In Utero Limbo

The Prenatal Brain & the Sticky Question of Consciousness

When does an unborn child become conscious?

The human mind is unique in the known universe. We see evidence of it manifested on cave walls or in broken artifacts, but it has no natural history. Similarly, it is difficult to nail down when, exactly, a human being’s conscious experience begins. Research sheds broken shafts of light on this question. But, as one team that studied the emergence of infant experience put it last year, progress is difficult “because of uncertainty about how best to study consciousness in the absence of the capacity for verbal report or intentional behavior.”¹

Consciousness is called the “hard problem” of the philosophy of mind for good reason....