Are people really so stupid ...

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Absolutely.

I think the basis for their study was the concept (and an incorrect one, I might add) that the nerves may not be fully developed until adulthood, and so they likely thought that babies would feel less, or no pain, by comparison.

Honestly the study concept was stupid, and it shows how stupid the researchers really are because they clearly haven't taken any kind of biology class. If they had, they'd know that the nerve endings develop before birth and are likely activated at or before birth. That's why doctors can smack a baby to get it to breathe on it's own after it's born, because it hurts them enough to cry, which starts the process. I have literally zero background in biology and even I know that, so either the researchers really were that stupid and should have their funding pulled on the grounds that they are unqualified as scientists to run experiments, or they did it for fun, which they should have their funding also pulled for.

I'd like to see a study on how exposure to crying infants could be, perhaps, one of the best ways to promote population control.

quick question: has anyone complaining about oh so stuid researchers here actually read the article and watched the video?
to me, it all sounds quite reasonable, and frankly, living in a household with a baby and a toddler, I'm not all too sure at what point a baby becomes an actual person, rather than a biological automaton. Babies live in a grey area there, for quite a while, really.

The question was not: do babies feel pain?
It was: do they process pain with the same neural pathways that adults do?

Just so we're clear on this: neonates do not have a fully developed brains. The brain develops over years, and in the first few weeks, it can't disinguish sensory inputs too well. We do know that neonates can 'hear' light and 'see' sound. - inputs just don't all get sorted correctly, and the brain processes a lot of them with structures that will later serve a very different purpose.
In so far, the question whether a newborn brain processes pain as 'pain' and not, for example, as if it were a bright light flashing, is a valid one. Particularly since according to the video, until now, it was thought that newborns were NOT porcessing such stimuli as 'pain'.

and if you had read the article, you'd have learned that the parents had the stimulus administered to themselves prior to giving consent.

READ before you get upset, people!
There IS stupid science being done out there. This doesn't qualify as such. And the wellcome trust, which funded the whole thing, is a private institution, they don't give money away for s**ts and giggles.
They also paid for a large part of the Ebola vaccines last year.

Yup

You're really arguing that we can't assume babies feel pain? And that we need a test to know for sure? Can I ask why you think they wouldn't feel pain?

You don't become a person, if you are alive and human you are a person. Period. End of story. That isn't something you can gain or lose, people saying otherwise are people that do not respect human life and are rationalizing the mistreatment and destruction of it which is the gist of saying babies can't feel pain since the implication is that if they can't feel that it is okay to do those things. Dehumanization is how all the greatest evils in history have happened by one group to another, that is how their actions are legitimized.

define 'feel'.

If you think in terms of: Stimulus->Pain, then, no, there's no doubt babies can feel pain.

if you think in terms of: mechanoreceptor in the skin gets stimulated -> electric charge gets carried into the brain -> incoming impulse gets processed as 'touch' ->impulse is evaluated for dangerous intensity -> impulse exceeds threshold for dangerous intenstity -> sympathetic nervous system gets increasingly activated

I don't see a reason why you'd take that cascade as a given in a brain still rather early in development, and given today's imaging techniques, for the first time, we can actually check and see (and use non-trivial terms for) the steps italicized.
It'd actually be interesting to see pain being processed in brains in any stage of development.
Does a person with a painful chronic condition still process pain the same way a healthy person does?
does a person with autism process pain the same way an allistic person does?
as long as you haven't checked, you can't just go and say: "stupid scientists, of course autistics feel pain." -THAT'S NOT THE QUESTION.
The question is: how, exactly? and: is it similar to what we consider normal?


to Jacoby: Sorry, I shouldn't have used Hyperbole in a forum post. I did not mean to imply mistreatment and destruction of any living being is ever justified.
But I do find it fascinating to watch my 3 year old nephew refuse to eat his dessert, and when asked why, he is unable to answer. The next day, everyone but him has diarrhea.
Now, was that a conscious decision of his to not eat the dessert, or rather did the immuno-recepters at the back of his tongue scream out 'don't eat this!' ?
It's not that adult behaviour is less controlled by biology (after all, we haven't found anything else yet), but small children and babies don't make up excuses to justify their behaviour and make it appear socially acceptable, so it is more obvious and raises questions more readily.

Wow, and yet your words totally fall short of actual, logical, scientific thought, as to the realistic purpose behind the study itself. Everything can be rationalized, but in the end the study is still a stupid one, and the researchers are still idiots. Refer to my previous post as to why:

Any braindead monkey can figure out that in order for the nerve endings to function properly as they do at birth, the pain centers of the brain absolutely must be developed, and since we can see that they are at birth, the study was a stupid one. If the pain center of the brain wasn't functioning like it does in adults then they wouldn't experience pain the way we do, and thus they would react very differently to it, such as not immediately crying and start breathing at birth after the doctor smacks the child. It's not hard to figure out, and best of all, you don't need a room full of Ph.D's to confirm the concept because it's so d*mn simple.

We may be able to agree that people's experience of pain is varying, but it is rare for pain to be absent entirely. Although I think there is a condition in which this is the case.

yes there is, it's called ->congenital analgesia.
I linked to the wikipedia article. This article, btw. is great for this discussion. I'm a science geek, and I have never encountered about half of the stuff in the 'causes'-section before.
And that's why people are doing studies like the one we're discussing about: to know exactly what's going on, and why. and it's all really complicated, and if you can learn something about the development of the brain and which neurons it uses to process at what level of development, and all it takes is poking babies a little, inside an MRI, then please take my money and do so.


The world is only

if you

or any other science for that matter.

First off, if you're going to quote me, quote my entire post (without changing anything, I know how people like you think), don't take sh*t out of context just because it suits you.
Second, unless you have a degree that qualifies you to specifically vouch for this study's legitimacy, as well as actual experience under your belt, then you really have no real basis to pick apart my argument, which is entirely factual, since centuries of birthing have proven my statement time and time and time and time and time again.
If you want to disprove my statement, you'll have to bring in more cases of my statement not being the case, but since everyone who is born, ever, is smacked to start the breathing process, you'll find that an impossible task.

Future Warning
Before replying further to me, I suggest you think twice about what you're going to say as well as how you say it. If you find your comment is aimed at me and not as much the topic, delete it and try again. If at some point you're unable to attack the topic and instead feel the need to attack me, you should not reply at all.

You have been warned ahead of time, I do not put up with bullsh*t from anyone here, so if you're just going to make this conversation personal, as so many others like you have in the past, don't bother responding to me. But if you're only interested in a conversation surrounding the topic, then respect my wishes in terms of quoting me and keep it respectful, and we probably won't have any problem talking like adults.

For large parts of the last century, a baby's crying was thought to be a reflex.
Anand KJ, and Hickey PR. Pain and its effects in the human neonate and fetus. The New England journal of medicine. 1987;317(21):1321-9

While being argued about for the last 30 years, anesthesia had not found it's way into official treatment guidelines. Now there's proof, and people will have to develop new guidelines.

and here's for the ad hominem attack and half quote:
Yes, one

for that, because alone led to conflicting assumptions of babies' pain reactions being reflexes (decortical, as it is referred to in he study above, meaning: not being processed by the cortex, i.e. the part of the brain in which we believe conscious thought takes place).
And because , even when viewed as incorrect by other people, needs proof to be refuted, to show that pain processing does not end in the thalamus, as reflex-processing does, and to settle the argument, this study is very much justified.



Also: why would you believe my degree, while you don't believe people working at OXFORD???
I can't believe I'm feeding a troll.

First off, I warned you about misquoting me, now we're going to have problems because you have no respect for other people's opinions, if you did, you would have respected my wishes and complied with them.
Second, I'm not a troll, and people who happen to disagree with you and question the validity of a "scientific" claim are also not trolls. No-one has to conform to your concept of "science" any more than they have to believe that you have any qualifications (which I'm sure you don't, because if you did, you probably wouldn't be here on this forum, acting like an ass over something as stupid as this topic).
Third, I didn't disagree with the concept that babies feel pain like adults, in fact if you actually bothered to read my posts, I stated how stupid the study was because they would obviously have to feel pain like adults because of the fact that they cry when being hurt. You so obviously missed that, or blatantly ignored that fact just to argue with me, not to mention you're obvious intention of trying to anger me, and you're calling me the "troll"? You're laughable.
Lastly, the idea that a baby's cry after being smacked at birth as being nothing more than a reflex, is simply that, an idea. There are no real facts to back it up, no real experiments on newborns (because no-one in their right mind, nor respectable in the field of science, would put a newborn at risk just to prove the point) to demonstrate any evidence whatsoever. It's not science, it's a concept, a theory, an unproven statement that has no evidence of support, and mountains of evidence to disprove the notion or at the very least, make it unprovable based on the baby's reactions. We do not have the technology to tell the difference in the few minutes required to get a newborn to breathe.

Compared to adults very young infants have less than half a brain, so it is a question that needs to be studied and resolved.

ruveyn

But even animals with much less brains than adult humans feel pain.

The reason people circumcise their child is because it makes it easier to clean. So whenever a person who wasn't circumcised, has to open the flaps so they can keep it clean. Also it hurts a lot more when your an adult and more complications. Besides they numb the baby up. However doing it to girls is stupid.