for a baby its just black or white

Shruthi’s written this fascinating post about how her new born baby daughter only seems to admire her hair more than anything else! I was reminded of her post when a physiotherapist Sonali visited our home, and she was telling me to show flash cards of simple geometric shapes in black and white to my new born son for a few seconds once in a way, during his first month. So we made a few and stuck them on cardboard to make them like flash cards.

Sonali explained something which reminded me of Shruthi’s post, that kids for the first 1.5 months or so (earlier it used to be 3 months, they’re smarter in recent generations!) recognize and identify only B&W – jet black and pure white. This is because of the chronological difference in the development of rods and cones in our eyes. the more sensitive rods develop first (which facilitate vision at low light levels, but not color), and then followed by the cones (which can recognize color). For the time being, anything that’s gray looks just kind of hazy. Apparently red is the first color they start recognising, so she recommended adding in that color in subsequent flash cards after 1.5 months!

It seems one of the advantages is also to help in developing attention and interactivity. I’ll never know if it had never made a difference to my son if we hadn’t tried it out, but since this was a natural thing and he might as well look at those cards for a few seconds instead of anything else, we gave it a shot. Most of the time he didn’t seem to have any particular reaction to them, so who knows whether it helped or not, but it was good fun anyway! 🙂

Another interesting suggestion she gave was for the father to spend good amount of time holding the baby as well. And to talk to the baby, read stories to him, etc even though he may not look like he’s understanding anything. Also she suggested we speak to him mostly in a normal tone like we’d talk to any adult, rather than in any coochie coochie tones [and this I happened to have been doing most of the time anyway 🙂 not bad my paternal instincts heh heh ]

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See also: baby whisperer (wow… had never imagined when I’d posted that that I’d have my own son few years later!)

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PS: I made a website for Dr. Sonali but as she’s not too web savvy (also she dosen’t stay in Bangalore so we’re not much in regular contact) and dosen’t look like she’s going to be updating it much.