This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
There's a video on YouTube you might have seen.
It has nearly 200 million views.
In this video, a pair of twin brothers are standing in a kitchen having a little chat.
These twin brothers are diaper clad babies.
Now, if this video featured ten year old twins or adult twins, I guarantee you it wouldn't have gone viral.
What makes this video special is that we have no clue what these babies are saying.
To us non babies.
It sounds like gobbledygook.
Cute, mysterious gobbledygook.
Here at hidden brain, we love trying to understand the puzzles and contradictions of human behavior.
But we spend most of our time talking about the older members of the human race.
Today we focus on the younger set.
The much younger set.
I find babies are so impressive, we can't really ask them what they're thinking.
We have to come up with clever ways of figuring out what's going on in their little brains.
Later in the show, we'll hear from a researcher who says parents are often misguided when they try to steer their children's lives.
If you just do the right things, get the right skills, read the right books, you're going to be able to shape your child into a particular kind of adult.
But first, we'll start with the language of babies.