Laughing
Hearing
According to the University of Chicago, most small children can hear noises as low as 20 Hz (think: a big pipe organ) and as high as 20,000 Hz (a high-pitched dog whistle). Most adults, on the other hand, have experienced noise-induced hearing loss—a lesson in turning down the volume level on your iPod just a touch the next time you go jogging.
Memory
Recent research suggests that kids and adults remember in very different ways. Adults often skew memories based on their perception of situations, whereas children do not. This is because kids don’t have the same emotional and intellectual range that adults have. While this sounds like kiddos are inferior, here’s a major advantage: Their ability to keep it simple and see the facts without emotion proves invaluable, especially in court cases, when unbiased recalled memories are vital.
Smell
Babies start developing a sense of smell in the womb, and pick up on the subtleties of scents that you would never notice. Your newborn has a preference for her mom’s breast milk, can smell the exhaust from the cars on the street and becomes more alert when you begin to whip up dinner. Maybe this is why she’s always up and crying for you just as you’re about to take a bite?
Adapting
Kids’ brains are more flexible than adult brains, because they are not fully developed during adolescence. While this means your teen has trouble making big, long-term decisions and practicing impulse control, it also means he’s quick to pick up new technology and adapt to the changing times. In other words it’s why he learned how to navigate his smartphone in a day, and why you’re still working on it six months later.
MORE: Baby Superpowers
Learning Languages
A long-held belief about language development is that children acquire skills faster than adults while still in a sensitive period of the learning process. Although debated, researchers at USC have said that, at the very least, children use simpler vocabulary than adults and are able to reach competence in a second language much faster. In addition, they have more incentive to use their skills in school and with friends than grown-ups do—all the more reason to encourage bilingual kids.
Making Friends
While adults have more difficulty creating new connections with each passing year, friendship researchers have found that children have an instinctual and sophisticated process for determining who to bond with; everything from figuring out how much common ground they share, to assessing prospective friends’ styles of persuasion, to tapping into an ability to initiate interactions. Some kids are so skilled at this—not just being popular and liked, but at building friendships—that researchers would love to deliberately teach this skill to adults. Cool, right?
