Blogpost 3: 5 Superpowers We All Had As Babies

When we look at babies what do we see? We see cute little tiny versions of humans we think, can't do anything without help or assistance from the elders. That is wrong because in my blog, you will see things that babies have that we dont.

An article at "Cracked.com" explores the fact that every human being on the planet is born with super powers, from telepathy to heightened senses - we just grow out of them. It's a bird! It's a plane! It's super babies! Scientists love studying babies more than they enjoy studying rats and monkeys, mainly because babies are so delicious much more similar to real human beings than animals are. What's that? Babies are human too? I beg to differ, and science begs to differ as well. If babies were humans, would they be able to read minds? Of course they wouldn't, and they can't, but they do have powers similar to mind reading that baffle scientists on a regular basis. 

In an article called "5 Superpowers We All Had as Babies (According to Science)," Cracked's Cezary Jan Strusiewicz explores some of the amazing things babies can do before they grow up and become annoying preteens. For instance, mind reading. It isn't really mind reading, but scientists have found that babies are able to read subtle facial expressions in the adults in their lives so acutely that it verges on supernatural.n 2007, the team at the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences conducted an experiment with 18-month old toddlers found they become so sensitive to the subtlest psychological changes in a person's expressions that it might actually explain why they always cry when you come anywhere near them. They can feel the deep-seeded hatred for all things baby under that fake smile of yours.This strange power even extends to animals, according to a Brigham Young study that discovered that babies under six months could match a dog's bark to its picture without ever coming into contact with the animal. Bizarre! Of course then we grow up and it all turns to crap. Sadly, 

these amazing abilities get lost the minute the babies learn how to talk and get their hands on Twitter, becoming the modern age nonverbal-communication cripples. Before that though, they are basically Lil' Professor Xaviers. What other powers do babies have? How about extreme eyesight? Another study, conducted on a herd of six and nine month old children found that the younger babies could discern between two different monkeys, while the older babies could not. This tells us that somewhere between six months and nine months, babies get stupid. How does that happen? The thing is, adult brains are very busy and don't have time for such trifle things as actually "seeing" colors. From the time we acquire language (seven to nine months old), our brains start perceiving only the "idea" of a color rather than the real thing, unlike all the toddlers who see the world for what it really is. It's like us adults are living in a perpetual Matrix where everything we see is a lie, and all infant babies are Neo. Babies also have hypersensitive hearing. Unlike adults that have developed the ability to filter out non-essential sounds, like air conditioners or our bosses asking us when this article will be ready, to babies, every sound is essential, and they can hear things happening in the next room as if it were happening right in front of them, hence all the crying. Babies even have stronger brains than adults. Humans are born with around 100 billion neurons, same as the number of stars in the Milky Way. However, without a large number of synapses, having lots of neurons is like owning an impressive gun collection with only peas and carrots to load them with. By age three, babies have around 15,000 synapses per neuron... three times as much as an adult in his prime.P

Unfortunately, the adult mind can't deal with that much information being processed at all times, so our synapses get trimmed as we age, which Strusiewicz likens to "But all good things must come to an end. Our minds just aren't designed to deal with so much information in the long run, so between years four and six the number of synapses in our neurons gets trimmed by more than 2/3rds." The mind of the baby is to much for their body to handle so part of it growing up is to be able to discard the abilities.

According to the article "Baby Super Powers" by anthropologist Stephen Juan from the site " today.ninemsn.com.au "


Babies Can read the moods of people in their surroundings especially their caregiver. 
The belief used to be that babies were blind but studies have indicated that babies can see 25cm away. 
Using all their senses, the baby is continually perceiving and learning about the world they have come into and they don't have the filtering system we have as adults. Adults usually block out 98% of what they see and hear but babies block out less. 
The newborn's sense of smell is very strong, it's the newborn's strongest sense of all the senses. A newborn can tell the difference between their mother's milk and another breastfeeding mother's milk. They can also tell their own mother's body smell.
The point here is we need to take a short break from whining over not having real super powers so we can lament the ones we did have that disappeared as we became so-called productive human beings.P