don't think that it is at all difficult to suppose that we humans have a sort of "Boot ROM" to get us started in the world. This basic brain wiring pattern is then patched, if you will, over many decades to make us the person which we will eventually become.
- tsumnia 7y ago
  Right, but I believe OP's argument is more align to the idea that some things are "nature" and others "nurture". Further, which perceptions of the world are prewired will always be a hotly debated topic.
- posterboy 7y ago
  Yes, a "Boot-ROM", bleep, bloob, blergh. You are basically saying we are born with a brain and corresponding nervous system. That's a deep insight, but nothing fundamentally novel.
narag 7y ago
Is it really a feeling? What I find weird id how it's supposed to be defined in the genome.
- magicalhippo 7y ago
  You can get pretty complex behavior almost entirely due to the structure of the neural net[1], and judging by the rest of our bodies, building non-trivial structures is something the genome is quite capable of. [1]: https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/exploring-weight-agnostic-neural.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/exploring-weight-agnostic-...

fctorial 7y ago

Isn't that obvious.

ailideex 7y ago
Yeah ... this seems like a bit of a truism. Humans evolved in "the world". That implies that we are at least somewhat adapted to said world. What would be surprising is if we were not somewhat adapted to perceive the world. Saying that we have some adaptations to perceive the world is about as novel as claiming water is wet.