Deb Roy: The birth of a word

The below TED Talk is awe-inspiring:

MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language — so he wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son’s life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch “gaaaa” slowly turn into “water.” Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

I would give so much to have a map of my very first words in chronological order. What a lucky little boy.

(thank you Jessi!)

8 Comments leave a comment below

  1. The benefits of having researcher-parents…This is so amazing! Thanks for the share.

  2. Wow, truly amazing.
    That last clip had me almost crying.

  3. Saw this on the weekend. It was amazing and inspirational at the same time. Fantastic use of technology for research.

    I could only imagine what this could do for other usages like airport security.

  4. Never come across something so powerful that almost gets us back in time… fantastic stuff.

  5. It’s very interesting but to be honest, if my parents had run this experiment on me, I would be mad and feel like a lab rat vs. their child. In this age of over information, it’s becoming a luxury to forget and to experience life w/ no carbon copy.

  6. the guide to the success

  7. On the flip side – our memory works in a certain way to avoid memories. This presentation largely focused on a positive occurrence ā€“ revisiting how a child learned to speak/walk. There are plenty of moments you wouldn’t want to revisit. Use your imagination and Iā€™m sure you can think of a dozen things without putting much thought into the exercise.