The Fourth Trimester by Susan Brink

Author:Susan Brink
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520267121
Publisher: University of California Press

CHAPTER SIX

Sight

From Forms to Faces

From the moment of birth, a new baby is a visual feast. Relieved mothers and fathers count fingers and toes. Adoptive parents make the same fascinating full-body exam the minute they get the chance. They study the fine, downy hair on his head and, yes, on his ears and his back. They delight in the folds in his thighs, in his chubby cheeks, in his seeming lack of a neck. And if he deigns to gaze in their direction, they don’t really care if he sees clearly or not. They’re captivated. Adults will do any number of silly things to capture a second’s glance: blow bubbles, exaggerate a smile, babble ridiculous sounds, or bore their own wide-eyed stare directly into his eyes.

The very act of opening his eyes is a little trick, one of many irresistible manipulations nature has provided that provoke a caretaking response. “A baby opens up his eyes and looks. It’s a very powerful turn on,” says Dr. Penny Glass, director of the Child Development Program at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. “You think the baby is looking right smack dab at you.”1 It doesn’t even matter that he doesn’t see the details of the face that holds his attention, because every parent loves looking into the eyes of a new baby while trying to imagine the world from his point of view. And as parents gaze, they no doubt wonder: What is this brand-new being seeing when he looks back?

We know that vision is the least-developed sense at birth. Infants arrive able to recognize their mothers’ voices, for example, but with no such ability to see or recognize her face. Yet they can discern shadows of eyes, edges of faces, and areas of high contrast. What they need in order to develop this complex sense during the fourth trimester is practice at “seeing.” Each new flicker of vision establishes new neural connections that will eventually enable them to see. The slowly developing sense of vision, with its multiple components of focus, contrast, three-dimensionality, and color, will, during this time of transition, carry the infant from a world of darkness into the rich world of light.

What a baby sees is largely a mystery, even to science. Discerning what the world looks like to an infant is not as simple as, say, imagining a blurry video image slowly coming into focus. Infant vision no doubt has some elements of gradually increasing clarity over the first months. But since specific parts of the eye and the brain have to develop and coordinate during the fourth trimester in order for a view of the world to begin to make sense, we can only imagine what an infant’s new world looks like.

But imagining her world is really not so hard. In fact, it’s exactly what parents have been doing for millions of years—imagining what their baby sees. What science does know is that she wants to look, she wants to see, and she seeks out the edges of our faces, the shadows of our eyes, as her very first exploration.

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