Dude, really? Nociception (perception of pain) is one of the oldest elements of the nervous system evolutionarily, and YES newborn infants DO feel pain--they HAVE the capacity for nociception.

You are not conditioned to perceive pain. Unless you have some rare nervous system disorder, or are paralyzed, you feel pain intrinsically.

Responses to pain may be conditioned, but the perception itself is indeed inherent.

 

yes infants feel pain. obgyn's perform the pinch test at birth. if the baby cries, his CNS is functioning and he/she can thus feel pain.

 

[QUOTE=VAD,Feb 12 2008, 01:53 PM] So, based on your knowledge and experience, do you believe that babies can distinguish between pain and

 

Retarded? No, you idjit. He's just an 3vilmonkey!

 

+1

 

Hmmm, no no I'm fairly functional and all my limbs seem to work.

But that story was true, I have a big dirty scar on my right leg. There have been other times when I haven't felt the pain with significant injury until I noticed for another reason that something was wrong, ie blood pouring out somewhere.

 

Will they remember the pain later?

If you rip the leg off an ant it runs around in circles but soon forgets and walks a straight line.

Also, I have never heard of phantom limb symptoms from infancy injuries.

The difference between ant pain and human PAIN is cognition and then recollection which can induce traumatization.

Without cognition and recollection, it's simply reactive instinct.

 

The hippocampus--the area of the brain primarily responsible for memories--is not fully developed at birth. In fact, it does not become developed enough for distant recollection until at least after three years of nominal development. That is why we usually don't remember things in our infancy.

However, the brain is highly plastic and just because we haven't coded those memories in our long-term memory does not mean that we are not affected by those stimuli.

Inducing such high levels of stress, as indicated in the article, can produce acute problems that may or may not have lasting effects depending on the severity of the symptoms.

You can affect a person for the rest of their lives in ways you may never even think of. Who knows what kind of collateral effects that early damage can have.

I definitely think it's a liability to use anesthesia on infants. They probably thought it would be safer for them to not use it than risk complications (e.g. death) and a lawsuit. Afterall, if they didn't use it, who would tell? The baby? Definitely not. No recollection. The nurses or doctors? Probably not since they are the practitioners.