MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video (200 terabytes of data!) to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.

This is one of the more interesting and visually appealing talks on TED and I was blown away with the videos and images presented. The research combines communication, child psychology, visual imaging, and complex networks. One aspect of their research that I personally found interesting focuses on the feedback loops between and around mass media and social media.

In this new RSAnimate Steven Pinker shows us how the mind turns the finite building blocks of language into infinite meanings. Taken from the RSA's free public events programme www.thersa.org/events