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Babies stun scientists with 'amazing' insights »

Posted by: Bkumm 2 years, 6 months ago

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Babies might seem a bit dim in their first six months of life, but researchers are getting smarter about what babies know, and the results are surprising.

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Bkumm

Ex-Navy, degrees in History and Marketing and Management.
Socially liberal, fiscal conservative.
Just following my own brand of atheistic spiritualism.

" [T]he only purpose for ...

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Comments: 6

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Bkumm
May 25, 2007, 9:39 a.m.
This is simply amazing. We are in the infancy (pun intended) of brain research and we are just starting to understand the power of the human mind.
My son is 15 months old and just now trying to speak. But, long before this, he could let you know what he wanted just by his actions. I will be watching him closely over the next several months, observing and learning about him. I'm astounded by this new research.
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ETproductions
May 25, 2007, 12:19 p.m.
Too bad we can't all grow up in a multilingual environment. Babies are astoundingly adept at learning language.
My youngest was something of a Little Man Tate. When he was 15 months old, we took him to the Travel Town museum in LA's Griffith Park. He went tearing across the lot to an old Jet trainer, with me in hot pursuit. He ran up under the wing, looked up, and started reading the plane's ID numbers off the wing. I was astounded. By the time he turned 2, he could read.
We never tried to teach him how to decode letters and numbers. But there was a daytime TV game show he loved called The $100,000 Pyramid. Players "discovered" clues by calling out letters which lit up on the pyramid. He watched that, and saw these people jumping up and down in excitement over each letter. Of course, he didn't know it was the shot at $100 grand that had them so jazzed. He got that letters and numbers are extremely important, exciting things.
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capn_caveman
May 26, 2007, midnight
What we are seeing in this article is millions of years of evolution at work. Going back to the chimpanzee days, it was vital that infant monkeys be able to recognize certain happenings in their environment quickly. If you fast forward to modern day, we are now seeing evidence that all of this stuff is not learned, but hard-coded in our brains.