Mother, tell me again how my birth went. Father, tell me what your experience was like, if you were afraid in the hours before I was born, tell me your joy, and if when you first saw me it looked a little like what you had dreamed of, explain to me again how my birth was, although I already know this story well, I like to remember it, because remembering it is reviving and certainly sharing happiness.
Every child, at some point in his childhood, feels the desire or curiosity to know what that moment was like when he came into the world, sometimes it is the parents themselves or even grandparents who tell this story, setting aside the traumatic aspects of life. Many births almost always focus exclusively on the emotional, to show a beginning of life full of magical stories and symbolic details that will give the child a meaningful origin, a reference, a portal.
“Birth is not an act, it is a process. ” Erich Fromm?
These stories created within a family nucleus also define us as individuals. Knowing, what happened in our birth, what were the peculiarities and imagining for a moment the reaction of our parents at that time is something that helps us to place ourselves, to find an origin, the first marker of our lifeline. Because if there is one thing none of us have achieved to this day, it is to remember this moment, to remember its birth.
Plato said in his texts that the mere fact of being born involves beginning to “forget”. This Athenian sage explained that when the soul is trapped in a body and its sensitive world, we lose a vast universe of wisdom that was given to us in a primitive way, so we have to relearn what we already knew, what was ours before.
His theory of reminiscence is not without interesting nuances. One might wonder, for example, what kind of instinctive, atavic, and primitive knowledge or wisdom can fetuses have when they live in the liquid, serene, placid environment that is the maternal uterus?
Before reaching the world, the fetus already knows that it is human, in its still immature brain, the universe of instincts lives, pulsating, pumping hard into these brain cells and genes where all we are, everything we need is written. so that this baby, who has not yet seen anything from the outside world and has never seen a face, is able to identify and react to the shadow of a face.
The University of Lancaster in the UK has published an interesting article in the journal Current Biology, this paper explains how fetuses at 34 weeks of gestation react to shadows in the form of a human face. Researchers projected light through the wall of the mother’s uterus and realized that fetuses turned their heads only to follow face-shaped images. The rest of the stimuli and other forms didn’t get your attention.
These studies have shown two things that are simply surprising. The first is that fetuses between 33 and 34 weeks old are already able to process and discriminate sensory information, the second and even more fascinating is that we are ”programmed” to connect with our own species. The postnatal experience is not necessary to know, because example, what the parent will look like. The baby won’t recognize his traits, of course, but will he?(as Plato would say), what appearance, shape and proportion individuals of his species have.
We have no memory of the moment we reach this world, it is a sea lost in the thicket of time, it is a tunnel that disappears into the sparse convolutions of a brain where there is not yet a consolidated prefrontal cortex. is vague or non-existent, because the newborn’s brain has a poorly functioning hippocampus, because this structure determines which sensory information it will transfer to?it is not yet active and will not be active until the age of three when the child begins to consolidate important memories.
“We both have birthdays: the day of our birth and the day it awakens our consciousness. “Maharishi Mahesh?
However, psychologists have discovered that three- and six-month-old babies have a long memory: they are implicit or unconscious evocations, which are stored in the cerebellum and allow them, for example, to associate feelings of affection and safety with the mother’s voice. impressions associated with instinct, that latent noise in our brain that animates us, that pushes us to come into contact with our fellowmen and with what is vital to us.
In conclusion, we can say that none of us remember his birth, we do not know what the emotions were, what were the thoughts that suddenly invaded us when we came into contact with this outside world full of shapes, colors and sounds. We thought it was threatening, maybe we panicked, or maybe that fear was instantly extinguished, just as we were placed in the perfect shelter that is a mother’s skin.
And why we lack a memory that marks our own origin, our existential prologue, we always appreciate the history of our family, this story full of details and magic that every father, every mother, tells at one point in her life to hers. Children?