171–180 of 193 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe so, though this too seems like a strange belief, and touches on the reason I find surprise at such things odd: it's been known for years that fetuses at late stages have cycles of REM sleep and apparent wakefulness.
Isn't that part of rationale for roe v wade 3rd trimester rule already? I've never heard someone say farm animals can't feel pain.
Something about this reminds me of the 'Winning Ticket Hypothesis' in artifical neural networks: that some 'random' initializations prime a network far better for later faster learning. From https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635 - the abstract: Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of infere…
> Are these innate patterns of activity priming mammalian brains in a similar way? A newborn foal can stand within 55 minutes of being born and can walk or run within 90 minutes. That is crazy fast training speed. Is it training initialization or is it a form of transfer learning? Most human babies take 9-18 months to walk, and this is commonly attributed to the fact that human babies have immature brains that cannot…
https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=newbor...
> Stepping reflex > > This reflex is also called the walking or dance reflex because a baby appears to take steps or dance when held upright with his or her feet touching a solid surface. This reflex lasts about 2 months.
Maybe not enough to qualify as "exhibit the basic motor skills"
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Earliest I've seen was 9/10 months, that kid looked so strange to me, they could barely hold their head up as they tottered around like a drunk. I wonder if the parents promoted early walking?
People do that successfully, the problem is that if babies skip the crawling phase then it may cause learning disabilities among other things. Which is fascinating in the context of this conversation. The order in which things are learned can be very critical!
Our eldest wasn't interested in crawling really and went almost straight to walking but not until about 14 months IIRC (it was > 10 years back).
We did baby sign (a sort of simplified BSL; would recommend) and some people suggested it would retard speech - same child modified a sign before 12 months and so could tell us he needed a poo/wee and we'd sit him on the potty to do it all before he was able to talk - saved me changing a lot of stinky nappies! Longitudinally, our kids used baby sign and did/are doing well at school and have all been ahead with language skills (but that's not accounting for confounding variables).
It's curious to see infant developmental stages becoming more and more to be compared to AI/robot development.
To put this into context, retinal waves (essentially self-propagating excitations along the retina) pre-birth have been known to exist and help neural organization for what must be 20-30 years. What's new in this paper is that they additionally confirmed that the direction of the propagating waves coincided with the mouse's typical optical flow pattern, essentially helping priming motion-detection neurons in addition…
The video of retinal activity [0] looks quite similar to what I often see when I am falling asleep. [0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qarq_UPAS1M
Imagine if this is the dream, as we get older and stuff seems to make less sense is actually getting closer to birth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fascinating anecdote, and I'd love to see the report on this. I wonder what else they learned from such an interesting case study. But I doubt it's 100% "no pre-wiring". What about gravity and musculature? Surely brains must know or train on these in some way before birth. And what about fight or flight reflexes and presupposing monsters in the shadows? My understanding is that these had a primitive evolutionary basi…
Yeah - I just meant specifically 3D visual modeling. I think some fears are known to be innate among apes - fear of the dark, snakes, and falling. Also paying attention to faces? The cataracts thing was an article I saw on HN a few years ago, but don’t remember the title.
Found this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17687533
which leads to:
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/people-cured-blindne...
which leads to:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/10/to-see-and-not...
> TO SEE AND NOT SEE By Oliver Sacks May 2, 1993
> A NEUROLOGIST'S NOTEBOOK about Virgil (pseud.), who lost his eyesight as a child, and regained it at age 50. Tells how he could not adjust to the sighted world, and eventually had to be hospitalized.
Unfortunately, it needs a New Yorker account to view.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> consume so much energy that we give birth just before a women's metabolic limits would otherwise be overrun Since babies traditionally breast feed and thus survive solely on the mother’s energy after birth, this explanation doesn’t seem to hold water.
Breast feeding is quite hard on women and many women struggle to sustain the child on the breast alone. There’s a history of communal feeding which adds new energy into the equation and also mixed feeding once the child is old enough. I would say it’s probably a continuation at the peak metabolic rate described in the parent post.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fascinating anecdote, and I'd love to see the report on this. I wonder what else they learned from such an interesting case study. But I doubt it's 100% "no pre-wiring". What about gravity and musculature? Surely brains must know or train on these in some way before birth. And what about fight or flight reflexes and presupposing monsters in the shadows? My understanding is that these had a primitive evolutionary basi…
What about musculature? Human babies mostly just violently shake all hands and legs right after birth.
I don't think there's much opportunity to experience gravity before birth in order to train it, and I can't think of anything the brain would need to know about gravity beyond how we experience it with our senses.
> And what about fight or flight reflexes and presupposing monsters in the shadows? My understanding is that these had a primitive evolutionary basis and that we came hardwired to respond to certain stimuli.
Maybe pre-wired behaviors can depend on non-pre-wired stimuli, like a function that's conditioned on an undefined function and evaluates to false on exception.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe. But now we are just speculating.
> Instead, the mother delivers and the neonate’s growth rate slows relative to its fetal growth rate, keeping both the offspring’s and the mother’s energy requirements in check. Growth rate slows after birth, so that would account for some of that. Mother’s also would not need to carry around the weight of the baby, and would be more able to provide for the child.