[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: All right, so for this podcast I want to talk about my kid. His name is Amil. This is him right here. And by the way, I do plan to make this interesting to people who don't have kids because I was just one of those people two months ago, so bear with me. But okay, Amil, he's 2 months old, he's still in the munchkin phase, and he's just starting to tune in the world. And so there are these moments, like yesterday for example, where he gets real quiet and he just stares at me. And it's—it's kind of amazing, actually. But it also—it also kind of presents an interesting question which I want to explore right here, in fact you can't avoid it, you're just staring at this thing and you're like, "What is this little creature experiencing?" Like, here is a little human being that is brand new in the world. What does the world look like to a tiny baby? What does it smell like? What does it sound like? And I happened to find somebody who could help me at least begin to answer these questions.

JAD: Hello?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Hi, Jad.

JAD: Hi, is this Charles?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yes, that's right.

JAD: Woo-hoo!

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Good to talk to you.

JAD: Charles, before we get started, can I just have you introduce yourself so I can get your name right?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Okay. Hi, my name is Charles Fernyhough. I'm a writer and developmental psychologist from Durham University.

JAD: And back when Charles had his first child, Athena, he decided to tackle that question.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: You know, what is it like? What's going on for this little person? As a dad, you know, as an awestruck new dad.

JAD: But also as a scientist. So he wrote a book.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Called A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind.

JAD: It's an amazing book where he basically goes through what we do and don't know about what's happening in the minds of little babies when they're brand new. So I put the scenario to him.

JAD: Okay, Amil's brand new. When I'm sitting there holding him and we're staring at each other, what exactly is he seeing?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: One difference that does relate to their visual system is that their— the lens of their eye is absolutely crystal clear, whereas your lens, my lens, because they are of a certain age they have become slightly yellowed, so they filter out some of the blue frequencies of the light that we see.

JAD: So wait, what—paint the picture, what would that be like for them?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: I mean this is my stab at imagining what this would be like, but if you can imagine being in a Greek village in the summer at noon.

JAD: The sun is directly overhead. And it's one of those villages where ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Everything is white. You know, the houses are all painted white. You're wearing sunglasses, and then you suddenly take off the sunglasses.

JAD: It's that bright?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yeah. I think light is a big—it's probably the biggest shock to newborn babies.

JAD: It's interesting to consider that that blinding haze of whiteness might actually be how the world really is. We just don't see it. In any case, then I asked him about sound. Do babies hear things differently than adults in the same way they see things differently, and he said, "Yeah, we think so. We think they hear echoes."

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: The echoes are actually there, but our brains filter them out.

ROBERT: Really?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: But it takes some time for them to learn to do that. I mean, the science behind it is quite complicated, and I don't think I could explain it now, but it's to do with the relative times of arrival that the—that the sound makes on the—the two ears. That the brain basically has to—has to learn to make this adjustment, it can't do it straight away. And so a newborn baby's hearing, we guess, we don't know for sure again, because we can't know what it's like, but we guess that babies hear things in a very echoey way.

JAD: But it gets even stranger.

JAD: Tell me about the experiment with the babies and the brain cap.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yeah, I described a study that was done with babies where they were taking EEG measurements. And these are the kind of measurements that you get when you put a—a net of 16 or so electrodes over the scalp, and these electrodes pick up the very small electrical changes that go on as your brain works. And it's a perfectly safe, harmless procedure which you can do with very young babies. Well, usually when you do these studies you can see the way—see the way in which particular parts of the brain respond to different kinds of stimulus.

JAD: In an adult brain, he says, if you show someone a picture you will see a little—bzzt!—bit of electricity towards the back of their brain.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: If, on the other hand, you heard a sound, then the bit of your brain sort of slightly further forward from that, the auditory cortex, would fire, and you wouldn't see any in the visual cortex.

JAD: Because different parts of the brain have different jobs. But what happened with these babies is that things got very strange. Like, the researchers would show them a bunch of pictures, like boop! Here's a circle. Boop! Here's a cross. And often, things would work as they were supposed to. They would see, like, a little spark in the back of the baby's brain where vision is processed. Sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes when they showed them let's say a cross, the vision part would be silent but they'd see a spark ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: In the auditory cortex. The hearing part of the brain.

JAD: So the picture would trigger a sound in their head?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: We don't know what it triggered in their head for them subjectively, but we do know that a part of the brain that shouldn't have fired did fire.

JAD: They were—I mean, what—what you're saying but not quite allowing to pass through your lips is that they were hearing the picture.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: But we don't—we don't know what they heard, but it's a good basis for saying that when a newborn's brain is developing, these different wirings that lead information into different parts of the brain are still taking shape.

JAD: It might be, he says, that inside Amil's brain right now at two months, all of his senses are in a big synesthetic knot, so that when he hears my voice maybe he sees flashes of color, or maybe when he looks at the wall he hears tones. Or maybe when light comes in through the window he tastes it, like salt or something, I don't know. I mean, that's the thing.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: We can't know. I mean, there is really strong philosophical grounds for being skeptical there. I mean, naturally I can't know that anybody is conscious.

JAD: Wait, what does that mean?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: I can't know that you're conscious.

JAD: But I—I'm talking to you.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Sure. You are. But, you know, you could be a really smart zombie. You could be a robot. You know, I can't see you, you're 5,000 miles away. I mean, maybe I'm the only person in the universe who is conscious.

JAD: Huh.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: We tend to—you know, the vast majority of us tend to say, "Well, he looks like me, and he talks like me, and he thinks like me, and he perceives like me, so he's gonna be like me.” But it is a leap of faith.

JAD: Then I told him about the—the stare. How, you know, just in the last little bit Amil has started to really stare at us. And we stare back, and it's—that's not a leap of faith, that's for real. And he—he told me something really depressing.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: In those first couple of months, the visual system is controlled by the subcortical regions, and they're kind of the old bits of the brain. The cortex is the relatively new—evolutionarily speaking, the relatively new part of the brain that surrounds the whole thing. And there's a switch between one kind of control system, the subcortical system, and the cortical systems. But as the handover happens—and this is happening at about two months, it's probably— it would be interesting to know if he's doing this now. As the handover happens, there's a kind of struggle for power. And the subcortical regions which were controlling vision, kind of don't immediately want to cede power to the cortical regions.

JAD: Huh.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: So the baby loses—temporarily loses control of where he or she is looking because of this struggle for power.

JAD: Really?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Scientists call this sticky fixation. And it's where a baby will just keep staring at you. It's as if the baby can't take its eyes off you.

JAD: Yes, this is what is happening now. You're telling me this is a brain glitch?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH:  Yeah, and it's quite a well-documented phenomenon. And it's bad news for the parents who think that their babies are gazing—gazing at them adoringly, because actually they're just kind of—they don't know where to look, they can't control where they're looking. They don't know how to look away, basically.

JAD: Oh, depressing!

JAD: This might actually be one of those cases where ignorance really is bliss, because the truth is you have to project, and you have to make that leap of faith. Or at least you have to believe whatever it is you have to believe so that when he looks at you and you look back at him, you smile. Because eventually that will teach this little dude how the world works, that humans operate on relationships which are these feedback loops. Which okay, at this moment in time for him are not real, but they will be soon.

JAD: Radiolab is funded in part by the Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcast. Please go to our website, Radiolab.org and you can check out more information there about Charles Furnyhough's book A Thousand Days of Wonder. It's a really great book.

 

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