A new study has found that human babies have the hand-to-mouth motion encoded in the brain from birth which explains why they try to stick everything from Lego to a chair in their mouths from very early on.
According to New Scientist, Angela Sirigu of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences in France and her colleagues studied 26 people of different ages while they were undergoing brain surgery.
Researchers were able to make 9 of the unconscious patients bring their hands up and open their mouths by stimulating a part of the brain that is linked to those actions in non-human primates.
Because this behaviour is encoded in the same region as in other primates, it may be there from birth or earlier, the researchers said.