We Are Our Brains Read Online Free PDF Page A

therapists go too far when they maintain that traumatic memories from the fetal period are the cause of very specific psychiatric problems later in life. It’s been claimed that some headaches in adult life are due to forceps delivery or pain during childbirth. Some blame women’s obstetric or gynecological problems on a feeling of being unwanted at birth, because they were girls. Others attribute a penchant for bondage to being entangled in the umbilical cord at birth or a fear of being crushed to a long, difficult passage through the mother’s narrow pelvis. Luckily, the sametherapists reassure patients that problems like this can easily be solved by regression therapy, the theory being that to identify the cause of your problems is to solve them. A forensic study compared 412 suicide victims who were alcoholics and drug addicts with 2,901 people in a control group. A link was made between events around birth and self-destructive behavior. Suicides by hanging were associated with oxygen deprivation at birth, violent suicides with mechanical birth trauma, and drug addiction with the administration of addictive substances like painkillers during labor. A recent independent Dutch study, however, found no link between opiates administered as painkillers at birth and subsequent addiction. I’m very curious to know the results of future attempts to confirm the other correlations.
    Dalí did not need regression analysis or LSD to remember his intrauterine stay in detail, which he recalled as heavenly. “The intrauterine paradise was the color of hell, that is to say, red, orange, yellow and bluish, the color of flames, of fire; above all it was soft, immobile, warm, symmetrical, double, gluey.” His most splendid memory was of two fried, phosphorescent eggs. Dalí said he could reproduce a similar image at will by pressing on his closed eyelids (“characteristic of the fetal posture”). Those fried eggs return in many of Dalí’s paintings. Indeed, the human fetus does respond to light from the twenty-sixth week of pregnancy. But even if Dalí’s mother had lain in the sun in her bikini during her pregnancy, which is highly unlikely, the little Salvador wouldn’t have been able to observe much more than a diffuse orange glow. So it would seem that detailed visual memories are the privilege of Surrealists.
    However, other types of fetal memory have been demonstrated in a number of species. It’s undoubtedly useful for a baby bird to become familiar with the call of its parents while still in the egg. The same applies to humans: The bond between mother and child is first established during pregnancy through the mother’s voice. The existence of fetal memory in humans has been shown from three experimental paradigms: habituation, classic conditioning, andexposure learning. Habituation is the simplest form of memory, whereby the reaction to a stimulus declines the more it is encountered. In the human fetus, habituation is present as early as the twenty-second week of pregnancy. Classic conditioning has been demonstrated from the thirtieth week. Vibrations, for instance, have been used as the “conditioned stimulus” (akin to the bell in Pavlov’s famous experiment with dogs), while a loud noise has been the “unconditioned stimulus” (akin to the food in Pavlov’s experiment). But the level of the nervous system at which this type of learning takes place is debatable. Since an anencephalic fetus (a baby with most of its brain missing, fig. 4 ) can also be conditioned in this way, such learning may take place at the level of the brain stem or spinal cord. The experiments to determine exposure learning produced a much more interesting finding: When a pregnant woman relaxed every time she heard a particular piece of music, after a while the fetus began to move as soon as the music started. After birth, the same child stopped crying and opened its eyes on