Before I Could Tell

In 1986, when I was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, the ear, nose and throat specialist wanted to know as much as possible about my hearing and previous ear infections. I asked my mother. She told me what she remembered about an operation I had undergone as an infant in 1955, at the Catholic hospital in Kristiansand.

The middle ear infection had been so severe that part of the bone near my ear had to be chiselled away. She also told me that I had been operated on without anaesthesia because infants were thought not yet to be conscious. A chisel against the bone near my ear. That image has stayed with me since our conversation.

I later tried to obtain my medical records. The hospital had closed many years earlier, and the documents from my treatment had been destroyed. My mother’s recollection is therefore what I have to rely on; I have been unable to confirm what anaesthesia I received.

But the question has stayed with me: If I experienced pain, how did I experience it? Could it hurt without my understanding what was happening? And could such an experience leave a trace in a life that had barely begun?

When I read Carl Zimmer’s article “Are Babies Conscious?” in The New York Times on October 5, 2026, I returned to these questions. Researchers are now investigating infant consciousness using methods unavailable when I was born. At the same time, the article touches on something I later encountered in my work: An infant has a life we must try to understand before they can tell us about it.

What We Look For

Three low tones, then a high one. The sequence repeats. Then come four low tones.

This small change stays with me. In adults, certain responses to a break in such sound patterns can indicate conscious processing. Zimmer describes an experiment in Germany in which newborns heard tones through earphones while sensors surrounding a specially designed cot recorded faint magnetic signals from their brains. In them, too, researchers found distinct responses to the changes.

Other studies examine how regions of the infant brain work together. Several findings suggest that newborns already have conscious experiences, although researchers continue to debate how to interpret the signs.

I pause at the distance between the infant who hears and the adult trying to understand what that hearing means. A signal on a screen can tell us that something is happening. The infant’s experience of the tone does not appear on the screen.

Charles Darwin approached the question through observation. When he became a father in 1839, he began keeping notes on his children’s development. At first, he recorded actions he regarded as instinctive: sucking, screaming, yawning and bodily movements. Later came language, self-recognition and more complex behaviour. According to Zimmer, Darwin believed there were no signs of consciousness in the youngest infants.

Our understanding has changed. Infants cried and responded to touch in Darwin’s time, too. But their responses were read through a particular understanding of what consciousness had to be.

Gadamer’s concept of pre-understanding helps me see this. We approach the infant with a yardstick already in hand. If we expect words and self-recognition, those are what we will tend to look for. Other expressions may be understood as reflexes and fall outside what we regard as signs of experience. New methods of measurement widen our field of vision, but they also challenge the yardstick.

An infant does not necessarily need to be able to think “I am in pain” for something to hurt. Experiencing pain and being able to tell someone about it are different capacities.

The Infants Who Fell Silent

From my work in child welfare, I remember infants who had suffered abuse or a lack of care. Some seemed both unwanted and unloved. They were quiet and vulnerable, with a gaze that seemed turned inward. When I tried to meet their eyes, they looked away.

In some of these infants’ histories, there were accounts of crying that had brought no one to them. In time, they had fallen silent. To me, it looked as though they had given up trying to call someone.

That was an interpretation of what I encountered. But it raised a question that still moves me: What had the infant experienced before falling silent? Had they begun to expect that no one would respond?

These encounters are no scientific test of infant consciousness. They nevertheless show how much is at stake when we try to understand an infant’s expressions. Silence could easily be overlooked. An infant who did not demand attention might receive even less of it.

Here, Løgstrup’s ethical demand takes concrete form. We hold something of another person’s life in our hands. In an encounter with an infant, dependence is profound, while the capacity to formulate a demand is slight. As I read him, this is precisely a reason to attend more closely. The demand must be recognised even when it does not take the form of a plea or a protest.

I had to try to reach the infant who looked away. The adult had to respond even when the crying had stopped.

What Might Leave a Trace

In hospital, the infant was supposed to receive help. There, too, how adults understood the infant’s pain was crucial.

In “Discovering Pain in Newborn Infants,” the physician and researcher Kanwaljeet J. S. Anand describes how the belief that newborns did not perceive pain persisted into the 1980s. Together with concerns about complications from anaesthesia, it contributed to some infants undergoing surgery without anaesthesia, while others received treatment that provided inadequate pain relief. Methods of anaesthesia for newborns also existed in the 1950s. The history therefore encompasses several practices.

I read this with my own operation in mind. It makes the question of what I might have experienced more pressing.

I have difficulty remembering what I hear. A specialist psychologist once suggested that I might have begun to rely less on hearing as a source of memory. I asked whether pain from the ear infection and the operation in infancy could have played a part. She left the possibility open but emphasised that the connection could not be established.

I leave the explanation there. Yet the question of how early experiences may enter into an infant’s development remains. What does it mean to receive relief? What does it mean to have someone respond when something hurts? Can an experience matter without later being retrievable as a memory?

Before Words

Towards the end of the article, researchers ask whether infant consciousness might take a different form from adult consciousness. Complex patterns of infant brain activity open up a hypothesis that infants may be receptive to their surroundings in richer and more varied ways than we usually imagine. Greater complexity in a measurement does not, however, in itself mean a richer conscious experience.

The thought makes the image of consciousness as a single ladder less self-evident. Perhaps infants have ways of experiencing the world that differ from those of adults, who select, recognise and name what is happening.

For me, this brings back the eyes of the infants I met in child welfare. I came with my experience, my words and my understanding. The infant came with their body and their gaze. The encounter required my understanding to be open to change through what I saw.

Our understanding of infants has likewise changed since Darwin. Research gives us more signs to follow. Care requires us to follow them attentively.

My mother told me what she remembered. The medical records might have filled out her account, but they would not have told me what it was like to be the infant on the operating table. When I think of our conversation now, the eyes of the infants I met in child welfare return as well.

Those infants already had lives that needed care. So did I, before I could tell.