Claudia Passos-Ferreira

You wake up in a new world, your eyes open to bright, confusing lights, your ears filled with mysterious sounds, everything around you feels unfamiliar.

This is the reality of a newborn baby.

So what is it like to be a newborn?

For a philosopher and a psychologist like me, this is a fascinating question.

It is hard enough to know what's going on in an adult's mind.

What could be going on in a newborn baby's mind?

Do babies have consciousness, the subjective experience of their mind and the world?

In adults, consciousness involves experiences of seeing, hearing and thinking, and feelings of pain, pleasure and emotions.

Do babies also have these experiences and feelings that light up their inner world?

So the traditional view is that newborns are passive observers of overwhelming chaos, and they may not be conscious at all.

It sounds unbelievable today, but 50 years ago, doctors routinely performed circumcision without an aesthetic, convinced that newborns' immature brain could not feel pain.

Since then, developmental psychologists have shown that infants' abilities are much more complex than we thought before.

But the question of infant consciousness has remained open.

One problem is that infants cannot tell us how they feel, they cannot describe their thoughts, and we certainly cannot take a consciousness test.

So how can we know what's going on inside their minds?

One answer is to measure infants' brains.

Over the past few decades, the science of consciousness has told us a lot about the brain bases of consciousness in adults.

We found neurosignals that are only active when an adult's conscious perceiving is stimulated.

Recently, neuroscientists found the same neurosignals in infants' brains.

This provides powerful new evidence that infants might be actively experiencing their surroundings from a remarkably early age.