I'm an engineer at heart and I like to understand how things work. Our new baby, Anne, is no exception. Let's take a programmers approach to understanding this mysterious black box.
Inputs (the 5 senses):
- Sight Anne certainly likes to look around. My understanding is that babies generally see only high contrast at a pretty short distance (1 foot?) She certainly likes looking at faces close up.
- Sound Whitenoise is supposed to be soothing. She also likes U2 and (heaven help me) Cher. Loud. I think she likes my singing too. I'm not sure why.
- Taste She eats a lot. I'm not sure how much variation in taste she actually gets. There are theories that the mother's diet can affect the milk, but I haven't personally verified that. Ewwww.
- Touch Babies need to be held and touched. They also need to be warm. One input is swaddling -- wrapping her tightly so that she can't move her arms or legs. Rocking and dancing with her count here too.
- Smell Smell is supposed to be one of the most powerful senses. I've yet to see her react to any smells specifically, but I'm sure she is paying attention.
Outputs:
- Biological Outputs Doctors are funny creatures. They are really concerned about all forms of matter escaping from our bodies: liquid, solid or gas. Parents also pay close attention to this. The amount, type and origin seem to be important clues to understanding the baby.
- Cries She has many and varied cries. Some of them are short yelps to draw attention while others are reports of murder nearby. Then there is the scary quivering lower lip. This is supposedly normal and a byproduct of her immature nervous system. It just kills me to see her do it though.
- Posture The way she holds her body is an important clue. If she is curled up like a bug or stretched out and rigid means something.
- Eyes and Face Her eyes and face are very expressive. Almost too expressive. She goes through a facial expression every 5 seconds or so.
- Sleep You'd think that it would be easy to tell if she is asleep or not. It really isn't though. She can be sleeping with her eyes closed or just pretending to sleep so that the minute you put her down she perks right up again.
There you have it -- 5 inputs and 5 outputs. Sounds like a pretty simple system to me. The problem is that she is indeed a very complex state machine. She is so complex that there is no way to map the effect of the inputs (feeding her, for example) to the outputs (her current crying state). One would think that it would be easy to empirically derive causal relationships between certain inputs and certain outputs. Nope. She has more states than a Rubik's cube (43,252,003,274,489,856,000). The baby is indeed a very complex creature that does not yield her secrets to such a naïve logical approach.
The amazing part is that biology takes over. My own brain is more complex than
it can understand. It has adapted to the baby and somehow we're able make it
work. Except when we can't -- like last night when all of us were up every
90 minutes.