The future supervillain in the picture aside, a new study reports that babies are more gooder at learning things than previously thought and can even do it in their sleep.
A new study has found that newborns are capable of a rudimentary form of learning while they're asleep, which may be an important process, considering that infants spend between 16 to 18 hours a day in the land of Nod.Further investigation is required to determine if blowing air in sleeping baby's faces increases the likelihood of becoming psychopathic killers in adulthood, but you don't need stupid experiments to prove sound logic.
Researchers recruited one- and two-day-old infants for the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. With each sleeping baby, the researchers played a musical tone and followed that by a puff of air to the eyes, a mild annoyance that caused the infant to automatically scrunch up its eyes. As this sequence of events was repeated, the sleeping babies learned to associate the air puff with the tone, and soon began to to tighten their eyelids as soon as they heard the musical note, even if the air puff didn't follow. Electrodes stuck to their scalps also showed activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in memory.
Thanks to Andy, who learned everything he needed to by six-months.
