INFANCY TIDBITS

ONE INTERESTING FACT LEADS to another. As an example, the Interesting Facts website recently noted that “Babies Blink Less Than Adults.” Here are tidbits gleaned from this report and from associated reading and Googling.

“The average adult,” Interesting Facts recounts, “blinks about 15 times a minute, whether to lubricate the eyes, clear unwanted irritants, or refocus attention. Babies, on the other hand, blink far less often—only two to three blinks per minute on average.”

Dopamine Levels? The website continues, “The answer may lie with our brain’s dopamine levels, which control human blinking. Scientists initially made connections between this feel-good neurotransmitter and blinking because people with schizophrenia, who usually have excess dopamine production, may blink more frequently.”

“The inverse is also true,” Interesting Facts continues, “— Parkinson’s disease, caused by damaged dopamine-producing neurons, makes people blink less often. So a baby’s infrequent blinking may be a clue about how the brain forms after we’re born, showing that a baby’s dopamine system is likely still forming and thus impacting blinking frequency.”

Less Lube, Another Demand. “However,” the website says, “dopamine production is only one piece of the mystery. Scientists also theorize that because a baby’s eyes are small, they likely require less lubrication than adult peepers.”

Also, the following comment led me onto other paths: “Babies may also blink less often because it’s actually pretty demanding to be a baby, requiring more active attention to gather the necessary visual information for survival (and thus leaving less energy for blinking). So while babies may seem like pint-sized layabouts, they’re actually putting in a lot of work to become functioning and frequently blinking members of society.”

Back 15 years ago, Anadad O’Conner noted this phenomenon in “The Claim: Babies Blink Less Than Adults Do,” The New York Times, December 8, 2008. He observed, “Considering the world of visual stimuli to which infants are suddenly exposed, and the range of primitive reflexes they typically display — forcibly sucking on objects put in their mouths, grasping things put in their hands, and throwing out their arms when startled — frequent blinking may seem natural for an infant. But studies show that they blink spontaneously at a rate far below that of adults.”

Baby’s Business. Wikipedia offers other tidbits of infancy: “A newborn’s head is very large in proportion to the body, and the cranium is enormous relative to his or her face. While the adult human skull is about one seventh of the total body length, the newborn’s is about 1/4.”

“At birth,” Wikipedia recounts, “many regions of the newborn’s skull have not yet been converted to bone, leaving “soft spots” known as fontanels…. Later in the child’s life, these bones will fuse together in a natural process. A protein called noggin is responsible for the delay in an infant’s skull fusion.”

Ha. Hence the misplaced etymology of “Conked on the noggin.”

Mirror Neurons. “Caregivers of an infant,” Wikipedia says, “are advised to pick up on the infant’s facial expressions and mirror them. Reproducing and empathizing with their facial expressions enables infants to experience effectiveness and to recognize their own actions more easily (see mirror neurons).”

Wikipedia continues from the caregiver’s point of view: “Exaggeratedly reproduced facial expressions and gestures are recommended, as they are clearer forms of expression. The baby’s babbling should also be picked up and repeated. By imitating each other’s sounds the first simple dialogues are initiated. Accentuated pronunciation and melodic intonation make it easier to recognize individual words in a sentence. However, it is not advisable to use simplified ‘baby talk‘ (e.g. ‘Did you “ouch”?’ instead of, ‘Did you hurt yourself?’).”

Orson Welles’ First Utterances? I’m reminded of Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles: A Biography, in which she cites Dr. Maurice Bernstein’s recounting 18-month-old George Orson Welles’ first utterance to him: “The desire to take medicine is one of the greatest features which separates men from animals.” 

Why “Mama”? Other sources suggest that many infants’ first word is “mama.” This makes sense in English, as the repeated “m” sounds comes from murmuring through the lips twice naturally. “Dada” sounds almost as natural, though it has some tongue control as well, whereas “Papa” requires explosive “p” sounds.

These arguments, though, got me thinking about other languages: Are “mama,” “papa,”and “dada” cross-linguistic? 

Maybe in Sanskrit? Other research for another day. By the way, did you know that Orson’s mother Beatrice née Ives Welles included Sanskrit among her cultural interests? ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023