-----Original Message-----
From: Dana Hedberg <dah@signalinteractive.com>
To: extropians@extropy.com <extropians@extropy.com>
Date: Saturday, January 22, 2000 1:00 PM
Subject: Re: rights for late-term and yet unborn human beings...
>
>Mental development follows a timeline immediately upon conception I would
think.
>
>-dana
>
You would think wrongly, for the most part. Various experiments have shown
that it's at a certain point after birth (sometimes as little as minutes),
that a baby starts to develop certain cognitive skills, such as recognizing
faces, or being able to tell when sound is in sync with image. The
developing fetus is presumably going through biological developments which
get it *ready* to being cognizing about the world, but how could the baby
employ those skills until it actually had some raw experience to chew on?
The single thing I have heard which suggests any significant cognitive
development before birth was that a fetus may begin to be able to
distinguish voices in the womb - I got this information in a
psycho-linguistics class where the professor mentioned it in passing as one
of "the latest theories" in child language acquisition. These other
experiments of psychological development, which shows them to occur at some
point *after birth*, can be found in any introductory psychology text
(they're worth reading for the ingenius methodology employed, if nothing
else).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Zeb Haradon
My personal website:
http://www.inconnect.com/~zharadon/ubunix/
A movie I'm directing:
http://www.elevatormovie.com
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