What and how does a baby think?

How gifted parents should be to have a baby of their own. According to us, what a newborn knows is to cry, sleep and again cry and sleep, and so on. The baby will cry for milk, will cry when it is wet when there is pain or any illness, etc. Otherwise, it will sleep. This is what we feel that newborns do, but do they think?

Research has been done on this for the past twenty-five years and they say that yes, they do think, they can see and hear everything that is happening around them. Due to their small size, we do underestimate them as they do not know anything. A thorough analysis on the newborn was carried on and it was found that they do pick up information and learn from their experience just like us.

It has been found that after few minutes of repeated exposure of the mother's face after birth to the newborn baby, the baby can identify its mother from a group of photographs. The same way without thought process how come it searches for the mother and when found smiles at her, at times screams to get attention, etc.

It listens carefully to the mother when she reads a story book. And it has been found that if the book is read backward, the baby will lose interest and stop listening to the book. What a great finding by the scientists proving that babies do think!

Just like us babies do dream and we all would have seen babies smile when they are sleeping. Grandmother stories will tell us that a monkey would come to the baby and give a flower to it, and that is why the baby is smiling. Not only smiles, but also the babies would react with body movements and facial expressions that prove that the baby acts like adults when they experience a dream.

When the baby is two to three months old, it can distinguish mom and dad and search for them. When the baby reaches five months, the baby can respond to the name. When called would turn and see or smile at the person. The image of the caregiver gets registered in the baby's brain as well as the name of the baby. It thinks and reacts accordingly.

From the above, it is clear that they can think, identify and respond well, but what are they thinking about? Are they thinking about us? To us, they are miniatures of us, cute and adorable but to the babies, we are all huge giants with big hands, a huge body who can easily carry them and move around.

I have heard some parents call their babies, as they start to crawl, juju, puppy as if they are all cute little doggies if the baby knows what juju means, how will it react, will it take it lightly or get angry, calling me doggy? You all are shouting like barking dogs and at times behaving like fools, will our sweet little ones think like that? No way! I do not think so.

Definitely, it all depends on the parents, grandparents, and the surrounding, how they talk and behave to the baby. If we talk nice things to the baby it is going to think in a nice way too.

If we shout and chide them for acting naughty or for a wrongdoing, immediately the first thing that would they do is to cry. That's their trick. They know how to meet the mother, just a cry is enough. How smart!

So folks, next time we see a baby, never underestimate the baby as a tiny little thing who knows nothing and cannot do anything because of the size. They are watching each one of us and studying us so carefully that it is our responsibility to act in a good way towards them because a fresh new brain can absorb anything and can be smarter than us in all possible ways.