A group of French neuroscientists have become interested in the question of when babies begin to have self-awareness. In their opinion, this function appears (in its primary features) in the fifth month of a person's life, and sometimes even earlier.
To establish this, scientists from Paris have developed a special technique that allows to establish the presence of consciousness in infants. Self-awareness is manifested in the fact that a person already remembers his actions and understands the actions of others. Moreover, he becomes capable of analyzing both.
Sid Coudier and the group of neurophysiologists led by him, in order to understand when children develop self-awareness, checked their brain activity at the time when they were shown three photographs each.
At the same time, they were also shown to adults. One of the frames showed a man. And on the other two, what in its silhouette resembled the previous photo (that is, a human head), but was filled with dots of different colors.
First, the subjects were asked to look at the "mask" and then the person's face. They also demonstrated two "masks" in a row. According to scientists, with a very fast change of pictures, human vision is not able to instantly fix the changes. But this is done for him by the consciousness recognizing familiar faces.
The experiments involved children aged 5 to 15 months. Scientists have found that even at 5 months of age, the brain of babies reacted to the picture and made attempts to recognize it. But this, naturally, took longer than in older children.
Andrey Severny
