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"He's a baby genius": 3-month-old stuns mom by perfectly repeating full sentences

The boy's sister couldn't believe her ears and began sobbing uncontrollably.

Photo credit: Canva

3-month-old baby repeats full sentences, shocking mom and social media.

Babies can't talk. This isn't something that needs to be studied and researched, it's a pretty common fact of human existence. The reasons babies cry is because they can't talk to tell us what they need, at least that's what the general understanding has been for centuries. Not only their brains, but their bodies lack the development and coordination needed to form complete words and sentences.

But what if some babies could talk and we simply haven't been exposed to them because the world is so big? Thanks to social media, the world has gotten a whole lot smaller when it comes to being able to take a peek into other people's lives. This means we get to be exposed to things that may otherwise gone unseen.

Mekeia, a mom of two, uploaded a video of her then 3-month-old son talking. Not the cute baby babble that we like to call talking, but repeating actual short sentences.


baby talk; talking baby; video of talking baby; echolalia in babies; baby repeats mom; talking infant; family; parenting What if babies could actually talk? Some of them can... sort of. Giphy

Mekeia was recording her daughter playing with the baby when they captured the moment on video.

The little girl holds the baby's face and says, "say I am two months," before Mekeia corrects her, "say I am three months," the little girl pipes back up. Clearly the baby was trying to join in the conversation with what was expected to be baby babble when the mom instructed the older child to let the baby have a chance to "talk." It was then that the baby shocked everyone by sounding like he repeated the same phrase.

The two are visibly and audibly shocked not wanting to believe the baby actually repeats what the other child says. Mekeia is on the phone with a friend when the entire thing happens. Presumably thinking this is a fluke, the mom attempts to put the phone up to the baby's mouth. When he just babbles, she tells the baby, "say hey Bam." Nothing. Just more babble and drool.

Just when you think your ears were playing tricks on you, the baby does it again when the mom tells him to say, "hey Quintin." Clearly the baby still sounds like a baby but you can clearly hear him repeating the sound and cadence of the words so much so that it sounds like he's fully saying the words. His older sister is overwhelmed with emotion and begins to cry while Mekeia seems to be so shocked that she begins to laugh while the person on the phone is just stunned into confusion.

@foxondemandfam

Watch until the end 😱omg🥹🥰!!

People in the comments were eager to jump in with exclaiming the baby is a genius with one person writing, "he is a baby genius start showing him math problems."

Another person jokes, "next thing he's writing emails and making appointments."

"Talking so clear would scare me sooo bad he's so intelligent," someone writes.

Others explain the phenomenon with a condition called echolalia.


@foxondemandfam

He growing too fast , I didn’t have time to baby proof the house 🥴🥴 #babymessiah #babiestiktok #mamababysound

"Echolalia is a normal part of child development. As children learn to talk and understand words, they imitate, copy or echo the sounds and words they hear. Over time, a child usually learns to talk by connecting new words together to make unique little phrases or sentences,” according to Speech and Language Advisor Claire Smith when interviewed by the BBC.

Sometimes this phenomenon rears its head extraordinarily early. Mekeia's daughter was just three months old in the video above. Another popular video from a few years ago shows an 8-week-old infant from the UK very clearly saying the word "Hello" in response to his parents. A 7-week-old from Ireland was shown doing the same in 2015.

While echolalia can be a sign of autism, that's not always the case. Many kids grow out of it by the age of three and continue their typical development.

What's really interesting is when kids start to actually understand and utilize language intentionally at an extremely early age. A boy named Michael Kevin Kearney was said to be talking by around 4-months-old, even asking his parents "What's for dinner?" He went on to become a certified child prodigy, received a masters degree in chemistry at just 14, and secured his doctorate at the age of 22.

Most babies who repeat words shockingly early are not little geniuses in the making, just good mimics. Much of the time, they're not able to consistently repeat the feat once the clip goes viral on social media.

But you can't blame the parents, and social media users, for getting excited. It's adorable and fascinating to watch in action!

This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.

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Fascinating study suggests there is no such thing as a "male" or "female" brain

It's a great reminder that gendering activities and behaviors is a bunch of bunk.

Andriyko Podilnyk/Unsplash & David Matos/Unsplash

Are we more alike than we've been led to think?

Have you ever heard that women are "hardwired" to have better memories?

Or that men are "naturally" better at navigating?

Sure, they're just stereotypes, but they're coming from somewhere. And for a long time we've been led to believe that men's and women's brains are fundamentally different, so why couldn't blanket statements like these hold some truth?

British neuroscientist Gina Rippon, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at the Aston Braine Centre, Aston University and noted speaker on the subject of sex differences, offered a different idea in 2014. She believes these patterns are acquired through environmental factors—a woman could become great at multitasking because society expects her to be better at it, for example—not because of any innate wiring in her brain.

According to a 2015 study, research suggests her claims are correct.

A team led by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel recently concluded that there is no consistent difference between male and female brains.

A black and white brain scan from multiple anglesCould the "male" and "female" brains be a myth?Daniele Oberti/Flickr

The team, led by behavioral neuroscientist Daphna Joel, analyzed the MRI scans of 1,400 individuals, mapping things like gray matter (gooey stuff that handles sensation, emotion ... pretty much everything), white matter (the gooey stuff that carries messages between areas of gray matter), and a host of personality traits along the way.

What did they find?

That it's pretty dang rare for a given brain to demonstrate only male or female characteristics.

So next time someone says to you, "Women's brains do this" or "Men's brains behave like this," feel free to call B.S.

The plain truth is that our brains flat out can't be separated into two distinct gender categories.

Our brains, the researchers say, are more like "mosaics" — wonderful mixtures of the traits we usually associate with men or women.

That's not to say the study found no differences between the brains of men and women, but rather that a brain consisting of almost all male or female features was pretty uncommon, and that it'd be really tough to tell if a person were biologically male or female just by looking at their brain.

Yes, on average there are certain differences in brain size, connections between hemispheres, size of the hippocampus or amygdala.

But this particular study found you couldn't make any concrete predictions about how a person's brain would look or function just based on their biological sex.

Joel summed it up in a follow-up publication in 2021:

"Although there are group-level differences between men and women in brain structure, most brains are composed of unique mosaics of brain features, some in a form more common in women compared to men, and some in a form more common in men compared to women," she wrote.

"Moreover, the brain architectures typical of women are also typical of men, and vice versa... Sex category provides little information on an individual’s specific brain architecture or on how their brain is similar or different from someone else’s."

It's a great reminder that gendering activities and behaviors is a bunch of bunk.

If you're not looking at an individual person holistically for the things that make them them, you're doing it wrong

Better yet, The Washington Post writes that these findings are "a step towards validating the experiences of those who live outside the gender binary.

A male and female restroom sign with arrow pointing to the rightIn how many areas of life are we creating arbitrary divisions?m01229/flickr

It's just more evidence to support the idea that the biological "parts" you're born with don't really tell us much about who you are.

Turns out that what's inside is much more fluid and malleable than we ever imagined.

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The world's monster plastic problem could be thwarted by mutant bacteria

It sounds like something straight out of a comic book, but the prospects are very real.

CockrellSchool/Youtube

The world could be saved by bacteria

Plastic has been taking over our world for a while now.

You may not think too much about it, but plastic is a global crisis. A recent rundown in The National Review reveals that more than 8 million tons of plastic is regularly deposited in the ocean. It's killing sea life, endangering coral reefs, and affecting the fish we eat because of the toxins they ingest.

So much for a happy, carefree day, right?

But there's some good news on the horizon: Scientists have found a mutant bacteria that eats plastic.

Of course, this mutant bacteria isn't exactly like the kind of mutants you see in movies and comic books. Although, I'll admit I initially thought, "Good! Someone's finally getting Storm to handle this whole climate change business." How cool would that be?

So maybe Professor X isn't coming out of hiding to help us with our global problems, but the reality of this news is just as exciting. According to The Guardian, an international team of scientists have mutated a bacteria's enzyme to fully break down plastic bottles.

The plastic-eating bacteria was first discovered in 2016 in Japan. Researchers studying plastic pollution — specifically polyethylene terephthalate or PET — discovered a colony of bacteria that fed on the plastic, breaking down strong chemical bonds as a means of survival. The bacteria back then, though, was eating through highly crystallized PET — the material plastic bottles are made of — at a slow rate. Researchers knew it would take a while for the bacteria to evolve into the environmental savior we need.

Scientists started studying the bacteria's evolution and discovered they'd unintentionally made it stronger.

"It's alive! It's alive!" they screamed. That's how I imagine the discovery of this mutated bacteria enzyme went, with all the blinking lights and klaxons of a superhero movie. That's what happens in labs, right?

Well, that's how it should have gone. Because this is exciting! After viewing a 3D model of the bacteria, scientists discovered that small modifications could make its enzymes much more effective. The BBC reports that PET takes "hundreds of years" to break down on its own, but with the modified enzyme, called PETase, the same process begins within a matter of days. The enzyme breaks down PET to its original building blocks, meaning that the plastic can be reused again without losing quality.

recycling, reusable, plastic bottles, PET, enzymes

A large blocked cube made up of plastic bottles.

Image via Pixabay.

Here's why this is important: You may think plastic bottles are recycled into new plastic bottles and that every bottle you drink from had a rich and beautiful life before it came to you, but that's not true. In 2017, BuzzFeed reported that Coca-Cola sourced only 7% of its plastic from recycled material and only 6% of Nestle's bottles were made from recycled plastic. The rest of all that single-use plastic being dumped is turned into other fibers like carpet and clothing.

This is because plastics degrade as they're recycled. "Bottles become fleeces, then carpets, after which they often end up in landfill," the BBC notes.

But PETase makes it possible to use PET in its original form over and over again.

We're only at the beginning of this development.

On one hand, PETase could bring us closer to true recycling (producing much less plastic and using much less fossil fuel) than ever before. But the research has only started. The breaking down process still needs to be made faster, so it could be years before PETase or anything like it is used on an industrial scale.

While scientists keep working to make PETase a worldwide plastic problem-solver, we can all do our part by reducing our reliance on plastic. Little things — like a reusable bottle for the gym, keeping metal utensils at work, and reusable bags and totes for trips to the store — can help keep the Earth clean, save animals, and make us a little less reliant on mutants (er, mutant enzymes) to save the day.

Curious to learn more? Watch the video below:


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Captivating new TED video shows how planting a trillion trees would help reverse climate change

via Ted-Ed / YouTube

Trees are one of the most effective ways to fight back against climate change. Like all plants, trees consume atmospheric carbon through photosynthesis then store it in their wood tissue and in the surrounding soil.

They work as an organic vacuum to remove the billions of pounds of carbon dioxide that humans have dumped into the atmosphere over the past century.

So, if trees are going to be part of the war on climate change, what strategies should we use to make the best use of their amazing ability to repair the Earth? How can we be sure that after planting these trees they are protected and don't become another ecological victim of human greed?

A new Ted-Ed video by Jean-François Bastin and directed by Lobster Studio looks at practical ways we can plant one trillion trees and remove up to 200 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

That would account for one-sixth of the total carbon emissions created by humans.

The video also investigates how, instead of planting anew, we can repair the environment by using the natural regenerative abilities of forests damaged by humans in the past.

Bastin is a forester and geographer who uses remote sensing to better understand global ecosystem ecology.


What if there were 1 trillion more trees? - Jean-François Bastinwww.youtube.com




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