Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber sitting here with Aniches and Skate James Harkin and Andy Murray.

And once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the

last seven days and in a particular order, here we go, starting with you Andrew Hunter

Murray.

My fact is that babies practice their first words before saying them out loud, which is

very sweet.

I love that.

How do we know?

Well, this is from a study at the University of Washington where scientists scan babies

brains and observe what happened when they were being spoken to.

And bits of their brains light up, different parts of the brain light up.

And some of the bits were associated just with listening and taking in information and

other bits are associated with actually planning the motor movements that you need to

say words.

So even when they are listening, they are trying to figure out how to make that sound basically.

So that's what it is.

It's just that they're figuring out how to make sounds.

But don't they all finally reach the same word?

Is it all Mama?

No.

...