1. WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
Prenatal Perception, Neonatal
Bain Activity, and Birth
Mythologies

2. Setting the Stage:
Defining Minimal
Consciousness
sensory awareness of the
body, the self, and the
world
(Lagercrantz &
Changeux,2009)

3. Contrasted to:
Defining Self-Aware
Consciousness
“Inner, qualitative, subjective
states" and processes of
sentience and awareness,
involving
autobiography and mental time
and involving the capacity to
introspect
(Searle, 2000)

4. Self-Awareness
“Consciousness is awareness of your body and
your environment; self-awareness is recognition of
that consciousness—not only understanding that
you exist but further comprehending that you are
aware of your existence. Another way of
considering it: to be conscious is to think; to be self-
aware is to realize that you are a thinking being and
to think about your thoughts.” – Scientific American
Self-awareness involves the conscious
acknowledgement of one's presence as a separate
entity in space (Morin, 2004)

5. Access Consciousness
Access consciousness is a state that is poised for direct
control of thought and action. A state is available for
access consciousness if it can be used in reasoning and
for direct control of action and speech.
(Conscious versus unconscious information processing)
** Emphasis on verbal report

6. Access Consciousness:
The Ebbinghaus Illusion

7. Phenomenal Consciousness
“P-conscious states are experiential, that is, a state is P-
conscious if it has experiential properties. The totality of
the experiential properties of a state are “what it is like” to
have it. Moving from synonyms to examples, we have P-
conscious states when we see, hear, smell, taste and
have pains.” (Block 1995: 230)

9. What is the source of light for a person here? The sun
And when the sun sets, then what light does he have?
The Great Forrest Teachings
(Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, 7th Century B.C.E.)
The moon
And when the sun and the moon set, then what light does he have?
Fire.
And when the fire goes out, then what light does he have?
Speech. Even when one cannot see one’s own hand,
when speech is uttered, one goes towards it.
And when speech has fallen silent, and in the absence of sun, moon,
fire, what source of light does a person have?
The self. (atman). It is by the light of the self that he
sits, goes about, does his work, and returns.

10. The ultimate answer:
The Self is Always Here,
Never There
- How could outer sources of light reveal anything to us, if
they weren’t themselves lit up by the self?
- Consciousness is like a light; it illuminates or reveals
things so they can be known
- A person has two dwellings – this world and the world
beyond. Between them lies the borderland of dreams
where the two worlds meet.

11. David Chalmers:
The “Easy” Problems of
Consciousness
- Explaining an organism’s ability to discriminate,
categorize, and react to environmental stimuli
- Explaining how a cognitive system integrates information
- Explaining how and why mental states are reportable
- Explaining how a cognitive system can access its own
internal states
- Explaining how attention gets focused
- Explaining the deliberate control of behavior
- Explaining the difference between wakefulness and
sleep

12. David Chalmers:
The Hard Problem
- “The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of
experience….there is something it is like to be a conscious
organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for
example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of
redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a
visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different
modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of meatballs. Then there
are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that
are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the
experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of
these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of
them are states of experience.” – David Chalmers, 1995

13. States of Consciousness
- Waking
- Sleep
- Coma
- General Anesthesia

15. Memory + Consciousness:
Infant Amnesia + Birth
Memories
- The neonatal is “unreflective, present
oriented” (Lagercrantz & Changeux,
2009)
- Described as “basic” or “minimal”
consciousness

16. “Mount Everest in Utero”
- Sir Joseph Barcroft (1872-1947)
- The intrauterine environment is
extremely hypoxic
- The fetus depends on placental transfer of
oxygen through the mother’s circulatory system. The fetus
competes with the mother's organs for a share of the
systemic oxygen delivery, and increased demand from the
mother's tissues could be detrimental to fetal circulation.

17. Somatosensory
Experience
- Smell: At 20 wks gestation, the epithelial plugs blocking
the nostrils disappear, and preference for mother scent
- Nociception (pain) at 20 wks
- Vision: Visual acuity is 1/40, but preferential looking to
patterned stimuli vs. grey fields, facial recognition and
imitation – preference for faces who make eye contact
- Hearing: Newborn infants remember sounds, melodies,
- and rhythmic poems they have been exposed to during
fetal life
- Touch: Self-other touch discrimination in newborn

18. On Being Born
- Arousal from a resting, sleeping state in utero
- At birth, the infant is taken from an unconscious fetal state
to an awake state for about two hours, and then remains
mostly asleep for two days
- Intense flow of novel sensory stimuli after birth
- Endogenous analgesia is removed at birth, thus taking
away the suppressors on neural activity
- Catecholamine surge triggered by vaginal delivery may
also contribute to increased arousal at birth

19. GABA – Excitatory to
Inhibitory
- In adult brain, GABA is the main inhibitory transmitter that hyper
polarizes target neurons. In early development, GABAergic
transmission is not inhibitory but facilitates endogenous events
- The high chloride concentration in immature neurons leads to a
depolarizing postsynaptic response. During development, the
expression patterns of chloride-regulating molecules undergo
profound changes such that GABA becomes more hyperpolarizing.
- The inhibitory action of GABA is paralleled with emergence of
continuous oscillations in various frequency bands (33, 34)
- A transient switch in GABA signaling from fetal excitatory to inhibitory
is elicited by maternal oxytocin release upon delivery (Tyzio, 2006)

20. Active Areas of Neonate
Brain
- The fusiform area for face
recognition (Johnson, 2005)
- The left hemispheric temporal
lobe for processing speech
stimuli (Dehaene-Lambertz,
Hertz-Pannier, & Dubois,
2006)
- Early thalamocortical
pathways

21. The Fusiform Area
Jiang et al., 2006

22. The Fusiform Area: How we
know it’s for facial processing

23. Neonatal EEG

24. Developmental EEG
Landmarks
- temporal theta burst
- beta delta complex
- temporal alpha bursts
- trace alternant
- frontal sharp transients
- occipital dominant alpha rhythm
- vertex transients
- sleep spindles

27. preterm EEG
initially comprises
intermittent bursts of
activity, with a
gradual increase in
the amount of
ongoing
(continuous,
oscillatory) activity.
Neonate EEG

28. Facial Recognition
2-month old infants
get distressed when
they see a recording
of a face with
various
expressions, versus
a live face,
indicating an
awareness of social
interaction

29. Facial Expression Imitation
Hypothesized as a
subcortical facial
recognition system,
babies can imitate
facial expressions, a
very sophisticated
form of social
interaction.

30. Embryonic Visual System
Neuronal development is mostly in areas
related to the sensory modalities stimulated
in the intrauterine environment (tactile,
proprioceptive, auditory, and gustatory
pathways) – EXCEPT for the visual system,
which has substantial myelnation prior to
birth without exogenous stimulation.

31. Do Babies Dream in the Womb?
“After about seven months
growing in the womb, a human
fetus spends most of its time
asleep. Its brain cycles back and
forth between the frenzied activity
of rapid eye movement sleep and
the quiet resting state of nonREM
sleep.” – American Institute of
Physics (2009)

32. Role of REM Sleep in Fetal
Development
Roffwarg, Muzio, and Dement (1966) theorize that REM sleep
substitutes wakefulness during period (early life) when
wakefulness is limited.
This provides an “inner stimulation” which could anticipate the
sensorimotor experience of the newborn with the outside
world and regulate thalamocortical development (Biagioni et
al., 2005)

33. Phenomenology of Infancy