Newborns Senses

Each of your baby’s five senses is in working order from the moment of birth. A baby does not have to learn to see, to hear, to sense touch through the skin, or even to smell or taste. The equipment for all these activities is in-built. What is lacking is experience: knowledge of what things look or sound like; how different things feel or smell or taste. All five senses are bombarded with stimuli as soon as the baby comes out of the womb. Learning through the senses goes on from the moment.

Finding out exactly what a new baby senses is exceedingly difficult because he cannot tell us what he is feeling. Research workers have to find ways of measuring the baby’s responses without his direct cooperation. Often we cannot say more than that babies respond with pleasure to certain kinds of sensory stimulation and with distress to others. The sense of touch is an instance in point. We know that babies react with calm pleasure to warm, soft, firm pressure, especially up the front surface of their bodies. We know that they react by gripping to the feel of an object in their fists; we know that they react with sucking reflexes to a stroking touch on the cheek. But we do not know exactly what they feel or what difference they sense when their skins are tickled with a feather or stroked with sandpaper.

Smelling and Tasting

We assume that newborn babies have a sense of smell because we know they have a sense of taste and the two are intimately linked. But experiments in smell-differentiation would be impossible. Offered bad eggs and daffodils, babies can neither tell or show you whether they can distinguish between them nor which they “prefer.” They have to go on breathing even if each breath brings an odor they find noxious. They are not yet able to hold their breath on purpose.

Taste is easier to test. Bitter, acid or sour tastes make the baby screw up his face, turn his head away and/or cry. He can also differentiate accurately between plain, slightly sweetened and very sweet water. We know this because while he will suck a bottle containing any one of these, he will suck longer and harder as the sweetness increases. No wonder it is so difficult to control the sugar-intake of older children!

Hearing and Making Sounds

Your baby’s only deliberate sounds during these early days are crying. It may seem to you that all the crying sounds the same, but in fact there is a repertory of different cries which represent different states of feeling. Whether or not you feel you can recognize, by ear, the difference between one kind of cry and another, you will almost certainly find yourself reacting differently to each. When the types of cry are analyzed by sound spectrograph you can actually see the differences between them, differences of tone, of duration and of rhythm.

A baby’s pain cry has a particular intensity and rhythm. Instinct will tell you to take the stairs three at a time. You will find that you are thinking of nothing but getting to the baby – fast.

A hunger cry is quite different. It has particular patterns of sound and pause which are the same for all babies but quite different from any of your baby’s other cries. If you are breast-feeding, that particular cry may start the “let-down” reflex so that your milk starts to flow even as you get up to go to the baby. If you are bottle-feeding, the cry probably directs you to the kitchen to start warming the bottle. In this case, however, although you will have no doubt at all the baby needs you, you will not have the sense of urgency that comes with the pain cry.

Fear sounds different again. The fear cry is a sound of pure desolation and is highly infectious. By the time you reach your baby your own pulse will be racing and adrenalin will be flooding through your body, readying it to fight any danger to protect him.

By the time he is around four weeks old, your baby will begin to make other sounds besides crying. He will make small gurgly googly noises when he is relaxed after a feeding and little tense whimpery sounds when he is building up toward hunger cries. He is moving toward the next stage in communication – cooing.

Listening

Babies can hear from the moment of birth. They can sense and differentiate sound vibrations while they are still in the womb and they react with soothed pleasure after birth to recordings of heartbeat sounds, which they have lived with before it.

Loud, sudden sounds will make your baby jump. The sharper the sound the more extreme will be his reaction. Thunder rolling around the house will not bother him nearly as much as a plate smashing on a hard floor. Just as clearly as he dislikes these sounds, the baby enjoys (or at least is soothed and relaxed by) repetitive rhythmical sounds. He will enjoy music, but he will enjoy the rhythmical pounding of a drum or the steady whirr of your vacuum cleaner just as much – as far as we can tell.

But while the baby clearly hears all these sounds, the ones to which he listens, with obvious concentration, are the sounds of people talking. He has a built-in interest in voices and in voice-like sounds. Because they come from the caretakers without whom he cannot survive, he is programmed to pay attention to them.

Unless you are on the look-out for it, you may not notice how much your baby enjoys your voice during these first weeks. At this stage his looking and listening systems are still separate. He listens without looking for the source of the sound he hears, so he often listens to your voice without looking at you. But if you watch him carefully, you will see his reactions to your loving prattle. If he is crying, he will often stop as you approach the crib, talking. He does not need to see you or to feel your touch first. If he is lying still when you begin to speak to him, he will start to move excitedly. If he is kicking, he will stop and freeze to attention, concentrating on your voice.

It will be a long time before the baby can understand your words but from the first days of his life he will react to the tones he hears in your voice. When you talk softly and caressingly he reacts with pleasure, but if you speak sharply to an older child while handling the baby, he will probably cry, while if something should make you cry out in fear while you are holding him, he will be instantly panic-stricken.

Looking

Babies can see, clearly and with discrimination, from the moment of birth. If your baby seems to spend a lot of waking time gazing blankly into space or looking toward a brightly lit window or blowing curtain, this is not because babies are incapable of seeing anything more detailed, but because you do not put anything else within easy visual range.

A new baby can focus his eyes so as to see things clearly when they are at different distances. He can, but he seldom does because, until his eye-muscles strengthen, it is very difficult for him. The easy focusing distance for a new baby is about 8-10in (20-25cm) from the bridge of the nose. At that precise distance he can see clearly but objects which are further away are blurred. If he lies in his crib with nothing within his focal distance to look at, he will look across the room at whatever he can perceive through the distance-blur. Brightness and movement (as every near-sighted person knows) are the two things that will be visible to him.

If, armed with this information, you deliberately put things close enough to your baby’s eyes for him to see them clearly, he will “choose” to pay attention to much more subtle stimuli than brightness or movement. You can test his “choices” for yourself by holding pairs of objects where he can look at them. He will look at a simple circular red rattle if there is nothing else close enough for him to see, but if you add a sheet of paper with a complicated black and white pattern on it he will turn his attention to that instead. He will look at a simple cube, but add a more complex shape such as a tea strainer and he will look at that. He is programmed to give his attention to complex patterns and shapes because he must learn a complex visual world.

His fixed-focal distance is not a matter of random chance. On the contrary, it is exactly the distance which separates his face from yours when you hold and talk to him or when you are breast-feeding. Just as voices are the most important things for him to listen to, so faces are the most important things for him to look at and he is innately programmed to study them intently whenever he can. It may even be that the blurring out of more distant objects is developmentally useful to him as it helps him to concentrate on those vital faces undistracted by other things.

New babies do not know that people are people so your baby cannot know, when he studies your face, that what he is looking at is you. He simply gives his full visual attention to any face or to anyting he sees which is face-like. His criteria of “face-like” have been studied in detail. If an object or a picture has a hairline, eyes, a mouth and a chin-line, the baby will react to it as a face. If you watch his eyes you will see that he starts at the top, scans that hairline, moves his gaze slowly down to the chin-line and then back to the eyes. Once he is looking the stimulus in the eye, he will go on for much longer than he will look at anything else.

While it is interesting to try out this reaction by showing your baby a simple sketch of a face, or a balloon with a face drawn on it, looking at real faces is much more valuable to him. When he has learned enough about faces you will get your reward for patiently giving him yours to study. One day soon that intent scanning will end as usual at your eyes but it will culminate in his first true social gesture to the outside world. It will end with his first smile.

Your Newborn’s Senses

Until recently, the new babies were extemely limited in their range of responses. We thought that a wet diaper, hunger, or colic were the only things that brought out a response in a new baby. We believed that babies could not see at birth, but when they finally did see, they could not discern color. We also believed that babies could not hear because their ears were full of mucus and fluid. And we thought that babies could be spoiled if they were picked up every time they cried. How we underestimated babies!

After years of study, we now recognize and consider some of the newborn’s amazing capabilities:

Seeing

When he is quiet and alert, your baby can focus on objects seven to eighteen inches away. He prefers to look at human faces, complex patterns, and slowly moving objects–particularly shiny objects with sharply contrasting colors. Your newborn can follow a slowly moving object in a 180 degree arc above his head (if the object catches his attention).

Hearing

Infants hear from birth and react to sound. They respond to voices (especially female, which is why people often unconsciously raise the pitch of their voices when talking to babies). Your baby heard your heartbeat, your voice, your partner’s voice, and other internal and external noises while inside you. He may become calm or alert when he hears these familiar sounds (when you hold him close or talk to him) or when he hears similar sounds (such as a dishwasher, a washing machine, or certain music). He will also startle at sudden, loud noises.

Smell

Your baby has a refined sense of smell. Within the first week, he recognizes differences in smells and can even tell the difference in smell between his own mother’s milk and another mother’s milk.

Taste

Babies may react to sweet, sour, salty, and bitter tastes, preferring sweet substances.

Touch

Your baby enjoys being stroked, rocked, caressed, gently jiggled, and allowed to nestle and mold to your body while being held. He also likes comfort and warmth–not too hot or cold. He enjoys swaddling when he is young and freedom of movement as he grows older.