Apparently there is evidence that a fetus is asleep until birth, including studies that show that lambs (who are more developed at birth than human babies) never awake in utero.
However fetuses experience REM sleep and can “remember” their mothers’ voices at birth, so surely it’s possible they might be minimally conscious? Perhaps they’re “drowsy” but not wholly unaware of their surroundings? Is it possible sensory experiences could bleed over into their awareness before birth? I’ve heard that people can feel real pain during their dreams, so I could see how fetuses might dream of the sensations of the womb during the last couple months of gestation.
I’m really dubious about people who claim memories from before birth. Frankly, I don’t believe people who claim they have memories of being born, or from when they were six months old.
The brain of even a newborn isn’t developed enough to form permanent memories.
Fetuses may have some fuzzy sort of primal awareness, but they do not have “awareness.” They aren’t awake.
Given the way my twin sons fought each other in utero when my wife was pregnant, I lean more toward the idea that they knew exactly what they were doing.
Well, that would suggest that a foetus sleeps all the time.
A newborn sleeps much of the time, but not all the time. Developmentally, there isn’t a huge difference between a late-term foetus and a newborn, so you’d expect the late-term foetus to do the same. I don’t see that the inability to form or retain memories prevents a foetus from sleeping and waking; it certainly doesn’t prevent a newborn.
As someone who has been pregnant, let me assure you, YES, fetuses have sleep and wake cycles in the womb. It’s quite obvious when you start to really feel the fetus kicking you that s/he is more active at certain times of the day than other times (and often it becomes a bit of a routine - my son was generally much more active at night than during the day, probably because during the day I was walking around at work a lot and the motion rocked him to sleep).
A lot of research has been done on what kind of memories fetuses have from before birth, and they do appear to remember experiences in utero. They tend to prefer tastes that are similar to things the mom ate while pregnant and they can recognize sounds of language they heard in the womb. It has also been found that young children remembers things from earlier in life than they will remember when they’re adults. I have never met anyone who claimed to actually have a memory of being born and I think it would be ludicrous if anyone claimed that, but there are different types of memory and “episodic” memory (the type of memory that allows you to remember specific events from your life) is just one type. We clearly don’t carry episodic memories from infancy with us, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t influenced by other types of memory from that age.
Well, foetal development is obviously a continuum. But if a foetus, late in development, can have a functional brain that can wake and sleep, then obviously the answer to the question “can a foetus wake and sleep?” is “yes, once it is sufficiently developed”. And presumably the medics have some idea as to more or less when a foetus can be expected to reach that stage of development.
That’s true, but I think what many of us are trying to get at is that it’s a bit of a leading question. “Awake” implies things about adults; a level of alertness, a train of conscious thought, recall of memories (and new ones being formed etc).
A lot of these things are not even unambiguously happening in the months after birth – for example, for the first year much of the brain is not myelinated, meaning essentially that different regions of the brain are not usefully connected up yet, let alone the level of brain development at various stages of gestation.
It’s misleading therefore to talk about a foetus being “awake”, without disclaimers and elaboration.
The problem with that definition is that it leads to “babies aren’t awake”, which is not true. A late-term fetus displays different levels of activity, alertness and awareness; we can’t know how much of a train of though (sic) it has because of experimental problems, but we know there are times when we can take a look at the ultrasound and say “your foetus looks like babies look when they’re asleep; kid’s asleep” and others when we can look and say “your foetus looks like babies look when they’re awake; kid’s awake”. If someone wants to come up with specific words other than the perfectly useful “asleep” and “awake” they can, of course.
Babies eyes aren’t completely developed either, but none of us would say that a baby doesn’t look at things.
Yup. A foetus or a newborn probably experiences being awake, and possibly experiences being asleep, somewat differently from the way an adult experiences them. But as any parent can tell you, newborns definitely have periods when they’re awake and other periods when they’re asleep - indeed, the distinction between these periods is marked, and the parents’ own lives tend to revolve around these periods. And if that’s true of newborns we have no reason to think that it isn’t also true of late-term foetuses.
It is not a yes/no - on/off sort of thing. Rather think percentage of consciousness developed.
Sort of like ability to speak. They don’t suddenly start speaking. Rather this is slowly developed over time. The first utterance of speech might be considered 1% ability to speak.
Also look at medical papers on brain damage due to accidents. The reverse is true - when people lose cognitive abilities due to brain damage.
If you want a scientific answer, that’s fairly easy to find by a google search. Lots of information, both medical and layperson, about the sleep wake cycles of a fetus, based on movement, brain wave tracings, and heart rates.
If you want a philosophical conversation about what “awake” means, and how we truly tell when another entity is “awake,” then this should probably be moved to Great Debates, because it’s a doozy.
But either way, some clarification about what’s actually being asked would be helpful.
There are some lovely experiments identifying the horizon of “abstract thinking.” Right around the age of one and a half, a child learns to think in terms of analogies and metaphors. One of the coolest is the “doll house model of the room you’re in” experiment. Right around 1 1/2, the kid gets it. “Wait…this is this room!”
I understand your point here, and I completely agree in regards to the higher brain functions. However, the more rudimentary functions are more fully developed in the unborn baby … the heart beats, the leg kicks, the older twin beats up the younger twin. Functions associated with the more primitive brain stem are working in the womb.
If we believe the wake/sleep cycles are are functions of the brain stem … then I think these babe do sleep and then are awake. There’s nothing in the birthing process that causes these to somehow become functional.