Even lower animals (worms) avoid unpleasant corners in mazes in the
wake of nasty experiences. To suggest that a human neonate, equipped
with hundreds of neural cubic feet does not recall migrating from one
planet to another, from one extreme to its total opposition - stretches
credulity. Babies may be asleep 16-20 hours a day because they are
shocked and depressed. These abnormal spans of sleep are more typical
of major depressive episodes than of vigorous, vivacious, vibrant
growth. Taking into consideration the mind-boggling amounts of
information that the baby has to absorb just in order to stay alive -
sleeping through most of it seems like an inordinately inane strategy.
The baby seems to be awake in the womb more than he is outside it.
Cast into the outer light, the baby tries, at first, to ignore reality.
This is our first defense line. It stays with us as we grow up.
It has long been noted that pregnancy continues outside the womb. The
brain develops and reaches 75% of adult size by the age of 2 years. It
is completed only by the age of 10. It takes, therefore, ten years to
complete the development of this indispensable organ - almost wholly
outside the womb. And this "external pregnancy" is not limited to the
brain only. The baby grows by 25 cm and by 6 kilos in the first year
alone. He doubles his weight by his fourth month and triples it by his
first birthday. The development process is not smooth but by fits and
starts. Not only do the parameters of the body change - but its
proportions do as well. In the first two years, for instance, the head
is larger in order to accommodate the rapid growth of the Central
Nervous System. This changes drastically later on as the growth of the
head is dwarfed by the growth of the extremities of the body. The
transformation is so fundamental, the plasticity of the body so
pronounced - that in most likelihood this is the reason why no
operative sense of identity emerges until after the fourth year of
childhood. It calls to mind Kafka's Gregor Samsa (who woke up to find
that he is a giant cockroach). It is identity shattering. It must
engender in the baby a sense of self-estrangement and loss of control
over who is and what he is.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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