Deoxygenated Intellectual Genius – Lack of Oxygen at Birth

Every child born into this world has a healthy brain and a striving mind with the mental capacity ready to be a genius. A genius is a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of new advances in a domain of knowledge. Actually at birth more than 100 neurons are ready to coordinate with other body systems to bring about full cognitive development in the newborn.

Being a Genius is every student’s desire. The urge to be the top in class, achieving brilliant GPAs is the focal point for most students and for those who don’t achieve this in one way or another remain usually feel guilty and blame themselves.

Others believe that being a genius is genetically related, inherited from parents. Others believe that it comes from many years at school and reading many books.

There are different reasons that contribute to as to why students may not perform well in class, and this has been tentatively reviewed and conclusions made about the matter. However, there is another reason that contributes about 5% to 100% delay in cognitive development, and hence academic performance.

Speaking of cognitive development, I refer to how a person perceives, thinks and gains understanding of his or her world through the interaction of genetic and learned factor. This comprises of information processing, intelligence, reasoning, language development and memory.

In the long list of notions and beliefs that I don’t stand against basing on theories and beliefs built on them about cognitive development, the main trigger of intelligence is Oxygen supplied to a newborn at right proportion and at the right time. Insufficient supply of oxygen at birth has serious consequences to cognitive development of a child.

In the medical field, it is known as birth asphyxia, referring to a condition in which oxygen supply to newborn infant is impaired. The prevalence of birth asphyxia as documented by a series of population studies shows that Tanzania has 45.9 cases per 1000 life-birth.

Birth asphyxia causes brain injury, whose extent depends on the time before restoration of normal breathing or the extent in which the brain is affected and above all how much the brain of the infant has matured before birth.

The main effects may not be noted early during childhood but rather when the child is placed in the environment where there is a high cognitive demand such as when one needs to learn, spell words or in doing arithmetic work in school.

It should be kept in mind that with any degree of brain damage there is no going back or healing from it but there are ways in which one can be trained and be able to adapt the condition, though a delay is manifested.

Researchers are still looking for ways in which they can make more sensitive assessment tools to differentiate the infants with major brain damage after suffering from birth asphyxia so that these high-risk infants can be targeted for early intervention.

There are efforts world wide to reduce impacts of the problem, such as the low-cost ‘cooling cure‘ developed in Johns Hopinks hospital.

Every single second without oxygen to a newborn may produce major long-term effects including impairment in the cognitive development of the newborn. This alone may impair mental capacity and ability for him or her to one day be brilliant, and hence the name Deoxygenated Intellectual.

Guest post by Benson Bryceson and Nadya Rashid – Medical Students at Hubert Kairuki Memorial University

We would love to hear your comments.

Our contacts:

•   bensonbryceson@yahoo.com ,0657717996
•   nadyarashid@gmail.com, 0717805523