Cry Victory

38 Weeks and 11 hours in the coming: Meet the latest and greatest bleeding-edge technology in bio-hacking: the human baby.


Figure 1. Benjamin Lloyd: 18.5", 7lbs 5.2oz

A. and her husband just brought home their 3-day old newborn, Ben. Both parents are doing very well (although sleep-deprived). Ben is their first-born, and this effectively makes me an Aunt again (Auntie, to be specific). He also comes with all sorts of interesting and useful features such as: a pug nose (to avoid suffocation while he breast-feeds); a love of white noise (so that SHHH-ing him actually works); and an affection for warm, constricting places (which means he likes to be swaddled in to a Baby Ben Burrito). He can also put his foot up to his nose and is learning to sleep through the hiccups.

Ben looks very intelligent -- he can already lift his own head and appears to be able to track voices -- which is very good for a newborn! In reality, however, Ben is quite dumb. Babies like Ben are stimulus-response automata. He has no sense of cause and effect, he only knows that he's happy or he's unhappy -- he couldn't tell you why he's unhappy, and he couldn't tell you that anything can fix his unhappiness. He can't comfort himself. Ben's not even cognizant yet, but he is very, very cute. And he needs constant input to form neural pathways (it goes hand-in-hand with his constant twitching and erratic breathing; he's still forming his autonomic nervous system). Consequently, there's no such thing as spoiling a baby, it's impossible for him to be too happy. And this is where the killer bio-h4x0r feature of Ben's kicks in: pheromones. He already uses pheromones (or, rather, his mother does) to help him root around and find a nipple to breast-feed from, but I think Ben may also produce baby-brain-inducing pheromones of his own. I wish I had a proper citation, but I'm unable to access PubMed to review article abstracts at the moment.

My assertion: newborns produce a pheromone that makes adults want to touch and cuddle them. Why? Well, Ben smells like a newborn, and that smell stays on your clothes for some hours after handling him, much like the smell of say, a boyfriend or girlfriend. And while I like babies, and while I have every reason to love and adore Ben, I was constantly caught off guard by how much I liked holding him, cuddling him, kissing him, humming to him and rubbing his back. It was as though a contented, sleeping baby was the ultimate human accomplishment - even though he wasn't at all fussy for his third day post-utero. Then after leaving, it took a few hours and a shower for the baby-brain to wear off and for my normal, rational thought to return. Thus, I postulate the existence of infant pheromones. I've seen enough stupid parents that I truly doubt the existence of "maternal instinct". Also, I've seen newborns have this effect on men who swear to hate babies (and usually detest older infants and toddlers). And, you know, there are also those rare instances of babies being raised by bears or wolves.

It's not exactly fun to have your cerebral-cortex co-opted into caring for a larval human. As M says, babies are terrific; they inspire terror. They are fragile, uncomprehending, extremely complex systems that are trivial to damage. I'm not entirely sure how any of us survive. But here's to Ben, he's a very sweet baby with a rather large extended family to look after him. The list of people who will change his diaper might very well include a few Nobel laureates. And as long as he doesn't vote Republican or get anyone knocked up, he'll be just fine.