The viral video of 17-month-old twins Sam and Ren McEntee chattering away and laughing at each other in the kitchen has become a Youtube sensation, attracting more than 14 million viewers and sparking widespread discussion on one question – what on earth were they talking about?
A Children’s Hospital Boston blog published Friday suggests that the two diaper-clad toddlers were not, in fact, actually speaking their own secret language. They were merely babbling – or speaking in “reduplicated babbling,” a behavioral term used to describe the repeated “dah dah dah” in the twins’ conversation.
Hope Dickinson, a speech pathologist at the Children’s Hospital, said in the post that the animated babbling, which will eventually be filled with words as the toddlers grow, demonstrated that the babies already have a grasp of conversational structure, such as turn-taking, pausing and even keeping appropriate body distance.
“They are also imitating the various intonations we use in conversation and speaking,” Dickinson said in the post. “There is fantastic rise and fall to their pitch and tones.”
The twins used questioning intonations, ended sentences loudly and emphasized with hand gestures, which is what made their interaction so adult-like and lively, according to Dickinson.
One was even laughing, seemingly understanding and reacting to what the other toddler was saying – but Dickinson said it was probably a reaction to the intonation and gestures.
The nonsensical sounds, however, do serve a purpose as children’s first steps to establishing languages. Baby-talk, as the twin babbling video indicates, isn’t random movement of the mouth, but deliberate actions. Though the twins weren’t conveying actual information as they talked, they were communicating nonetheless.
Can you prescribe me something for a broken heart?
Heartache is no longer just a metaphor to describe lovesickness.
A University of Michigan study indicates that the heartbreak from a relationship’s end can actually cause physical pain.
Psychologists from University of Michigan teamed with researchers at Columbia University and the University of Colorado to recruit 40 people who had been rejected in the preceding six months. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the patients’ brains, and discovered that romantic heartbreaks activate the same regions of the brain that physical pain does.
In the first trial, patients were connected to a heat source to create tolerable physical pain in their arms, similar to holding a hot cup of coffee without a cardboard sleeve. In the second one, participants were asked to look at pictures of their ex-partners and to think about how they felt during their breakup. The participants rated the level of pain after each trail.
As expected, greater pain was reported in the ex-partner trial, but both types of experiences led to overlapping increases in activity in the same pain regions.
In other words, the heart and mind do connect when it comes to love, because your brain can’t seem to distinguish between physical pain and emotional pain.
The findings “[demonstrate] that social rejection and physical pain are similar not only in that they are both distressing, they share a common representation in somatosensory brain systems as well,” the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which the study was published.
The result offers new insight into how rejection experiences may lead to actual physical pain disorders such as fibromyalgia. It also legitimizes the feeling of rejection.
“We often think of emotional experiences as these abstract things that happen in the head,” psychologist Ethan Kross, the lead author of the study, told PostMedia News. “Here we’re showing how these experiences may manifest themselves in the body.”
Beware the midnight munchies
Find yourself munching chips and wolfing down pizzas during those late-night study sessions? It might be that you’re sleep-deprived, not actually hungry.
A recent Columbia University study suggests that sleep-deprived adults consume nearly 300 calories more per day than those who are well rested.
The researchers recruited 26 normal-weight participants and monitored their eating habits during two six-day stints in a sleep lab. During the first six days, they could sleep up to nine hours per night; the second, only four.
Ultimately, sleep-deprived participants consumed an average of 296 calories more. Their favorite midnight snack? Ice cream, among other unhealthy treats full of saturated fat.
The 13 women in the study ate an added 329 calories on average, compared to the male participants with 263 more calories. The study supports, in precise calorie measures, the link between sleep deprivation and obesity, but researchers are still analyzing the data to find out how sleep deprivation affects appetite hormones.
Children are no exception, according to earlier research conducted by the University of Chicago, which found that overweight children tend to sleep less and to not make up their loss of sleep on the weekends.
So the moral of the story – try to get a full eight-hour night of sleep, in addition to hitting the gym to burn off those calories. And don’t worry – you’re burning calories in your sleep anyway. A 150-pound person burns roughly one calorie per minute while sleeping, a total of nearly 500 calories during an 8-hour sleep cycle.
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