Inside the Mind of a Newborn Baby | Claudia Passos Ferreira | TED

You wake up in a new world. Your eyes open to bright, confusing lights.

Your ears are filled with mysterious sounds.

Everything around you feels unfamiliar. This is a 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 adults' minds.

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 this experience 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 anaesthetic, 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.