TED 2011: Deb Roy's Unusual Home Movies

Score: 9 balloons

The MIT Media Labs Cognitive Machines Group's director Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with 11 videocameras and 14 microphones to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 7 million words spoken in 90,000 hours of home video to hear "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

See the Guide to TED Talks 2011.