If you have a child of your own, or have watched a baby grow up, you’ll likely have found yourself contemplating one thing in particular:

“I wonder what they are thinking?”

That’s because babies only develop the capacity for language – the means by which we primarily communicate between ten to eighteen months of age (though they coo and babble before that of course).

But that doesn’t mean they’re not thinking the things they might one day say – and according to a new study from neuroscientists at Trinity College Dublin, they could be categorising things in their minds much earlier than we thought.

In the study, recently published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers proved that babies are thinking and learning even when they’re just a couple of months out of the womb.

Combining fMRI scans alongside AI modelling tools, the researchers were able to study the responses to visual stimuli in 130 babies at just two months of age.

The babies were made comfortable on a beanbag with noise-cancelling headphones on whilst being shown images from categories like ‘cat’, ‘bird’ and ‘tree’.

After performing fMRI scans of the babies to monitor their brain activity in response to the images, the researchers used AI modelling to understand the neural pathways of the babies when they saw the images, with results that impressed the team.

The use of awake fMRI on the babies was crucial to understanding how an infant’s mind works, with the results immediately rewriting previous theories, as researcher Dr. Cliona O’Doherty explained in a statement:

“Parents and scientists have long wondered what goes on in a baby’s mind and what they actually see when they view the world around them. This research highlights the richness of brain function in the first year of life. Although at two months, infants’ communication is limited by a lack of language and fine motor control, their minds were already not only representing to how things look, but figuring out to which category they belonged. This shows that the foundations of visual cognition are already in place from very early on and much earlier than expected.”

All this just goes to prove that babies – even infants – are smarter than we give them credit for, and create these patterns during their earliest experiences in the world.

They’re not just thinking: they’re learning.

If you found that story interesting, learn more about why people often wake up around 3 AM and keep doing it for life.