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Are babies able to taste?

Missy

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I have had numerous answers from different people about this question and honestly I am not sure which one is right.

My sister has just had a baby with a cleft pallet. She has trouble feeding him so she has to add this apparently bitter tasting crap to his milk for added calories. Baby goes mental when my sister tries to feed him with that stuff in it Her neo-natal nurse told her that the baby won't develop taste untill he's about six months, but watching baby trying to feed, my sister and me reckon otherwise.

So what do you think? Are babies able to taste?? :confused:
 
Why not ask a 3 month old if they can taste?

Walk up to it and shove some feces or paint or something in its mouth and yell "HEY BABY, WHAT DOES THAT TASTE LIKE?" and if it doesn't answer hit it upside the head until it does.

In order to make it scientifical like, I would have a control group of babies getting fed nothing, just being hit upside the head and yelled at.

I should be a scientition, I could SO solve these problems. :)
 
SquishyDave said:
Why not ask a 3 month old if they can taste?

Walk up to it and shove some feces or paint or something in its mouth and yell "HEY BABY, WHAT DOES THAT TASTE LIKE?" and if it doesn't answer hit it upside the head until it does.

In order to make it scientifical like, I would have a control group of babies getting fed nothing, just being hit upside the head and yelled at.

I should be a scientition, I could SO solve these problems. :)
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Please tell me you have no kids..
 
SquishyDave said:
Why not ask a 3 month old if they can taste?

Walk up to it and shove some feces or paint or something in its mouth and yell "HEY BABY, WHAT DOES THAT TASTE LIKE?" and if it doesn't answer hit it upside the head until it does.

In order to make it scientifical like, I would have a control group of babies getting fed nothing, just being hit upside the head and yelled at.

I should be a scientition, I could SO solve these problems. :)
Click to expand...

LOL!! :D

Wouldn't you also need a sceond control group that gets fed feces but doesn't get smacked upside the head?
 
Missy said:


Please tell me you have no kids..
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I used to, long story, have you ever seen that movie "Look Who's Talking"? I haven't but the ad for it got me thinking "Are babies really smart and talking to each other and just holding out on us?" So I had a couple of kids on this drunken sl....er lady I found in a bar and then I took Kid A in the toilet and randomly electrocuted it, and dunked it's head in the toilet, you know, standard stuff. Then I put it next to kid B, now there is no way kid B could know what went on in the toilet, so I left the two kids together, then I took kid B into the toilet, to see if he would be scared of it, from what the other kid had told him, you see?

Anyway before I could finalise the test, the government took the test subjects away :(

But seriously :) does it matter? Aren't guys with senses of humour allowed to have children ;). You're a great audience Missy, I look forward to letting you in on some more baby jokes as I come accross them. :D

And good old The Central Scrutinizer, I like the way you think. :)
 
I remember learning in high school that the ability to distinguish between tastes changes as we age. If I recall correctly, infants have an inborn affinity for sweet tastes but are unable to differentiate between sour and bitter until they are older.

I'm wondering why on earth they would choose something bitter to add to the bottle, there are plenty calorie boosters which are either neutral or sweet in taste which are used for adults. It can be difficult enough to feed a baby with a cleft palate without adding an objectionable taste to the process.
 
Ours showed some strong preference from very, very young infancy. We will never know what the sensory modality (s) that are responsible are, though.
 
I've heard somewhere that small children actually are more sensitive to bitter than adults. This is supposed to be an adaption to prevent it from being poisoned, since most poisons taste bitter. The dislike of bitterness decreases slowly with the years. It sounds perfectly reasonable to me; most kids hate vergetables, which are more bitter than other foods, they don't usually like coffee either.

Imagine yourself being forced to eat something that tastes many times more bitter than the bitter things you know of today, and you'll get an idea what the poor thing is going through.
 
Was it a problem in early human evolution, babies needing to be extra sensitive to poisons? Did early humans use them to make sure food was ok to eat? Or is it just that they are littler and so more susceptible to poison and that's why they are more wary?
 
SquishyDave said:
Was it a problem in early human evolution, babies needing to be extra sensitive to poisons? Did early humans use them to make sure food was ok to eat? Or is it just that they are littler and so more susceptible to poison and that's why they are more wary?
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I think it's a mixture of things.

Babies explore the world by testing it with their mouths, which are rather sensitive to touch. They also pick up some bugs along the way, which helps their immune system.

Naturally if something is bad for them, they won't want it in their mouth if it tastes bad too. In addition, infancy is the time in life where most learning occurs. Hence it makes sense to be most prone to negative information at this time too.

Athon
 
I've always heard babies develope a sense of taste at around 6 months old. But really, how much can you learn about an object by putting it in your mouth... wow, it sure do taste like my other plastic toys...

Every 10 years, the average human is expected to lose 10% of their sense of smell (I guess after age 100, your nose starts to suck back into your face or something)... I've been inside of an old folks home, and the smells that ferment from that place, it is only tolerable when you have little or no smell left.
 
Of course babies taste! .... but not very good.





Awww, cmon! Somebody hadda say it.....

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
Of course babies taste! .... but not very good.





Awww, cmon! Somebody hadda say it.....

Hans
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The rest of us just lack the testicular fortitude to be the first to say it...
 
SquishyDave said:

I used to, long story, have you ever seen that movie "Look Who's Talking"? I haven't but the ad for it got me thinking "Are babies really smart and talking to each other and just holding out on us?" So I had a couple of kids on this drunken sl....er lady I found in a bar and then I took Kid A in the toilet and randomly electrocuted it, and dunked it's head in the toilet, you know, standard stuff. Then I put it next to kid B, now there is no way kid B could know what went on in the toilet, so I left the two kids together, then I took kid B into the toilet, to see if he would be scared of it, from what the other kid had told him, you see?

Anyway before I could finalise the test, the government took the test subjects away :(

But seriously :) does it matter? Aren't guys with senses of humour allowed to have children ;). You're a great audience Missy, I look forward to letting you in on some more baby jokes as I come accross them. :D

And good old The Central Scrutinizer, I like the way you think. :)
Click to expand...

I'm glad to see I don't need to be here 24/7 to wreck threads. There are others capable of doing so in my stead.
 
A recent story in the news has a grandmother going to jail for murder--she switched the infant formula for salt (or just added a whole bunch of salt), so that her daughter (the baby's mother) mixed up a batch of toxically-salted formula. The baby went into convulsions and died at the hospital, if my memory serves.

The relevance to this thread is simply that the high concentration of salt (one which any adult would have been repulsed by) was apparantly consumed without notice by the infant.

Psychophysicists measure infant sensation by looking at the rate of sucking; when a baby detects a change in a stimulus, they change (temporarily in the case of most stimuli) their rate of sucking.
 
The neonatal nurse may have been partly right and partly wrong.

I'll bet what the deal is is that while the necessary sensory equipment comes on line right away, a baby's developing brain may not know what to do with much of the information collected because the associated connections are mostly wired up on the fly. Some of the outputs do go directly to the amygdala, which makes it possible for smells (most 'tastes' are smells) to trigger emotions directly. This makes me wonder how much is hardwired.

[humorous contribution]Some people never develop any taste.[/humor]
 
Thanks athon, that makes sense.

shemp said:


I'm glad to see I don't need to be here 24/7 to wreck threads. There are others capable of doing so in my stead.
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Thanks, I think :) maybe we could organise a roster.
 
Same nurse who says the baby doesn't feel the circumcision,

babies can taste, they may have to learn to differentiate, but I bet the bitter is a real fast learning curve.
 
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