To find the answer, I had to visit the Library of Congress and dust off a scientific paper so old it is not publicly available on the internet.
I began to fear that the claim that a 45-day-old fetus shows brain activity was wrong. In fact, all the papers posted publicly online quoted the brain research on babies in the first trimester second-hand. Worse, most researchers use fetal EEGs to record brain activity in babies during childbirth or in the last trimester of pregnancy. I expected that electrical signals coming from the mother’s muscles would mask those from the brain of the unborn child. I set out to find the original research and determine if it was done well. How could a baby the size of a grape produce enough electrical activity to be detected? But, as any neuroscientist will tell you, it is difficult to record electrical activity from adult human brains using electroencephalography (EEG) due to interference from the scalp muscles and cranial bones. That would be just three weeks after the fetal heart starts beating (2), and one week after the earliest-recorded fetal movements (3). According to some websites I had read, electrical activity had been recorded from the brain of a human fetus only six weeks and three days after conception (1). To view this report as a PDF, see Fetal EEGs: Signals from the Dawn of LifeĪs a neuroscientist, and the mother of two children, I have always wanted to know how little ones’ brains work.
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