Question: Why do babies learn things so quickly eg. when your older it takes years of practise to learn a language but when you're a baby you learn to talk very quickly in comparison.

Caspar Addyman answered on 16 Mar 2011:

That’s a very good question. No one knows for sure but there are three things that could make the difference –

1. Babies brains are a lot more ’empty’ than yours or mine, because they haven’t experienced as much as we have. So when they encounter something new firstly it is more new & more surprising to them si they remember it better and secondly that memory has less other things to get confused with. For example, part of the problem trying to learn a new language as an adult is that we can’t remember the foreign word for something because the english ones get in the way.

2. For related reasons, Babies brains are also more adaptable than ours. We’ve spent a lifetime fixing the wiring of our brains to be a certain way so it is much harder for us to change it and rewire it to learn new things.

3. Babies put a lot more effort into learning because they have to learn if they want to know what is going on around them and because they have nothing better to do and can learn from everything. All of the playing that babies do is teaching them things.

However, it is also important to know that learning doesn’t have to stop. If your grandparents went to live in a country where they didn’t speak any of the language, they could still learn it. And they could learn it quite fast too.