In the world's first study, which used MRI used to analyze infant pain, scientists have found that babies' feel pain just like adults.
The brain scanning study by Oxford University claims that the brains of babies "light up" in a very similar way to adults when exposed to the same painful stimulus, suggesting that babies experience pain much like adults.
The study looked at 10 healthy infants aged between one and six days old and 10 healthy adults aged 23-36 years.
The researchers found that 18 of the 20 brain regions active in adults experiencing pain were active in babies. Scans also showed that babies' brains had the same response to a weak "poke" (of force 128mN) as adults did to a stimulus four times as strong (512mN).
The findings suggest that not only do babies experience pain much like adults but that they also have a much lower pain threshold.
Lead author of the report, Dr Rebeccah Slater said that babies that are less than a week old are more docile than older babies, and while people have argued that babies' brains are not developed enough for them to really "feel" pain, any reaction being just a reflex, their study provided the first really strong evidence of that this not being the case.
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Dr Slater added that they hope to develop similar systems to detect the "pain signature" in babies' brains in future, which enable the pain relief treatments and see what would be most effective for this vulnerable population who couldn't speak for themselves.
The research is reported in the journal eLife.
