Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born • Hacker News Board

Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

#191

Post by gavinmckenzie » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

underwater wrote: post #55

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that children can walk with assistance (and crawl) before they're strong enough to walk on their own.

Interestingly they can also effectively communicate well before they can vocalise words. A baby can sign reliably at 7-9 months but typically won't be able to speak until 12 months.

Yes! Signing (albeit with a small vocabulary) was surprisingly successful with my infant daughter, over 20 years ago. I was initially skeptical, but it worked really well. Not sure if it reduced my infant daughter's communication frustrations, but it certainly helped her parents feel less frustrated.

Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

#192

Post by eru » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 7:56 AM UTC

jacinda wrote: post #186

eru wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interestingly, the EGG hypothesis postulates that the constraining factor is not pelvis size, but rather that neonates consume so much energy that we give birth just before a women's metabolic limits would otherwise be overrun (leading to both maternal and infant death). Based on this, the increased energy demands of our larger brains mean that we have to sacrifice neonatal motor skills or drastically improve the m…

Having gone through it, while it's true you need more calories after the baby is born (I breastfed and pumped exclusively and was told it's about 500 calories per day vs 300 or so extra prior to birth) the strain on your body is lessened because you are producing a single item (milk) going to one part of your body that's drained periodically. In contrast, by the third trimester of pregnancy, your total blood volume h…

Yes, lungs, heart, kidney and liver seem like more obvious bottlenecks than calorie intake alone.

I was mostly just remarking on the energy-demand hypothesis advanced in the comment above.

My first daughter is just in the process of weaning at the moment.

Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

#193

Post by melfrey » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

To dream about the world that they are about to experience, that's truly amazing. Imagine that the newborns are not aware of the dangers, cope with their surroundings, and become familiar with them.