Michael Hyson, Ph.D on Birth and Babies!

Michael Hyson is a wonderful Neurobiologist whose shares his profound knowledge on babies awareness, why water birth is important and even expected, and just how far we've gotten from our "nature". He fell in love with the dolphins at an early age for their compassion, healing capabilities and their smarts! And I fell in love with his work when I read with wonder about the dolphins and the possibilities of one day birthing with dolphins! Thank you Michael for your wonderful donations to womankind. This is part one of a two part interview, there is just so much good stuff I encourage you to read both!

Michael Hyson: From Biology to Dolphins and Babies

Michael Hyson: Well, I grew up in Illinois and it was on a small farm, we had many pets, so I was always interested in biology. My father was a medical technician and worked pretty much as a pathologist. He knew all kinds of things like microbiology, parasitology, entomology. So, I got a lot of biology through osmosis. When I was around 12-13 I was interested in bats. I went into caves and collected some and was doing some sonar experiments with them. In the library, one day, I ran into a book “Porpoises and Sonar”. Next time I looked up everything I could on dolphins. One of the books was “Man and Dolphin” by John Lilly. I presume you know about John Lilly’s work?

Ashley: Yes, but only through your website actually. www.planetpuna.com

Michael Hyson: John Lilly was an MD, biophysicist, engineer, computer programmer - all kinds of things. Very impressive guy. He was once described as “a walking syllabus of western civilization”. By the end of the book he is describing teaching English to the dolphins. So, that got me very interested. The dolphins came to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago shortly thereafter, and I was able to go see them. My older brother Bob was offered a job, training dolphins. I encouraged him to do that and during summer vacation I helped him. I essentially lived with the dolphins in Port Aransas, Texas for a summer. That’s how dolphins got in my life! I went to a marine biology summer camp at Cape Haze Marine Lab headed by Dr. Eugenie Clark. She was studying sharks. Among other things she taught me to scuba dive and we worked with her team with sharks and other things. One thing I did that summer was a time-lapse film of a fish that develops from a single cell to a full baby fish in about 18 hours.

Ashley: Goodness. That’s quick!

Michael Hyson: Yes, and they are hermaphroditic too, Serranus subligaris, a little bass that has complete sexual equipment for male and female. They have these little battles over who gets to be female! As they start, they are both in male phase, with dark stripes. Eventually one of them is pushed into a corner and switches to female, and their stripes fade out. Then they go through this mating dance and at one point they both arch and snap and their eggs and sperm come out. The eggs have little oil droplets in them so they float to the top of the aquarium. We fished them out and they are all developing at the same rate. I was able to pull out an egg and get a time-lapse film of it and that got me interested in embryology and development.

Ashley: That’s so cool!

Michael Hyson: I ended up at the University of Miami and I got three degrees in biology there. I was pre-med for a while, but I eventually decided to specialize in Neurobiology. I went on to study perception; did a Masters on stereovision and a PhD that was a computer model of the retina to see how the signals were processed by the eye and then from there went to Cal Tech for a post-doc in stereovision and brain waves.

Backing up a bit, while at Miami, one of my major professors was Thorne Shipley who founded the journal Vision Research. He was working on EEG studies, using evoked responses. Basically you flash a light about 20 times into the eye and record the brain waves that happen just after the flash of light. Then average them and you get this curve called the evoked response. It gives you some idea of what the brain is doing in response to a light, sound or touch. We were working with babies, young children and school children. Some of them had learning difficulties, and we still have very little idea what’s going on with some of this. We did brain wave studies that showed that the children with learning disability - if you gave them light and looked at the response, it was fine, and if you gave them a sound, it was fine, if you gave them a touch it was fine. But if you mixed two or three stimuli, like sight, sound and touch, there seemed to be a conflict, because the response from the brain decreased, rather than, as with most people, it increases.

Ashley: That’s remarkable.

Michael Hyson: We had some indication from the brain waves of those with learning disability and it seemed to have something to do with integrating different sensory systems at the same time.

Ashley: Right. So it was some kind of sensory overload.

Michael Hyson: Yes. About this time, I was working on my master’s degree and met Dr. Hank Truby. Truby had been with the Lilly projects for 17 years. He was a linguist and an acoustic phonetician and he helped develop the voice printing technique (sonograms) with Bell Labs and IBM. He did a lot of things; he had 250 publications, spoke about 14 languages, played professional tennis and had 6 children. He was very interested in child development, a wonderful guy. He was the main one teaching the dolphins English in about 1965-68.

Michael Hyson Explains Just How Aware Newborns Are!

Ashley: That’s amazing.

Michael Hyson: Yes. It also showed that their sensory capability was fully on at birth. Shipley was able to show that babies had full stereoscopic vision within 20 minutes of birth. The learning rates were already going up exponentially. Rather than the old Descartes idea that babies are tabula rasa (a blank tablet), and barely able to do anything at birth, that’s all wrong! Babies are fully capable sensory-wise at birth. Their muscles may need some development, but their sensory capabilities are fully on! Their eyes are on, the ears are on, stereovision is working. All that. So you have an extremely aware baby right at birth.

Ashley: Um, hmm. Which changes a lot about how you deal with a newborn.

Michael Hyson: It changes a lot. The traditional view for hundreds of years has been that babies have hardly any sensory awareness at birth. Some people still have this idea that babies fail to sense pain. And there is still some portion of the earth that thinks if you circumcise a child and he’s crying and screaming, he is really OK, and will fail to even remember it, which is totally wrong.

So, the idea that our sensory systems are fully on at birth led to a biological puzzle for me. You see, there are two kinds of birth. Animals that are born and need more development after birth are called altricial. An extreme example would be things like ‘possums. Baby ‘possums look like fetuses, they’re hairless and their eyes are closed and the first thing they do when they are born is crawl, latch onto a nipple and get milk. And then they finish their development. People are familiar with the kangaroo where the baby goes into a pouch and latches onto a nipple and develops further there. In those cases it’s pretty obvious the baby needs more development. On the other end of the spectrum you have animals that are able to run right away, like wildebeasts. Or swim right away, like dolphins. Those animals in their style of birth are called precocious. You have on the altricial side things like kittens that take several days for the eyes to open. And on the other hand you have dolphins that can swim within seconds of birth.

Ashley: Right, right.

Michael Hyson: So that’s precocious. Now, because humans are hardly able to move when they are born in a one gravity field, in the air and then put into a bed, they were always considered altricial, as needing more development. But then there’s a puzzle - why would the sensory systems all be on? Because if they are altricial, they might as well go through more development and then the systems could turn on when they are ready to move. So this puzzle stuck in my head for years.

Ashley: I love that that’s your puzzle!

Michael Hyson Gives us the Whys of Birthing with Dolphins

Ashley: That’s remarkable. And was it lasting or was it just while they were in the presence of the dolphins.

Michael Hyson: Well, that is still somewhat open, but in general there are some lasting results. There are some cases on record now where autistic children say their first words after they’ve seen the dolphins. It’s still a small sample, we have a lot to learn, and it looks very promising. I was aware of these things when I saw a book called Water Babies, which showed

Tcharkovsky’s work birthing babies underwater. After I met Star I found Michele Odent’s work. He is a friend of hers and she had interviewed him on film in Vancouver,B.C. (1985) when she was getting more involved in dolphin attended birth. When I saw Water Babies, it just made absolute sense that the dolphins should be part of that.

Ashley: Yeah! And you would say that’s because they are so gentle with children and their affect on the children. Is that why you connect them?

Michael Hyson: Yes, because I knew they were so gentle and considerate. And I knew that they could heal things in certain cases, so it just made a great deal of sense. And it was from personal experience, having been with the dolphins at 14, it made sense, if I thought, “What would be the ideal way to be born?” ”Oh yeah, right, dolphins!”

Ashley: Right (Ashley laughing!) That’s beautiful. I can see when you’re thinking from the child’s perspective, what would be the ideal way to be born, that would be right up there!

Michael Hyson: Yeah! It seemed like a good idea to me! That was the initial thing, and shortly thereafter I met Star Newland along with her son at John Lilly’s birthday party in 1990, when she was living with him. She had already written things in her journals and planning things that had been running in my head for a while. So, that’s how we ended up partnering. She knew about everyone I had heard of in the dolphin and dolphin birthing world. That is why I became research director of her Sirius Institute.

When I saw Elena Tonetti’s films showing children being born into the water, it struck me they were wiggling; in fact more than just wiggling, they were swimming! So the babies are born and are swimming right away while still on the umbilical cord.

Ashley: Right. I’ve seen some of those films as well that you’re talking about and the same thing struck me, how amazing it looks like the babies are swimming!

Michael Hyson: Yep. So, now we have a birth that looks kind of like a dolphin birth. The dolphin and the human are swimming, at birth. In some of the films you can see the child has its eyes open, it’s perfect underwater, swimming, turns around and looks up at the people above, smiling and all ready to go, aware of what’s going on. Of course then they come up from the water and breathe and are given directly to the mother. A really simple, straightforward process. We’ll get into this, but it’s as easy you can get, and as far as I can tell, it’s the primal pattern that we’re expecting - a water birth followed by quick, close contact with mom. So, if babies are swimming at birth, and their eyes are on, their ears are on, they are smiling, all that - it means that instead of being altricial, requiring further development - we’re precocious. But we are only precocious if we are born into the proper environment, water. So, when we birth babies into water, swimming, they have freedom of movement in water immediately. They are buoyant and mobile instead of waiting for someone to move them about!

Ashley: Right.

Michael Hyson: So, that’s basically it, to recognize that we are precocious at birth, if we are born into the right environment. This implies that the proper environment for birth is into water. And then ensure that they have a lot of water experience, at least until the time that they are able to crawl. We have baby fat, that helps us be buoyant and to be warm in the water. This maintains itself until 3-5 months until we start to crawl. We have a window of expected water experience right at birth, until at least crawling. Studies by Michel Odent and Tcharkovsky and diver Jacques Mayol (who wrote the book Homo Aquaticus), say if you allow babies to have their water time, their diving response and their breath hold times are maintained and we swim from birth on.

Ashley: Which is totally changing what most people would think about a newborn, which is that they poop and sleep and eat and that’s all they can do. So, again we’re opening to a whole new perspective.

Michael Hyson: Absolutely. It’s important to know that most of the people that exist on this planet right now have been born into the wrong environment, raised in a way that they missed a lot of the imprints and experience that is the expected primal experience that was built in from evolution. What we missed is that we are Aquatic Mammals and that has many implications for understanding our evolution, for all sorts of things.

What Michael Hyson Says on Water Birth and Protecting the Brain

Michael Hyson: The head size, okay. Humans have very large brains at birth; in fact, it’s probably the size of the head in conjunction with the size of the pelvic opening of the mom that determines when the birth happens, because you have to be able to get the head through the pelvis. If the head develops too long, you will have difficulty or perhaps require a c-section. That’s a major evolutionary driver that the head has to be small enough to get out. We already have as large a head as we can have and still be born. After birth the brain doubles its size in the first year, and then roughly doubles in size in the second year.

So, we have a large brain at birth. Now, an important factor pointed out by John Lilly, is that large brains are easier to damage, they’re more fragile. Its consistency is something like Jell-O, easily damaged by shock or by acceleration. Lilly worked out the maximum acceleration before a brain of various sizes would be damaged. If we have a large brain we have to have a large body to protect it. The extreme case would be the sperm whale, 9600 grams of brain and a 45-ton body. It protects the brain, because with its massive body, the chances of being accelerated enough to hurt the brain are minimized.

Ashley: Okay.

Michael Hyson: Now, if we turn it around and apply it to a baby, we have a measurement called the brain to body-weight ratio. Right at birth, the baby has a large head and a rather small body. So, it has the largest brain to body-weight ratio that it’s ever going to have. Now, this implies that since the brain, especially, is sensitive to accelerations that might damage it right at birth, the gentler you can be at birth, the better.

When you’re born into air, there is someone there to catch the baby, and so on. It’s important for them to know to be as gentle as they possibly can when they catch that baby and handle it. And that leads directly to the value of water birth because, besides all the other things that we discussed, if you birth the baby into water, first of all, it’s been buoyant in the womb for 9 months, floating in water, and when it transitions to water that’s the gentlest transition. It’s buoyant in the womb, it’s buoyant in the water, and the water itself helps lessen any fast motions to the head.

Ashley: Which makes sense.

Michael Hyson: Right, the neuron structures that are developing, will be better preserved that way, better protected.

Ashley: That’s great.

Michael Hyson: I think they are doing it differently now, but the classic image of taking the baby out, holding it upside down and smacking it on the bum to make it cry is a little bit like having a heavy weight, think of something like a bowling ball, held by a long string, then you whack it in the middle. It swings the head, which breaks connections. You’ve got this baby that’s been buoyant for 9 months, then you hang it upside down and officially give its neck whiplash.

Ashley: Well, I hope they aren’t doing that anywhere anymore, but if they are I hope they read this!

Michael Hyson: That’s the classic thing they show in movies. And thankfully they’re doing something better. That’s the basic information about human head size and water birth.

Ashley: Great, so tell me, you’ve told us about a couple of I guess societal misconceptions that we’ve had as habits. So, what else should we know from your perspective?

Michael Hyson on What our Nature Expects

Ashley: Goodness, that’s hard to believe.

Michael Hyson: Right. It might also be that a little rougher handling might, for example, also lower the IQ.

Ashley: Right, because you are loosing the brain connectivity, is that what you’re saying?

Michael Hyson: Yes, I remember reading that rough handling of a baby at birth could maybe break up to 1/3 of the neural connections already formed.

Ashley: Goodness, at such an important time.

Michael Hyson: Right, so there’s that and I would say again you have to be very, very gentle with the baby. Another aspect is imprinting. You’re probably aware of it and it has been most publicly exhibited with birds. And granted, people are different than birds, but we still have our expected imprintings. We are a bit more flexible than birds, and that’s good, because it allows us to tolerate all sorts of things, and there are backup systems to help so we can pretty much get around all sorts of imprinting difficulties. Still, it’s good to know that we are deeply imprinted by things that happen at birth.

Ashley: And when you say imprinting, imprinted with what?

Michael Hyson: To give you a typical example, let’s take birds. Say a goose is born, hatches and in the next 5-10 minutes it expects to see its mom. It turns out, whatever it sees within that time-window will be considered mother. Most of the time the first thing the gosling sees is a goose and everything works out fine. They follow her around and everything’s great. But sometimes it’s different. There was an experiment done in Canada, for a film called Come On Geese. This fella wanted to film geese and have them fly with his ultralight. So, he got this clever idea of hatching the geese next to his ultralight.

Ashley: And so they flew with the ultralight?

Michael Hyson: Yes. This group of geese decided that this hang-glider was mom and would follow it around. So, he raised the geese of course and was very nice to them, but they were imprinted with an ultralight. He would go flying with them and the geese would follow, and it’s a marvelous film. But the point is, they were imprinted on an ultralight instead of a mom goose. So, that’s an example of a strong imprinting and how we can mess it up.

Ashley: So, it’s like a bonding with the mother versus imprinting with trauma or something like that.

Michael Hyson: Right, in humans the imprinting window is probably an hour or two, rather than five minutes. And as I said, we are more complex mammals so we’re more flexible in things like that, but still we need to understand that if possible, to the best of our ability we should honor the imprintings that are expected by the infant.

Ashley: And what would you say those are? The water birth, the immediate contact with the mother after birth.

Michael Hyson: Right, close skin-to-skin touch with the mother. In fact, Michele Odent said that the first year after birth should be considered a maturational phase which he calls extra-uterine development. In a sense like the ‘possum coming out and latching on to the nipple of a ‘possum mom and then developing further. In a similar vein, the human baby comes out and would immediately suckle, even before the placenta is delivered. That’s really simple, the umbilical cord is long so the baby pops out into the water, swims around a little bit, and then is brought immediately to the breast. There are also these sorts of issues with imprinting on the mom, and her face, breast and her voice. The baby has heard the mom’s voice in the uterus for a long time. The major organs are developed by week 8, and I feel the baby is fully conscious at least by week 25. They have recently shown that phoneme discrimination for language is being shaped and formed and learned while still in the womb. And further, the midwife April, just told me much to my surprise, though it makes sense, that when a baby is being born, in her experience, she can ask the baby to do different things and they will! Perhaps the hand is in front of the face and she’d like it to be by the side. So, she’ll just ask the baby to move its hand, and it does! So it’s responding to verbal commands and such during birth.

Ashley: That’s remarkable. And again, that’s changing the way we look at newborns and the way we look at birth.

Michael Hyson: Right, exactly! We expect to be born in water, the transition being as gentle as possible, then being brought up to the mom for feeding even while the umbilical is still pulsing and before the placenta has even been delivered. In general April and other midwives and birth experts like Michele Odent suggest that, at the very least, let the umbilical cord pulse and do it’s thing for as long as possible. Let it do that until it’s done however long that may be.

Ashley: Right. I interviewed Dr. Sarah Buckley on lotus birth actually, you’ve heard of lotus birth?

Michael Hyson: Yeah, and that’s an extreme case that makes a lot of sense, though functionally, I wonder how much it adds once the umbilical has stopped pumping blood. I think it’s pretty much done with its functional role when it stops pulsing, but there are other aspects to it.

This part is important. We watched many recorded births on Discovery Health. They show hospital births. Star happened to count how long it took for them to cut the umbilical cords. The minimum was 6 seconds and the maximum was 13! That was in about 20 births watched. In one case it was obvious, at least to us, when they cut the umbilical cord of this one baby it immediately went into distress. So they scrambled around with detectors and monitors and they resuscitated the baby – but those in the delivery room failed to ever correlate what they had just done with what happened right after. Now in fact, it turns out that if you cut the umbilical cord too soon you can leave something on the order of 1/3 of the blood supply in the placenta. So, suppose that’s done, you’ve just … well, think of it as an adult, you walk into the hospital and the first thing that they did was to extract 1/3 of your blood.

Ashley: Well, you’d fall to the ground right!

Michael Hyson: You’re going to be in some distress! Now, to do this to a baby who’s going through major transition … Consider there’s a period while you’re in the womb where you’re actually breathing amniotic fluid into the lungs, but the circulation to the lungs is cut off and it goes through the liver, basically, the renal portal system, from the umbilical through the renal portal system and so on. So, the lungs are out of the loop because you’ve yet to need them. When you’re born, part of being born is, as the head is compressed into the birth canal, the oxygen level goes down and the CO2 level goes up. That’s an expected thing and it triggers a process in which, for example, the fistula in the wall of the heart closes to change the heart from a 3-chamber to a 4-chamber heart. So the umbilical pulses throughout this transition to an air breather, and it is vitally important to let the process proceed to completion.

Michael Hyson Interview Part II