[engine revving]
Your first snow. What do you think?
[laughs]
[Ryan] What is this?
[Nikki] Ooh!
-Hey, Mila.
-She's so serious.
[Nikki laughs]
First snow of your life.
[Ryan] Oh, my God.
Okay, where is it coming from?
[Nikki murmurs indistinctly]
[Ryan] Bring him out in the snow.
What is this?
What's going on?
What do you think?
[woman 1]
At a time when babies can't even walk,
we are testing
babies' understanding of the world.
And what's fun about my job
is that I get to tell parents,
"You know what?
Your baby is smarter than you think."
[man] In the first year of life,
the child is really learning to become
a member of their society.
So I became very interested
in how babies adapt
to the environment they are born into.
Maybe I'm gonna eat you!
[woman 2]
It's possible that when babies are born,
they aren't the helpless blobs
they look like...
that they're born with expectations
about the world and how it works.
[Nikki]
Lincoln had five. Mila had three...
-Alright.
-[Ryan] ...this morning.
[Nikki] Hey, empty the dishwasher
so the bottles can go in. Okay?
[Ryan] Okay.
[Ryan] Love you.
[Nikki] Love you.
[yawns]
Nikki just left for work, and...
my strategy is survival.
Being a dad is, like,
being a prison guard.
In the beginning, I obviously loved them,
but the more I get to know them,
the more--
the stronger the love gets,
you know what I'm saying?
And, uh,
I think once they can speak to--
you know, English,
or... communicate better,
that will, uh,
that'll increase my feelings too, but...
they're not so bad
right now, you know.
So I try to be very appreciative
of what I have,
even though what I have
sometimes doesn't sleep,
cries all the time,
doesn't know what they want,
-and what else?
-[sneezes and murmers]
Relax, I didn't mean anything by it.
[babies babble]
[babbling]
What?
[baby babbling]
As a parent, I can see them develop
in terms of like, smiling,
eye contact, physical contact.
Uh, I wonder what they're thinking,
I'm definitely looking forward
to a time when they can talk...
because, right now, there is no intel
about what they're saying.
[babbling]
Why are you talking so much today?
[woman] The field
of developmental psychology
is relatively young.
It's about 100 years old.
And it used to be this idea
that babies were hapless blobs,
that they were a blank slate.
But I do remember
when my son was a baby.
You're often asking these questions
of, like, "Oh, my gosh,
how did they get that?
How'd they figure that out?"
So it's interesting to me
why this myth persists.
Why is it that we would think that babies
aren't super smart from the beginning?
Why can't knowledge be as hard-wired
as the ability to circulate your blood?
[man] Maya.
-[Maya laughing]
-[Stacy] Maya, where's Mateo?
Here.
[Stacy]
Look, he's at the top of the door!
What's he doing up there?
Mateo, what are you doing?
[Mateo's dad vocalizing]
[Maya] Funny.
[Mateo's dad] Hi.
-[gong echoes]
-Whoa! Dinner!
[Stacy] Mateo. What's this?
[tapping spoon]
What's that?
Mateo.
[Hespos] What I'm interested in,
in the big picture,
is what do babies know
about things like water...
and gravity?
Are they born knowing
how the world works?
You know, "If I let go of this object,
does it fall down?"
[clattering]
What kind of expectations
would babies have?
Mateo, no. Don't do that again, Mateo.
Okay?
You play here, baba, okay?
[Hespos]
Do babies understand gravity?
My job would be much easier
if babies could write us a little essay
about their vast experience
in the first 5 months of life.
Short of that, we have to capitalize
on what they're good at.
My favorite age
is studying kids between...
four to six months.
Because one thing that infants have
very good control over from that age
is their eyes.
So to find out what babies are thinking,
we've been doing experiments to figure out
how babies acquire knowledge over time.
We use... things that babies can see well.
And we show them events
on a puppet stage.
Like adults, they tend to look at things
they find interesting,
and when they get bored,
they're kind of rude.
They just look away.
So, by timing how long infants look
at events that we show them,
we can...
essentially, ask babies questions.
[Hespos]
You have a seat there.
Center yourself-- so, that little hole
where the camera is.
I'm gonna calibrate, which is
squeaking this object where the action is.
-Oh, my goodness, it's so exciting.
-[toy squeaking]
[Hespos] We have the infant sit
in front of a puppet stage,
and there's a little video camera
videotaping the infant's face.
If the infant looks away
for two consecutive seconds,
we take that as baby language
for "they're bored,"
the computer would beep,
and we'd go on to the next trial.
You are a superstar little man.
Are you ready to go?
I was trained in graduate school and got
a PhD in developmental psychology,
so I know a lot about cognition,
and how the brain works,
and things like that.
But to pull off these puppet stages,
you also have to be a master
at using a glue g*n,
making magic effects work.
In the experiment on gravity...
we'd show them an expected event
and an unexpected event.
[baby babbling]
[Hespos] The first event,
we just show them a block
being pushed back and forth
on top of the box.
[object slides]
[baby sighs]
They'll look at interesting things
for a while, but they'll get bored.
And you contrast attention
to that type of event
to one that's an unexpected
or magic event.
We push the block,
so it goes off the edge of the box...
and it floats in midair.
[baby coos]
And they go, "Oh, my gosh."
You can see their focus in their eyes.
They just stare at it.
But... what are they thinking?
It could be something
along the lines of...
"There's something wrong.
That's not what... usually happens."
And it causes them to look longer.
You show them a puppet show,
you measure how long they look.
It's not very fancy,
it's not very high-tech,
but it's extremely powerful
because as early as we can test,
infants have this expectation
that an unsupported object should fall,
so they have some
understanding of gravity.
[Ryan] Okay.
Today, we're teaching...
street hustling 101.
So guys, we have this.
Something you like,
something you like to play with.
Can't touch it. See that?
There you go. Can't touch it.
Here we go.
Let's find it.
Big winner, big winner.
Got it, got it.
Double your money? Double your money?
Damn.
Alright. Alright.
We got it.
Let's go. She sees it's there.
She wants the bet, big spender.
Saturday night special.
Which one is it?
Pick it.
Pick it. It's there.
Which one you want?
She wants the money and run.
Big winner.
She gets me every freaking time.
Traditionally, it was thought that
babies don't understand
that if an object's gone behind a screen,
it's still there.
We talk about this as object permanence.
And we thought babies don't get it
until like, nine months of age.
[Ryan] Where's it at?
[Hespos]
But now we've developed looking paradigms.
Our studies suggest that
the ideas about gravity,
persistence, continuity,
whether things blink
from one spot to another spot...
[Ryan] Last try, double or nothing.
...they know this stuff way earlier
than we previously thought.
It shows us that babies have
this basic core knowledge
and that this is the sort of very
elemental, initial, primitive knowledge,
that is a kernel,
almost like a seed that will grow.
Come on, Hobbs! Good boy.
Alright Hobbs, ready to go in the water?
What do you think?
Wanna go get the ball?
Hobbsy, look. Ready? Go get it.
Go get it, Hobbs!
My dog is a Lab
and he likes to chase ba*ls.
Hobbsy, get your ball.
Sometimes the ball will go
someplace where he can't see it...
Get your ball!
Come on.
...and the dog will persist
until they get that ball back.
[Hespos laughs]
Come here, Hobbs.
That's a good boy.
We thought core knowledge
was uniquely human.
But it turns out that
my dog knows this too.
Hobbsy, get your ball!
Come on.
And so the next question
that we want to ask is,
"What makes us uniquely human?"
So in this study,
we're going to show kids
a pair of objects over a series of trials
and see if they learn
how to compare those objects.
We think it's abstract thought,
our ability to make comparisons
between either two objects,
two ideas, or two events.
What I mean by that is that
you may know how to play baseball,
but you don't know how to play cricket.
I could say,
"Oh, it's a lot like baseball,
but it's different in that
this way, this way, and this way."
So, I can get you up to speed
relatively quickly and effectively,
because you have this
ability to reason abstractly.
Go on in and have a seat
in the chair.
Humans do this effortlessly all the time.
Yeah.
But what about babies?
Now, this is an area
where we've just begun
to investigate what infants can do.
The simplest form of abstraction
that we came up with
is if I present you with two objects,
can you tell whether
they're same or different?
So we show them
these identical objects on the stage.
And we just lift them together
and turn them...
and then do that little dance
until they get bored.
Then we present another
pair of objects that are the same,
followed by another pair
that's the same and another.
They picked up the relation of "same."
They'll be like, "Yeah,
been there, done that."
It's fine. They'll look for a while,
but not long.
So probably not the most interesting
puppet show these babies have ever seen.
However, on the next trial,
we show them a pair that's different.
So, say a triangular block
and an elephant.
They detect that
that relation is different,
and they go, "Wait a minute!"
So, they look longer at that.
In the experiment, we tested 20 babies.
And some of the patterns we see
that come out of the data are amazing.
The babies are looking 33 seconds,
on average, at the unexpected event,
compared to 15 seconds
at the expected event.
They're not following
an instruction manual.
It's them choosing which one
and how long they want to look at it.
That's incredible,
that infants, as early as we can test,
decide to look twice as long at the magic
or the unexpected event.
[woman laughs]
[objects clattering]
I call him a little tornado
'cause he'll crawl somewhere, make a mess,
crawl to the next place, make a mess.
Who needs toys when you've got
plastic spoons and... lids and bowls?
[Hespos] The task for the baby is:
go figure out the world.
That's enormous.
But we're finding data that suggest that
the learning mechanism is innate,
hardwired into our brain,
but the content that you put into
that learning mechanism is up for grabs.
So when the kid opened
the drawer in the kitchen
and takes one container
and puts it on their head,
you can demonstrate,
"You can put this on your head,
you can put a lid on your head."
So they see,
"Oh, this is like this thing."
What you're actually doing
is giving the kids
exactly the knowledge that they need,
so that they can experiment
and test things and figure stuff out.
That is really cool,
uniquely human ability,
and my dog's never going to get it.
[woman] One, two,
three, four,
five, six,
seven, eight,
nine, ten.
Ready or not, here I come.
Hey, Finn. Hey, North.
I've lost Arthur and Percy.
I think I see you!
-I found you. I found you.
-[boy] How did you know?
You know what I didn't find yet?
Your brother.
Where do you think he is?
Oh, my! He is very hidden.
People have always wondered
where knowledge comes from.
And... the only way
to truly answer that question
is to study
baby brain development.
No, she teaches at MIT.
Yeah, but she teaches about your brain.
Yeah.
Whoa! Got it.
And what's amazing right now is
instead of speculating,
you can look through the skull,
into a brain,
and watch it when it's working.
Now who are the baby--
who are the kids, the babies?
Arthur.
That's right. Now, let Percy
find the other one.
Percy, can you find you?
-[Saxe gasps]
-Percy.
You got it. That's right.
Do you remember when we took those?
Do you know how old you were?
Little, tiny babies.
You were two months old
and you were three months old.
Can a three-month-old baby walk?
Can a three-month-old baby talk?
Can a three-month-old baby sit up?
No.
No? But look how much brain it has.
That's kind of amazing, isn't it?
-So much brain.
-[Arthur] Yeah, yeah.
[Saxe] When I started as a scientist,
people thought, "Well, maybe babies
are basically born a blank slate."
But I think that's probably not right.
I think that babies
are born with expectations
about the world and how it works.
To prove that,
we had to scan babies' brains.
But I couldn't do the scan
when a baby was asleep.
I needed the baby to be awake to see
how do babies understand
what they're seeing
and learn from it.
The problem was nobody
had scanned awake babies before.
The youngest awake brains
we had seen were five years old.
And there is a good reason for that.
For an adult in an MRI machine,
the way we do that experiment is we say,
"Okay, lie down
and hold perfectly
still for two hours, please."
There was no way a baby
would last two hours.
So the question was: what was
the longest time a baby could last,
and what's the shortest time
an MRI experiment could be,
and was there any overlap?
The other problem with MRI is
an MRI machine is really loud,
and we didn't want to damage
a baby's developing hearing.
So we found a way to make the protocols
less sensitive,
in order to make them more quiet
and still have good enough
measurements of the brain.
But that was really important.
We wanted to be sure
that the baby's hearing would be safe.
For five years, we had been
setting this experiment up.
So we sort of thought,
"Okay, we have a protocol.
We have an experiment.
Maybe we're almost there.
All we need is babies."
And then I got pregnant.
-[baby cooing]
-Boop! Boop! Boop!
When I first had Arthur,
the first surprise
was falling in love with him.
How is it even possible
to love somebody you just met?
[laughing]
That made no sense whatsoever.
When I was pregnant, I was really scared.
I was... nervous that being a mother
would somehow...
overwhelm or suppress or destroy
the identity that was so important to me.
I identified as a scientist.
And then...
surprisingly,
I kinda liked being his mother.
Yeah? What are you looking at?
So, in the first days and weeks
of being his mother...
I found...
a really crazy, powerful satisfaction
in being able to take care of him.
And then it turned out
that one of the places I wanted to take
care of him was inside an MRI machine.
Before I studied babies,
I was studying adult brains.
Back then, we were looking for different
brain regions doing different jobs.
In grown-ups, there are two brain regions
that have really important jobs.
One is for seeing faces,
and the other one is for seeing scenes.
So we had this thought: could we see
the same brain regions in babies?
So, we designed an experiment
that was the simplest thing
you could possibly do.
It's three things:
the movies of faces;
happy, smiling, dynamic kids;
and then natural environments.
But then we need a baseline.
And so the baseline in between
is scrambled up movies.
Then we tried to scan Arthur.
I'd be lying inside the scanner
with the baby
and I'd hear the scanner shimming,
and be like, "Come on, guys,
come on, guys.
He's still! He's watching the movie!"
And then he would move.
So then we'd take him
out of the scanner and we'd feed him.
Then we'd wrap him back up again
and we'd put him in the scanner
start the movies, and he'd poop.
So we'd pull him out of the scanner
and change his diaper.
Then it would be 2 hours
and the session would be over,
and we'd go home for another day.
Then we tried it again.
And again.
And again.
And I thought, "There's a good reason
we don't know how babies' brains develop,
because this is impossible."
I was trying to see if I could do this.
Science takes a ton of...
emotional resilience,
because most of the time...
something's not working.
But I really wanted to be the first one
to see something or to know something,
to be the one who gets
to do it for the first time.
Then a few days later, I'd be like,
"I really wanna know
how his brain is developing."
[laughs] And we would try again.
One day,
as we're scanning him,
and he's watching,
and I would start to count in my head:
"15, 16, 17, 18,"
get to "60... 23, 24, alright."
I was thinking,
"This might-- it might be working.
I think it might be working."
And then on February 12th,
at eleven o'clock at night,
I got the first image of Arthur's brain
that had brain activity in it.
He was the first baby ever
to be scanned while he was awake
and watching movies
in an MRI machine.
This was-- Hallelujah.
This-- the gray in the background
is the functional image of his brain.
And painted on top of that
we saw these areas of activity.
You can see those
on both sides of his brain.
So that was the first time we thought
that could actually be his brain
responding to the movies
when he was inside the scanner.
But the biggest surprise
was the similarity
compared to a grown-up.
These different parts of a baby's brain
would already have the same functions
that they would have as an adult.
We had no idea we were gonna find that.
[Saxe] We always knew
that there's a lot more
going on in a baby's mind
than you might expect
from a baby's behavior.
As an adult, you have an idea
of what learning looks like.
Learning is something you decide to do.
You sit down and you work hard.
What learning actually looks like
is a six-month-old baby.
Looks cool, man.
[Saxe]
A six-month-old baby opens their eyes,
and that's more learning
than somebody poring over
a book or doing their research.
[Ryan] Ooh.
Alright. Buddy, are you seeing this?
I'm on Lady Emerald.
[calliope music playing]
This... is... intense.
[Saxe] It's more learning
because everything is new in the world.
But it's also because
everything is being created in the brain.
When you've only scanned one baby,
you don't know anything.
Is that something about this baby,
or this scan,
or the noise that we happened
to measure this day?
You don't know.
But we already knew that there were a few
more babies coming down the pipeline.
[Saxe] Hi, guys!
Hi, Theo, how are you?
Oh, is that so funny?
[laughs]
So when we get you...
when we get you inside--
Um, does he get swaddled at night?
No, not anymore, no.
Not anymore? Alright.
We're gonna try to swaddle him.
And, um, a baby this big,
doesn't always work.
We can give it a try.
We'll give it a shot and we'll try
to put hearing protection on him.
The scan will be quiet,
so it doesn't matter,
but just for extra precautions,
we'll try to put pads over his ears.
Here, I'll do that side.
You ready?
It's a baby construction worker.
Okay.
Got it. Alright, there you go.
Is that gonna work?
We're gonna see if we can get
a quick image. Okay?
It's gonna go beep, beep, beep. Alright?
Alright, we got a picture
of your baby's brain, Sam. Wanna see?
[Sam] There's a brain in there.
Yeah, exactly.
His whole head is full of brain.
So over two years,
we collected data from nine babies.
And then we could finally see
what does brain activity
looks like in a six-month-old baby.
So this picture is the average activity
across all babies.
In fact, lots of the functions
in the back of the brain
look surprisingly grown up,
because we saw scene activity in scene
regions and face activity in face regions.
The most surprising thing
in these MRI images was we saw
a response in the middle
of the frontal lobe
when babies were seeing these faces.
Seeing a picture like this in a baby
who's only six months old
tells you their brain
is already specialized
for seeing and understanding other people.
That means there might be...
a predisposition...
to who babies learn from
and what they learn...
structured into the anatomy
of a baby's brain.
That was not what we expected,
and not what we were looking for,
because that brain region in grown-ups
is more active when you're thinking
about something you care about,
something that's of value to you,
and something that's relevant to yourself.
[laughing]
[Saxe] So if you see that in a baby...
it's very tempting to wonder...
"Are babies looking
at a face smiling at them...
and then thinking...
"That's for me, relevant to me,
and it's something I care about,"
and something they use to choose...
who to learn from?"
Oh, you're giving me kisses.
[man] About 20 years ago,
there were very few studies done
about babies and how they process faces.
But I became more and more interested
because of my personal experience,
which is very funny, actually.
I was born and raised in China
and then went to university in China,
so before 22 or 23 years of my life,
I've never seen--
actually encountered any foreigners.
So when I arrived in the Western world
to further my study,
I just couldn't tell people apart.
You know, they all looked
the same to me, so the... [laughs]
the females look all the same
and the males all look the same.
And it was visually shocking to me.
These kinds of experiences
would make me think about this.
How do we learn to recognize faces?
♪ Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream ♪
[Mateo's dad vocalizing]
[Mateo's dad vocalizing]
[Stacy] Maya is turning three.
This is the first time Mateo's
attending a birthday party.
And there'll be a lot of new faces
for him that he's never seen before.
[doorbell rings]
[Mateo's dad speaking Spanish]
-[Mateo's dad] Hello. Oh, it's Zoey!
-Hi, Zoey!
[overlapping chatter]
[Maya's dad]
Choose one.
Which one do you want?
[Maya] I want...
I want purple.
-And I want--
-How about I do a doggie?
-[woman] Thank you.
-Yellow too?
[woman] Say "thank you."
We know that as soon as babies are born,
they prefer to look at human faces.
But then researchers
at Sheffield University in the UK
came up with this crazy idea:
whether or not babies
can recognize monkey faces.
The lead author is
a very good friend of mine,
and at the time,
we all asked him, "Why bother?"
Because human faces are
more important than monkey faces.
But to my surprise,
the results were not like this.
Every monkey face is unique,
but if you show pictures
of monkey faces to adults...
they cannot tell one from the other.
However, the babies
at three months of age,
they can do that very easily.
They simply can tell one monkey
is different from another monkey.
That's astonishing.
[Stacy] Ready everyone?
Say, "Happy birthday, Maya!"
[adults] ♪ Happy birthday, dear Maya ♪
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
[Stacy] Make a wish and blow the candles!
[all cheering] Yay!
Hello.
Hey, bubs.
You okay?
All these new people.
All these new faces.
But you did good.
Mama's proud of you.
Oh, you're ready to come out.
You wanna come out.
As the babies see
more and more human faces...
they start to lose these initial abilities
to recognize the faces
of other animal species.
[Stacy] Yeah!
[Lee] By the time
we get to 12 months of age,
we kind of lose the magic.
We lose that ability to tell
different monkeys apart,
and we don't treat them
as individuals anymore.
We treat them as one group: monkeys.
[monkeys chittering]
And this process is called "pruning."
As babies see their mothers
over and over and over again,
the neural networks that are devoted
to recognizing their mothers' faces
become stronger and more efficient.
And the same time,
those neural networks
that are good at recognizing
the faces of other animal species
get pruned out.
They die away.
It's good for the baby.
However...
it's goodbye monkey.
[Stacy speaking in Spanish]
[children's program playing on TV]
[speaking in Spanish]
-[Mateo crying]
-[speaks Spanish]
-[continues crying]
-[continues speaking in Spanish]
[speaking in Spanish]
[clicking tongue]
[Stacy, in Spanish]
What's wrong? This is your grandma.
[grandma in Spanish]
He doesn't know me.
[in Spanish] I should have come
a couple of days earlier so he could...
[Stacy, in Spanish] Mateo, look.
This is your grandma. She's very nice.
[in Spanish] Look, look, look...
[speaking in Spanish]
No.
[Stacy] Tomorrow at 7:00-something
in the morning, I have a flight to Aruba.
I'm meeting three
of my best girlfriends,
and we're gonna spend time together
at the beach for about five days.
[crying]
[in Spanish]
Look, look, where's Daddy? Daddy!
-[continues crying]
-No.
This will be my first time
being away from Mateo for this long,
and actually I'm a bit worried
about it, because...
you know, I've been with him
every single day pretty much, so...
I'm wondering how he's gonna cope
and how I'm gonna cope.
I'm gonna miss everyone, actually.
Hopefully they'll miss me, but if not,
it's okay. I'll be on the beach.
[speaking Spanish]
You be a good boy, okay?
You be a good boy
for Grandma and for Papa.
I'm gonna miss you.
Mommy gonna miss you.
You be a good boy, okay, baba?
Alright.
[speaking in Spanish]
Te quiero mucho, eh?
[all speaking in Spanish]
[Stacy speaking in Spanish]
Adios, Mateo!
My keys.
[Lee] My research has been
mainly focused on
how babies learn to process faces.
Let's go.
We've looked at whether or not babies
are able to categorize faces
because white faces and black faces
and Chinese faces
have different kinds
of physical characteristics.
We're using near-infrared spectroscopy
to look at the brain activities
of the babies.
The cap has very low intensity lasers
coming out of the optodes that then
sh**t through the baby's skull
towards the cortex,
then the light kind of bounces back,
then we pick up the reflected lights,
and from the reflected lights
we use mathematical equations
to figure out how much hemoglobin
activities are there in the baby's cortex,
and through that, we can tell whether
or not the baby is processing information.
Alright. It's coming up, it's coming up,
it's coming up, coming up, coming up.
Ahh.
[Lee] Once the baby's paying attention,
for a very short period of time,
sometimes a few seconds,
these are the critical
periods we focus on.
Ahh.
[Lee] It turns out,
at about six months of age,
they able to recognize
every single individual face.
Just like with the monkeys.
But by nine months of age,
they lose that ability.
Even though black faces
and Chinese faces are so different,
Caucasian babies would categorize
them as just one single group.
What our studies are showing
is not that babies are racists.
But rather that babies are more likely
to prefer their own group,
and their own group, of course,
is dependent on what kind of faces
they encounter in their everyday life.
For most babies, these are the faces
of their parents, relatives,
and the people they are familiar with.
That was great. You did a great job.
[Adam]
Alright, Daddy's gonna do his beard.
[Adam] Di-di-di-di.
What did that feel like?
-Soft.
-Hot.
See you later, beard.
You remember Daddy without a beard.
Come on then.
Let's do it.
I might shock myself when I take it off.
It's just like grade eight.
[electric razor buzzing]
[Adam] If I just walk in and grab her,
she'll know it's me.
She's quite observant with me.
Cool.
Five, four, three, two, one...
-Blast off!
-Blast off!
Ohh!
Oh! You're not sure yet, are you?
You're not sure yet.
It's Daddy. [laughs] See?
Silly.
Does Daddy look different?
Yeah.
Do I look better or not better,
or do you want the beard back?
Uh, beard back.
You want the beard back?
-Yeah.
-Feel it.
[Lee] Imagine the father has a beard.
You know, that's something
the baby's very used to.
-Hello.
-Did you feel Daddy's beard?
And then the male face without a beard
becomes very alarming to the child.
-What's that? Oh!
-[Willow fusses]
[Lee]
Does this make any difference socially?
No?
And turns out that babies
actually naturally associate
different kinds of emotional tones
to a familiar face
versus an unfamiliar face.
Look at those tootsies.
[repeating] Dada, Dada.
[Lee] It's very important for them
to develop this ability to know,
"Who is someone I can trust,
who is someone I cannot trust?"
Their survival, their learning,
their adaptation,
all depends on whether or not
they can recognize faces.
[Lee] Lately, we have been looking at
the integration of face processing,
on the one hand,
and language processing,
on the other.
So the question is: How does the child
figure out to put two and two together?
Just like in face processing,
babies are also learning
to become specialized
to process language that is spoken
in their own environments.
[PA system chimes]
[announcer speaking indistinctly
over PA system]
[Lee] When they hear human voices,
within about a hundred milliseconds,
in their brain there's a flash
of electrical activities.
[indistinct chatter over PA system]
[Lee] And they turn towards
the sources of human voices.
By six months of age,
babies are very good at discerning
the sounds made by
all languages in the world.
German, English, Chinese,
Japanese, no problem whatsoever.
For example, a Chinese adult cannot tell
the difference between R and L.
But incredibly,
a Chinese baby at six months of age
is able to do that.
In my hometown dialect, which is spoken
by a very small group of people,
we have this game to irk
the people from out of town.
So, we-- you know, this is how it goes.
[series of similar syllables
in hometown dialect of Chinese]
So this is actually a sentence. It means,
"You play, you eat, and you watch a show."
[repeats sentence
in hometown dialect of Chinese]
Can you hear the difference? [laughs]
But babies anywhere
can tell the difference
between the sounds
I just made... anywhere,
until they're about 12 months of age,
then they lose that ability.
[Adrien cooing]
[Adrien speaking in French]
Okay.
[woman speaking on phone]
[makes whooshing sound]
-[Maya continues]
-[Maya's dad speaks in Spanish]
-[Maya continues making sounds]
-[Maya's dad speaks in Spanish]
[Lee] From an adult's point of view,
this is an amazing ability.
The child literally can pick up any
language that the child wants to speak,
be it English, Chinese, Portuguese, Greek.
They can just pick and choose
and learn it so well, without any accent.
Not like me, by the way. [laughs]
I can't even hold up my own body weight.
I would never wanna do that for my life.
-What?
-Watch the kids.
[Nikki] You look great
for a stay-at-home dad.
[Ryan] Thank you. Thank you.
[fussing]
Dada.
Dada, Dada.
Dada. [coos]
[Nikki] That was Dada.
"Nikki" Everyone heard that
loud and clear. Not "Mama."
-[Ryan] I'm right here.
-[coos]
[Nikki laughs]
[Adam] I mean, they're not my first words.
They're hers. So I'm really...
I'm a proud father regardless.
[Nikki chuckles]
-[Adam] That's my girl.
-[chortles]
[Baby coos]
[Stacy] Yeah, you tell me something?
-Baba. Baba.
-[Stacy] Baba?
[Stacy] Good boy.
That's a good boy. You said "papa."
-[fireworks exploding]
-[crowd] Wow!
[Lee] The learning that takes place
in the first six months
of the child's life
forms the foundation from which
the child eventually becomes
a functioning social being
in their society.
[Adam] It's like a space cloud.
[Hespos] Babies are not just hapless blobs
that are passively
allowing the world to go by.
They're actively seeking out
things to compare.
They're actively working on
the environment around them
and thinking all the time.
-[blowing raspberries on tummy]
-[giggles]
[Saxe] It's the human
evolutionary strategy of our species
to have these incredibly
incompetent babies,
with the most powerful
learning machines
in the universe inside their heads.
And that is part of what makes us
such an incredibly flexible species.
Each new generation is both
learning the new world
it lives in and creating it.
[singing "Happy Birthday" in Spanish]
[Lee] So my advice to parents is that
they should expose their babies
as wide as possible
in terms of, let's say, faces,
in terms of languages,
in terms of smells,
in terms of taste.
That would help the child to live
in the future, in the globalized world.
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