TED Talks Daily - Inside the mind of a newborn baby | Claudia Passos Ferreira

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

What if newborn babies are more aware than we ever imagined? Philosopher and psychologist Claudia Passos Ferreira shares groundbreaking neuroscience showing that newborn babies — and possibly even late-term fetuses — may consciously experience their world, transforming how we understand the very beginning of life.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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today. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hew. It's a deeply charged question across the world. When does human consciousness begin? In her talk, philosopher, bioethicist, and clinical psychologist Claudia Pazos-Ferrera challenges traditional views on infant consciousness.

presenting research that could reshape our understanding of early human development and raising important ethical considerations around personhood. 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 the reality of a new book. So what does 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' 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 baby 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. Well, 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 infant's 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 basis of consciousness. in adults. We found the neurosignals that are only active when an adult's conscious perceiving as stimulus. Recently, neuroscientists found the same neurosignals in infants' brains. This provides powerful new evidence

that infants might be active experience in their surrounds for a remarkably early age. One innovative experiment in neuroscience, is the audible paradigm. This is a test of how our brain reacts when something unexpected happens. I love this paradigm, and hear how it works.

Imagine repeatable hearing the same sequence of sounds. Bibi-b-b-b-b-b-boop, B-b-b-b-b-b. Suddenly, this family pattern is interrupted by a different sequence. B-b-b-b-b-b-b. Instantly, your brain detects the surprise, produce your measurable brain signal,

call it the pre-300 wave. These are the ball responds to an expected sequence of sounds only happens when an individual is conscious. People in deeply sleep don't have it, people in comers don't have it, when newborn babies do. The neuroscientist is laying that One scientist's laying the hand has found that when babies are just a few days old,

they show the same type of brain activity in response to this audible sequence of sounds. What this suggests is that right from birth, infants might be truly experiencing conscious perceptions and conscious expectations. have also looked for consciousness through patterns of attention in the brain. In conscious adults' brain, different types of network alternate their activity when we switch our attention between the external world and our internal thoughts. You know how it is.

You might be doing this right now. You focus our attention in the speaker for a while, and then you daydream for a while. It turns out that infants do the same sort of the neuroscientist Florina Nati recently observed the same type of alternation between these networks in newborn brains. This suggests that this switch on the focus of internal and external awareness are present right from birth. There is also evidence from gaps in attention. When our Our mind intensely focus on one thing, it usually becomes blind for something that happens

immediately afterward. We call this phenomenon, attention or blink. Infants experience this phenomenon too, but in its low motion. At three months old, infants take near a full second to shift their attention from one visual cue to another compared to adults that can manage this shift. must faster. Amazingly, infants show the same type of brain response when this happens is strongly hinting they are active experience in their environment.

Researchers have also found relevant brain patterns in premature infants, which makes you wonder. Could consciousness begin before birth? This is a really important question. I told you all how scientists applied the audible tests to newborns. Well, they applied the same test to late-term fetuses around 35 weeks into pregnancy. The results were striking.

Fetus shows the same type of brain response as we found in newborns. So even before birth and entering the world, babies seems to be capable to consciously processing sounds, meaning the awareness might develop while they are still in the womb. Of course, this results has potential implications scientifically, medically and ethically. For a start, we now know that when we're performed,

surgery in newborns or premature infants or late-term fetuses, we should give them an anesthetic. I know that many of you will be thinking about the abortion debate. In that context, I should stress that our strongest evidence is that consciousness requires brain structures that emerge after 24 weeks of gestation. a time when abortion is rare. The new evidence

might extend to fetus in a tertiary of gestation, but it doesn't extend earlier than that. This is a new understanding, and this new understanding is a work in progress, but might change a picture of newborn babies. They are not passive creatures waiting for consciousness to switch on. They are tiny humans,

already perceiving patterns and interacting with the world in a meaningful way. As human life unfolds, consciousness unfolds with it. Our sense of ourselves grows and changes. Our consciousness walks us and wanes until one day it ends. From the moment we take our first breath to the moment of our deaths,

our lives are lit by the flame of awareness. We share this flame with other animals, and we might one day share it with machines. Collectively, our conscious minds illuminate the universe. And though its flame eventually fades, the light of consciousness never disappears. It is rekindled with its new life in the endless dance of existence.

Thank you. That was Claudia Pazos Ferreira, speaking at TED 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonzica

Song Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisie Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balerozzo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. This episode is sponsored by Bombas. As fall settles in, the cooler days are a reminder to bring a little more comfort into our routines for the cozy season. And honestly, nothing makes that shift more seamless than slipping into something from Bombas. You probably know Bombas for their socks. And yes, they really are as comfortable as people say.

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