Making Eye Contact with a Baby Changes Both Your Brain Waves, Study Says | Hacker News Reader

Making Eye Contact with a Baby Changes Both Your Brain Waves, Study Says

time.com

32 pointsDoreenMichele13 comments

It sounds like "going to youtube.com changes reflections from you monitor on the wall" to me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but brain waves really don't explain anything and their empirical correspondence to some kinds of activity is, well, obvious and useless for most of the cases.

My thoughts exactly. Changing brain waves are good indicator of you being alive nothing else.

adults and babies

This just mentions 'an adult' without going into detail of whether this adult has children him/herself etc, or whether the adult knows the baby, or was even the parent of the baby. Yet these things could make quite the difference, I think. I don't have children, likely never will and in fact when I see a baby it doesn't evoke much feelings. So it would be interesting to see what 17 people like me would yield when studied in similar circumstances, vs 17 people who adore babies.

> This just mentions 'an adult' without going into detail of whether this adult has children him/herself etc, or whether the adult knows the baby, or was even the parent of the baby.

Quoting from the study paper [1]:

> Experiment 2. Infants sat upright in a high chair facing the female experimenter at a distance of 70 cm.

It doesn’t say anything more about the experimenter. All we know is that in all experiments it’s the same adult woman.

Note also that "this article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed" [2].

[1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/11/24/108...

[2]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/11/24/108878

What's up with these baby studies popping up on HN this week?

Did you just have a child? Might the [forget what it's called] effect. I'm a new dad, noticing the fact that HN is full of baby stuff.

I’m not a new father, and I’d agree with the premise — there has been an influx of baby articles. Could be poissonal, but likely someone was researching the topic since yesterday and posted something new. This tends to happen on HM

Same, and agree. The effect is Baader-Meinhof: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human...

Haha, you’re on to something. I’m an old dad :) And I don’t see any baby stories. But I’m into music/audio lately. And there’s so much cool music-related stuff popping up on HN lately...

September is generally peak newborn month in the US, so maybe by late November/early December new parents are beginning to rejoin society and share their newfound interests?

Or, more likely, it's just random.

Maybe the HN crowd is growing up - babies and age discrimination has been on the agenda lately.

Captain Obvious?

Neural synchronization is obvious?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com