Tell Me Again How I Was Born

Mother, tell me again how I was born. Dad, tell me how you felt. Tell me if you were scared the hours before I was born.

How was your joy? When you first saw me, was I who you thought I would look? Tell me again how everything was when I was born, even though I feel this story as my own pocket. Because it is said that by remembering you can go through it again, and to rejoice in memories is to share happiness.

Every child at some point becomes curious and wants to know how it came into the world. Sometimes the parents and grandparents tell the story and omit the medical (perhaps traumatic) parts of the birth.

They focus on how it felt and writing a prologue to life and filling it with magical stories as well as symbolic details. This gives the child a meaningful origin, a point of reference.

These stories, which are woven into our family, also define us as human beings. Knowing how I was born and how it was and visualizing our parents seeing us for the first time helps us to place ourselves on our own timeline, because none of us can remember our own birth.

Plato said that the simple act of being born suggests that one begins to “forget”. This Athenian philosopher explained to us that when the soul is locked in the body, we lose a universe of wisdom that we originally had.

We must therefore begin to learn again to “remember” what we once knew, what was once ours.

His theory of remembering has some interesting nuances. It also makes us think about the kind of instinctive, primitive knowledge that a baby can have in the peaceful womb.

Before it enters the world, a baby already knows that it is a human. In its immature brain, there is a universe of instincts, brain cells and genes where everything is written. In fact, this baby who has not yet seen anything of the outside world can identify and respond to faces.

Lancaster University in the UK published an interesting article in the journal “Current Biology”, explaining that 34-week-old fetuses respond to shadows that look like a human face.

The researchers projected light through the mother’s uterine wall and observed how babies turned their heads to follow images that looked like faces. The other images and shapes did not interest them. These experiments show two amazing things. The first is that fetuses between 33 and 34 weeks can already process sensory information and distinguish between different types of information.

The second, which is even more fascinating, is that we are “programmed” to create bonds with our own species. For example, it does not need any knowledge from after the birth to know what mother and father will look like.

The child will of course not recognize specific characteristics, but will “recognize” or “remember” (as Plato had said) the aspect, form and proportion that its own species has.

We do not remember anything about how we came into this world. It is lost in the ocean of time. It is a tunnel that disappears into a brain that has not yet formed a mature prefrontal cortex. The memory is vague, if it even exists, because a newborn baby does not yet have a fully functional hippocampus, which is the structure that determines which sensory information will be transferred to the “long-term memory”.

It is not yet active and will not be until the age of three, when the child begins to create important memories.

But psychologists have discovered that babies between three and six months old have a certain type of memory for a while. They are implicit or unconscious memories stored in the cerebellum.

These memories make the children associate warmth and security with their own mother’s voice. This is an imprint associated with instinct, that silent whisper from our brain that causes us to form bonds with others of our own kind. It’s vital.

None of us remember our own birth. We do not know how we felt or thought when we came in contact with the external world of shapes, colors and crazy sounds.

It may have seemed threatening. Maybe we panicked. But the fear disappeared as soon as we were placed on our mother’s breasts.

Since I have no memory of the event, I appreciate the stories the family tells. That unique, special story of how I was born.