Thanks to the bloggers

Thank you to the writers of the blogs that have supported the book over the last year or so: One Strangely Lush Mother, Hilery Williams, Sultanas under the carseat, The Briggle Blog, rabbitIng, Kickypants, Alpha Mummy, Mind Hacks, The Cedar Lounge Revolution, clearframe and Morning of Dystopia. And thanks to the readers in the books forums at Mumsnet and The Breast Way for mentioning the book. Sorry if I've missed anyone!

With a new novel pouring out of me, keeping up with Twitter is about all I've been able to manage for the last few weeks, but I promise there'll be something new in the next couple of days.

What tiny eyes see

I've been talking quite a bit recently about how the world looks to a newborn baby (see my Radiolab and Groks podcasts). So I found Tiny Eyes to be a lot of fun. This is a website, run by a couple of psychologists and a graphic designer, which allows you to upload your own pics and see how a baby would perceive the images. You can alter a couple of variables: the age of the baby (from newborn to 6 months) and the viewing distance. You'll note that babies can see in colour, but their colours are not quite the same as ours. Try it out for yourself here.

(Thanks to Melissa for putting me on to this.)

Don't keep it to yourself

Over at Psychology Today I have been blogging about the psychological significance of children's private speech, a topic that will be familiar to readers of this blog. You can read the post here.

Parents and experts

I had been planning to blog on our recent article on children's trust in the testimony of their mothers (and others), but Dave Sobel at Psychology Today beat me to it. Dave's is a thorough, enjoyable account of what we and others have been up to, so I'll just point you to his article - you can read it in full here.

Radiolab podcast

Jad Abumrad from WNYC's brilliant Radiolab got in touch to say that the book had inspired some musings on the consciousness of his baby son, Amil. We had a fascinating conversation down an ISDN line, and you can listen to the resulting podcast here.

The developing storyteller

This is the title of a new post in the wonderful OnFiction blog, describing some new research linking imaginary companions to children's narrative abilities. You can read the post here.

Astonishing, but not in a good way

Cover of Mother's Milk

I enjoyed Jenny Turner's essay review on mummylit and dadlit in last week's Guardian Review, and I would support her call for a bit less niceness in our writing and thinking about babies. I would part company from her on a couple of points, though. Firstly, I personally found little in the writings of the "post-Freudian baby theorists" (such as Winnicott) that took babies seriously on their own terms, rather than being a mouthpiece for a particular, adult-oriented theoretical perspective. Secondly, I think Turner picks a bad example of the supposed richness of a baby's experience. Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk is a delightful book in many ways, and many of its finest qualities relate to its treatment of children. But five-year-old Robert's memory of his own birth is incoherent, and pays no attention to the picture of infant consciousness that researchers have painstakingly drawn over recent decades.

Why had they pretended to kill him when he was born? Keeping him awake for days, banging his head again and again against a closed cervix; twisting the cord around his throat and throttling him; chomping through his mother's abdomen with cold shears; clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side; dragging him out of his home and hitting him; shining lights in his eyes and doing experiments; taking him away from his mother while she lay on the table, half-dead ...

To the best of our knowledge, babies do not feel these events or form a conscious understanding of them in these ways. As I've noted elsewhere on this blog, it is highly unlikely that a five-year-old child would remember the events of his birth at all. This is a grown-up writer imagining what it would be like, as an adult, to go through the process of birth. It is not even true to a five-year-old child's understanding—which is the astonishing bit, given how carefully and sensitively Robert's consciousness is rendered elsewhere in the novel.