Your Amazing Newborn by Nathalie Kelley

When most of us arrived into the world as newborn infants, a newborn baby was thought to be unintelligent and unfeeling with primitive and undeveloped senses. Not until the mid 1960s did research begin to show us the truly amazing complexity and wholeness of the newborn child. Now for the first time in the history of humanity, we have scientific evidence to reinforce our intuition that the newborn infant is thinking, feeling, miraculous being with astounding abilities and even greater mystery.
Six States of Awareness
By closely observing your baby, you will quickly learn to recognize its six states of consciousness. These are: quiet alert, active alert, crying, drowsiness, quiet sleep and active sleep. Each state has its own distinct function and set of behaviors. During your baby's first week, it spends about three hours a day in the quiet alert state gazing and being completely receptive to it's environment. About 16 to 20 hours a day is spent sleeping, alernating every 30 minutes from quiet sleep to active sleep. Your baby spends 50% of its sleep time dreaming, where it integrates new information, an enormous amount compared with our 15%.
What do babies dream about? Although uncertain, every measurable evidence suggests that infants' dreams are similar to ours and begin early in utero, containing material from their life experience thus far.
Movement
Recently with the use of special films, reserachers have discovered that there is a remarkable rhythm every minute and a half to the seemingly meaningless arm and leg, movements your baby makes. Even more exciting is the discovery of synchronous movement of the newborn to adult speech . Visible only with slow motion footage, babies move in response to each syllable we speak as if dancing to the rhythm of our voice.
Sight
While in the womb, your baby has seen only light and dark. Immediatley after birth newborns seem eager to look around and see the world for the first time. Your newborn can focus on objects 8-10 inches away, exactly the distance for your breastfeeding infant to see your face clearly. Nature supports the bonding process in hundreds of miraculous ways. If undrugged at birth, your baby will be in an extended period of quiet alertness for its first hour before falling asleep. This is a magical moment of awe and wonder. Your baby will gaze wide-eyed into your eyes as eagerly as you gaze into his or hers. Faces and contrasting light and dark patterns hold the most visual appeal to your infant.
Hearing
Your newborn has been hearing for several months in utero, and can hear very well at birth. Your baby actually hears small units of sound better than you do! Its hearing extends to as low as 40 decibels. A healthy newborn can determine which direction a sound is coming from and turn toward that direction, demonstrating a complex coordination of movement, sound, and sight.
Infants prefer speech to other sounds, and high-pitched voices in particular. "Womb sounds" have proven to have a powerful effect on the newborn. Studies of groups of newborns who heard a broadcast of a heartbeat in hospital nurseries show that they gained more wight, slept better and cried less than the newborns who did not hear the heart sounds.
Smell
Your newborn infant's sense of smell is much finer than most adults. By three days of age your infant can identify your smell and prefers it over other adults. A newborn can smell its mother in the room even if he can't see or hear her. Like us, the infant prefers sweet smells to sour or bitter odors.
Intelligence
Your child not only hears in utero, but through constantly hearing your voice, it is learning and practicing language. In "Babies Remember Birth", Dr. Chamberlain describes how sound can be broken down into minute parts and "cryprints" are produced. Each infant has its own unique cry which matches the mother's speech patterns. The fetus has been taking language lessons and acquires the mother's accents and intonations. Babies of deaf mothers have an unusual cry or none at all. Babies as young as two day old can learn to manipulate their environment through devices that meter sucking. If, when they suck fast, they get a high-pitched voice, they will suck fast. When this order is reversed, they quickly adapt and suck at the right speed to get the high-pitched voice.
The innate wisdom and intelligence of even the youngest babies cannot be underestimated. The more we learn about newborns, the more intelligent "they" become. And there is still so much we don't know!
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