There is evidence supporting that hypothesis. The idea that pain trauma mainly works trough personal memories processes was the reason why PSTD in adults was long seen as character weakness.
The idea that infants nervous system is more fragile should be the starting point.
Many people have experienced severe pain as a result of childhood injuries. We’re supposed to believe that they’re all walking around with PTSD as a result?
I (and Occam's razor) would say the exact opposite - one should assume the effect will be the similar as for an older human, unless proven otherwise.
Otherwise you're making the unproven assumption that an infant's mind responds to pain differently - why would you think that? And which other subgroups of humans could you make evidence-free assumptions that they are different from the default (however chosen) human?
> Otherwise you're making the unproven assumption that an infant's mind responds to pain differently - why would you think that?
Babies are very bad at remembering things. It might be that remembering isn't a big factor, but it's a pretty obvious basis for the idea.
> And which other subgroups of humans could you make evidence-free assumptions that they are different from the default (however chosen) human?
So you're not only going to associate everyone that disagrees with you with racism, you're going to say it's "evidence-free" that babies are different from the default human?
> It's totally realistic to assume that a human will have to suffer psychologically even decades later from a psychological scarring caused by such surgery without anesthesia.
That’s what OP said, emphasis mine. I agree with you: that infants experience pain in the same way as adults should be the default hypothesis. That they remain psychologically scarred by it for decades,
however, should not be.
Why not? The obvious difference is that an adults nervous system is developed while an infant's is still developing.
"Early life stress may have a lasting impact on the developmental programming of the dopamine (DA) system implicated in psychosis." [1]
I highly recommend Gabor Maté's book "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" for a deeper discussion of how various types of pre- and postnatal stress impact a person's proclivity towards addictive behavior and ADHD.
But even for adults extreme and overwhelming stressful experiences can cause long-lasting and even multigenerational psychological consequences through epigenetic mechanisms.
The link you provide A) has a very low N (24, half of which are controls) and B) does not account for genetic confounding. Am I missing something?
Also, there is essentially zero evidence for hereditary epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetic changes are common in the somatic cell lineages (which make up the entire organism except for the sperm and eggs), but there are very few plausible mechanisms by which epigenetic changes in somatic cells can somehow make their way back to the germ line cells (eggs and sperm) and, thus, exert an influence on subsequent generations. On top of the theoretical underpinnings being essentially implausible, there is no good evidence that hereditary epigenetic mechanisms exist. The only evidence I am aware of in humans are the children of Dutch women who went through a famine in 1944. However, that evidence has since evaporated. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia[0]:
"Moreover, the children of the women who were pregnant during the famine were smaller, as expected. However, surprisingly, when these children grew up and had children those children were thought to also be smaller than average.[11] This data suggested that the famine experienced by the mothers caused some kind of epigenetic changes that were passed down to the next generation. Despite this, a subsequent study by the same author failed to find a correlation between maternal exposure to famine and birth weight of the next generation."
