5 Superpowers We All Had as Babies (According to Science)

Take a look at this picture of two monkeys and see if you can tell the difference between them:

Can't do it, right? You can look at them all you want, but as far as your brain is concerned, both monkeys look equally attractive. We certainly couldn't pick them out from a room full of other sexy primates... but at six months old we totally could!

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 year old. This neuro-remodeling is also what robs us of our other visual super power: Cartoon Vision.

A 2008 study performed in England is hinting at the possibility that kids have an unfiltered perception of the world around them, processing "virgin" colors in a totally different and more intense way than adults do.

Dad running out on your mom, as viewed by your five-month-old self

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.

Similarly, to a baby's ear, every sound is "vital" and equally audible, be it the person talking right in front of them, or mom in the next room. As we age though, our modern brains start to focus only on a very narrow band of sound, pushing everything "nonessential"--like the voices of adults not currently giving you candy--to the background.

You can have some candy
only after you clean your room

Science is additionally claiming that at merely a few days old, human babies can tell the difference between their native tongue and a foreign language. Imagine if you were in their position, one day snuggled warmly in your bed when suddenly someone rudely yanks you out and transports you to a strange and unfamiliar place populated by giants who constantly produce unintelligible noises. Then, after just a few dozen hours, you can tell which noise doesn't quite fit in with the other. Sure, it would make you basically the least impressive X-Man, but that shit still borders on mutant abilities.

Ever notice that infants don't have such weight problems? What's their secret? Why, a pile of borderline-magic fat, of course.

Of course

Around five percent (or six ounces) of all infants' body mass is Brown Adipose Tissue (BAT), or brown fat. Unlike the hideous "white fat" around your belly, chest, arms, neck and feet (seriously eat some vegetables), brown fat is specifically designed to take in calories and burn them for heat until our infants are hotter than Scarlett Johansson's ass that one time it caught on fire. It does so by cranking the babies' metabolism all the way up to 11, effectively turning them into adorable furnaces for surplus calories.

In an adult body, three ounces of brown fat would be enough to burn 400 to 500 calories of white fat a DAY, or around 10 pounds a year, just from sitting on your increasingly sexier behind. Unfortunately, people lose most of their brown fat before they hit adulthood while babies just sit there, stupidly sitting on top of an amazing experience they don't even deserve because they can't appreciate it.

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.

Thanks to that, their supercomputer brains can constantly suck up data from their surroundings, then store, analyze and compare it relentlessly trying to understand the world they live in. The infant's capacity for gaining and processing knowledge easily surpasses that of a genius adult mind, making all babies giant nerds by nature. See? Your secret desire to punch them in the face has been perfectly natural all along!

This kid is just asking for it now.

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. It's like chopping off most of your gigantic dick because there was no woman on Earth capable of taming it.

Thus, we go from infant geniuses who might have given us affordable sex androids in the future, to a bunch of stupid kids who can't even color inside the freakinglines.

What the fuck is this shit?

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