Acta Paediatrica
May 1, 2025
Hugo Lagercrantz
8 citations
Consciousness develops gradually in the womb and after birth, rather than being an all or none phenomenon. A newborn infant is aroused and wakes up at birth, due to the enormous sensory stimulation and stress that it undergoes during the transition from an aquatic environment to air. Its first breaths activate the locus coeruleus, as indicated by the large pupils of the newborn. The infant...
Acta Paediatrica
January 10, 2020
Nelly Padilla, Hugo Lagercrantz
35 citations
The essence of the mind is consciousness. It emerged early during evolution and ontogeny appears to follow the same process as phylogeny. Consciousness comes from multiple sources, including visual, auditory, sensorimotor and proprioceptive senses. These gradually combine during development to build a unified consciousness, due to the constant interactions between the brain, body, and...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
January 7, 2010
Hugo Lagercrantz, Jean-Pierre Changeux
1 citation
Introduction One of the most important challenges of this century is to understand the neural bases of consciousness from the molecular to the highest cognitive level, in other words, to bridge “the hump from neurochemistry to subjective feeling” (Searle, 2000). Yet, due to the complexity of the human brain, it is not anticipated that a single concept, method, or experimental finding will ever...
Early human development
October 1, 2009
Hugo Lagercrantz
Newborn infants fulfil some criteria of being conscious i.e. being aware of the body, the self and the world. They are able to differentiate between self and nonself touch, express emotions and show signs of shared feelings. They process sensory impressions including pain at a cortical level. They remember rhythmic sounds and vowels which they have been exposed to during fetal life. The...
Acta Paediatrica
February 23, 2007
Hugo Lagercrantz
27 citations
The moment of birth is the moral and legal point when human life must be preserved independent of gestational age, according to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (1). Alternative views such as the newly formed embryo or a baby with a capacity for self-awareness were proposed by some of the distinguished members of the council or working party, but the consensus was that birth is straightforward...