5 Amazing Things You Didn't Know Babies Could Do

Researchers at Yale stuck babies between 6 and 10 months old in front of a puppet show, a morality tale featuring anthropomorphic geometric shapes, which sounds like the shittiest puppet show ever. Basically it boiled down to a yellow triangle helping a red ball up a hill, while a blue square tried to push the red ball back down. All of these shapes had eyes, if that helps with your mental picture. The important part is that when given a choice on which shapes they preferred, 80 percent of the babies reached for the helper shape, as if to say "You are the best and I want you" (or possibly "You are the one I am going to eat because I too am evil," but probably that first one).

If you think that was just a coincidence (like maybe the helper shape was also shaped like a boob), they've done multiple versions of the study -- for instance, babies as young as 8 months agree that justice should be rewarded and evil should be punished. That study was again conducted with puppets (the universal language of babies), and in this one a bad puppet was either rewarded or punished as the babies watched. This time, the babies picked the punisher as their favorite. Not the victim or the bad guy, but the one who administered justice.

And the older the kids get, the more intensely they feel right and wrong (one toddler actually smacked the bad puppet). But all of it happens at an age when they shouldn't even have witnessed enough good or evil to even know what it is. We practically come out of the womb wanting to administer pain to bad guys. Or bad puppets, at least.

Again: There are absolutely no real-world scenarios where you're allowed to put this knowledge to the test, unless you're the woman in the video below, dangling her naked newborn for shits and giggles:

The reflex is called the palmar grasp, and it happens when you stroke an infant's palm or put anything in his hand (which makes the idea of the baby reaching for his mother's nipple before latching on even more painful -- he's going to squeeze the shit out of it first).

The instinct doesn't just appear out of nowhere at birth, either. It's seen even in the womb. In fact, anti-abortion activists have used images of babies grasping the hands of their surgeon during in utero operations as propaganda for their cause. What those activists probably didn't appreciate is that the reflex to wrap your hands around whatever you can get your chubby fingers on is found in baby monkeys as well. Monkeys don't have the advantage of getting carted around in BabyBjorns, after all, and the ability to cling to your monkey mom while she's swinging through the vines could be the difference between surviving infancy and getting eaten by a rhino.

Where things get interesting is when doctors test out exactly how strong infant grips can be. Way back in 1891, one researcher decided to test baby grips by dangling 60 different newborns from a walking stick (one at a time, sadly). What he found was that most were able to hang on for at least 10 seconds, and one of them lasted two minutes and 35 seconds. A separate researcher did the same test with monkeys and found that they could make it between seven and 33 minutes, and with just one hand to boot. But again, human babies aren't required to grip their mothers to stay alive, so it makes sense that we're a little behind our monkey cousins.

The bad news is that a baby's superstrength grip disappears when he's between 6 and 12 months old. So if you're ever in a situation where you're attacked by babies, you better hope they're not newborns, because you might not make it out alive.

To get there, this little blob of weak sauce has to do push-ups while using his feet to step on his mother's abdomen, propelling himself to the boob of choice. With each little push-up, he lowers one arm and reaches to the nipple for leverage before pulling himself to his milk-filled destination. At which point he instinctively figures out how to latch on and start sucking.

Now, if you're thinking, "Of course babies instinctively know how to breastfeed, DUH," think again. The process of breastfeeding can be so anxiety-ridden, unintuitive, and painful for some moms that they quit before they even leave the hospital. But those mothers are probably guiding their babies to their breasts, not letting their brand new infants do the hard work of figuring out the business of eating on their own.

So how can babies do it? Researchers think the mother's breasts emit a secret smell that only her child can sense, and it's that smell calling him to action. Which also explains a lot of what we know about the teenage years, but not how the weakest thing on the planet can pretty much do one-armed push-ups right after birth.

Starting at about 6 months old, babies stop looking into their caregivers' eyes and start looking at their lips to figure out how to make sounds correctly. So one day your baby is bonding through eye gazes and gentle coos, the next day the baby says "Fuck this, I'm going to learn how to talk." And his gaze drops and starts watching the speakers' mouths.

Researchers figured the phenomenon out by studying babies at ages 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 months old. At 4 months old, babies stared at the speakers' eyeballs. At 6 months, they split their time between the eyes and mouth. The 8- and 10-month-olds focused exclusively on the mouths. By 12 months, the kids spontaneously switched backed to eye contact -- unless the scientists used Spanish speakers on babies who came from English homes. In those cases, the older babies kept their eyes trained on the mouths, because they still had some learning to do.

In other words, we have a natural instinct to quit bonding through eye contact and start communicating with words, and we make the transition without help from flash cards or Rosetta Stone or worried grandmothers who secretly think we're developmentally delayed. And every sound you've ever learned how to make was acquired during a six-month window before your first birthday. It kind of makes everything you've done since then look pretty lame, huh?

The best part about this fact is how researchers figured it out -- by deliberately lying to kids in the most dickish way possible. Sixty babies between 13 and 16 months were put into two groups. The children in the first group had the privilege of watching a grownup fake excitement over opening a box, only to find out the box was totally empty. In the second group, the grownups got orgasmically excited over a box that actually had a toy in it, presumably one that was appropriate for babies.

In part two of the experiment, the same grownups with the boxes demonstrated how to turn on a light -- with their foreheads. Sixty-one percent of the babies in the group with the non-lying adult actually trusted their adult enough to copy them by trying to turn on light switches with their hilariously oversized heads. In contrast, only 34 percent of the babies placed with the liars trusted them enough to use their foreheads to do anything, much less turn on a light switch.

So remember that the next time you try to trick your child into eating pea puree because it tastes like "ice cream." You might just cast yourself as an unreliable adult, unworthy of imitation. Then again, they're going to probably figure that out eventually anyway.

Zion Lights also writes about things that have nothing to do with babies at www.zionlights.co.uk. You can find her on Twitter @ziontree, where she tweets loudly, like everybody else.

For more reasons to fear all things cute, check out 6 Shockingly Evil Things Babies Are Capable Of and The 5 Most Horrible Things Nobody Tells You About Babies.

Related Reading: Did you know a crazy man once designed a hypodermic needle that looked like a bunny to trick infants into getting their vaccines? Read about that, and other terrifying baby products by clicking that link. More interested in all the insane ways our body tricks us into loving babies? Read this article and learn how infants are basically just tiny bald drug dealers. And did you know babies also had mild telepathy and superhearing? That's just the tip of the tiny super powers iceberg, and you can read all about it here.