Superpowers Only Babies Have

By Editorial Staff in Amazing On 28th July 2017
advertisement

#1

Babies usually look completely helpless, but in fact, they are capable of amazing things! Here are several “superpowers” of children under the age of 3 years.

#2 They feel great underwater

This is called a diving reflex. It disappears when babies are about six months old.

When a child is immersed in water, he naturally holds his breath, and his limbs begin to make swimming movements.

advertisement
Follow On Google News

#3 Extreme Eyesight

In an experiment conducted at the University of Sheffield and the University College London, a group of six- and nine-month olds were shown two sets of human and monkey headshots (courtesy of London Police's Primate Crime Division), each including one face they had seen before. Both groups easily recognized the familiar human face among the pictures, but when it came to the monkeys, only the six-month olds could tell one animal from the other.

The results didn't even change even when the pictures were shown to them upside down. It would seem that these six-month olds display a kind of hyper-attentiveness beyond even an intelligent adult; running around the world and absorbing every detail. You're right. Just like Dr. House.

The nine month-old babies didn't fare so well. How exactly do babies go from Mini Monks to primate racists in just three short months? Well, the researchers theorize that as we get older our brains rearrange themselves to only focus on the overall "important" differences between human faces, causing our super senses to rapidly decline, never to be as sharp as when we were barely 0.5 years old. This neuro-remodeling is also what robs us of our other visual super power: Cartoon Vision.

advertisement

#4 Babies can fake cry.

Last year a Japanese researcher captured on video an instance of apparent feigned distress by an 11-month-old. Hiroko Nakayama filmed two babies in their homes for 60 minutes twice a month, for six months. One baby only ever cried after displaying negative emotion. However, on one occasion, the other baby (“Infant R”) was caught on camera laughing and smiling, then crying suddenly and briefly, then displaying positive emotion again. “Infant R appeared to cry deliberately to get her mother’s attention,” said Nakayama, then she smiled immediately after her mother came closer.”

Follow On Twitter

#5 Educability

Children learn at an astounding rate, as each new experience creates strong links between neurons in the brain. By the time the child is 3 years old, the number of these connections will be approximately 1,000 trillion, more than double the number in the adult.

From about 11 years old the brain will start to get rid of extra connections, and learning ability will decline.

#6 Super Taste

With three times as many taste buds as adults scattered across their tongue, palate, tonsils, and cheeks, babies have an acute sense of taste. Taste preferences begin to take shape in the womb, as babies can detect aromas in the nutritious amniotic soup they swallow, ingesting up to 15 ounces per day by late pregnancy.

The flavors found in amniotic fluid and breast milk change depending on what the mother eats. Researchers think this may play a part in cultural food preferences, as infants’ early exposure to certain flavors has been shown to affect their future palate. In general, however, infants tend to favor the flavors found in breast milk: sweet and umami. Youngsters, meanwhile, tend to have a sweet tooth because they need extra energy from sugars to grow. Their special hate for vegetables stems from the association of bitterness with poison, which they’re hardwired to avoid. As the sense of taste dulls with age, people often grow to appreciate bitter foods such as Brussels sprouts and beer.

advertisement

#7 Power to sleep anywhere anytime

Not only can my toddler fall asleep sitting up in her car seat surrounded by her screaming brothers, I've found my boys asleep inside a laundry basket, upright at the dinner table with a chicken leg clenched in his teeth and, most memorably, with his legs on his bookshelf and his head on his bed. Yes, that means his body was hanging in midair.

#8 Babies understand foreign languages

In a study reported on by the BBC, babies only 30 hours old were able to distinguish between Swedish and English sounds. Patricia Kuhl, one of the study’s authors and co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington said, “We’re showing that the foetus, in the last ten weeks when we know that the auditory system is fully working, is not only listening, is not only taking note of the sounds but remembering and learning them.”

#9 Incredibly Strong Grips

When most people look their newborn babies in the eyes for the first time, the thought that pops into their heads usually isn’t, “I wonder if this baby can do a chin-up.” Fortunately for the world, though, that’s exactly what goes through the minds of scientists.

Newborns, as it turns out, are way stronger than they look. One scientist – apparently of the mad variety – dangled 60 newborns from walking sticks and proved that some babies can cling to a pole and support their own body weight for several minutes. He found out that even the weakest babies could hold up their own weight for at least 10 seconds, which is at least long enough to humiliate someone in the gym.

All that strength comes from the same grip your baby uses to wrap her little fingers around yours. When babies curl their fingers around something, they’re secretly using a massive amount of strength. If you lifted them up, they’d be able to support their own weight.