Sometimes it seems that the first few months of life must be sort of like an acid trip (not that I'd really know, but I can imagine, right?). This thought occurred to me after reading a book and experiencing some of Dorothy's behavior.
The book What's Going on in There? : How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life by Lise Eliot, a neurobiologist, is a wonderful summary of what we know about brain development in the early formative years. You learn things like the fact that babies form roughly 2 million synapse connections every second for the first two years of life! (After that, the connections get pared back as the baby learns skills etc.)
Dorothy sometimes gets some really funny facial expressions, including one we call the Stoner look: "Duuuude, that's like, toooootally cool!" :-) In general, you can only imagine what it must be like to develop your senses (such as binocular vision) from the beginning. Imagine suddenly being able to sense magnetic fields with your hair -- that's the best (crude) analogy I can come up with for what it must be like to suddenly realize you have hands and you can sometimes get them near your mouth, or that you can move your head to track something you're looking at, or that you can now see in 3-D, etc. The acid trip must certainly be exciting, though, because Dorothy sure smiles a lot when she experiences new stuff!
Posted by Tom Nugent at June 12, 2004 08:26 AM