Comments | chaoticidealism: Anencephaly

chaoticidealism

Anencephaly

Dec 18, 2015 12:18

I'm on the last day of finals week, finishing up a term paper for a fetal behavior class. My paper is on the neurological development of the premature infant, but along the way, I came up with some interesting ideas that can't go in the paper... so they are going here ( Read more... )

intelligence & cognition, disability, neurodiversity, quality of life

Comments 15

anonymous May 17 2020, 17:56:22 UTC

I don't know...this is such an interesting article & I totally get the similarities between neurotypical newborns & anencephalic ones. But here's where i get confused...anencephalic infants are purportedly blind & deaf since the nerves that make us able to see & hear end into nothingness. There's no cerebral cortex for them to connect to. Ive looked at countless pictures & videos of live anencephalic infants & one thing I've noticed is that they rarely open their eyes & when they do they are typically pointing outward in 2 different directions. I have 3 kids so i know what a typical newborn is like & regardless of what these moms say...to me they don't behave anything like a normal newborn. They are limp, they're cry is very different & the "smiles" Ive seen on these infant's faces are very different...almost like the smile of an older person. I've seen videos of them born with these strange smiles platered on their faces that just stay there...they aren't the fleeting little smiles you see go across a normal newborn's face as they ( ... )

anonymous May 17 2020, 18:02:56 UTC

(Cont)
put it out there that their anencephalic infant is smiling because they are happy it just kind of shows me that there's a lot of projection going on in order to make the whole horrific situation more bearable. It's just an awful birth defect & I think for most people it's just too hard to wrap your head around & therefore we all do & think what we have to in order to keep our sanity.

anonymous May 17 2020, 21:48:44 UTC

They're certainly very disabled. But they do have that brain stem, and they do the rudimentary sensory processing that the brain stem allows for. So although they're cortically deaf and blind, they aren't completely unable to respond to sensory stimuli. You might be interested in reading about "blindsight"--a very odd phenomenon in which a blind person is nevertheless able to navigate around obstacles. It shows that there's more than one sensory pathway for sight, and that it's not all conscious processing ( ... )