Q: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
The brains of babies 'light up' in a very similar way to adults when exposed to the same painful stimulus, a pioneering Oxford University brain scanning study has discovered. It suggests 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. Infants were recruited from the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford (UK) and adult volunteers were Oxford University staff or students. 
  
 During the research babies, accompanied by parents and clinical staff, were placed in a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner where they usually fell asleep. MRI scans were then taken of the babies' brains as they were 'poked' on the bottom of their feet with a special retracting rod creating a sensation 'like being poked with a pencil' -- mild enough that it did not wake them up. These scans were then compared with brain scans of adults exposed to the same pain stimulus. 
  
 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. 
  
 The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust and is reported in the journal eLife. 
  
 'Up until recently people didn't think it was possible to study pain in babies using MRI because, unlike adults, they don't keep still in the scanner!' said Dr Rebeccah Slater of Oxford University's Department of Paediatrics, lead author of the report. 'However, as babies that are less than a week old are more docile than older babies, we found that their parents were able to get them to fall asleep inside a scanner so that, for the first time, we could study pain in the infant brain using MRI. 
  
 'This is particularly important when it comes to pain: obviously babies can't tell us about their experience of pain and it is difficult to infer pain from visual observations. In fact some people have argued that babies' brains are not developed enough for them to really 'feel' pain, any reaction being just a reflex -- our study provides the first really strong evidence that this is not the case.' 
  
 The researchers say that it is now possible to see pain 'happening' inside the infant brain and it looks a lot like pain in adults. 
  
 As recently as the 1980s it was common practice for babies to be given neuromuscular blocks but no pain relief medication during surgery. In 2014 a review of neonatal pain management practice in intensive care highlighted that although such infants experience an average of 11 painful procedures per day 60% of babies do not receive any kind of pain medication. 
  
 'Thousands of babies across the UK undergo painful procedures every day but there are often no local pain management guidelines to help clinicians. Our study suggests that not only do babies experience pain but they may be more sensitive to it than adults,' said Dr Slater. 'We have to think that if we would provide pain relief for an older child undergoing a procedure then we should look at giving pain relief to an infant undergoing a similar procedure.' 
  
 Dr Slater added: 'Recent studies in adults have shown that it is possible to detect a neurological signature of pain using MRI. In the future we hope to develop similar systems to detect the 'pain signature' in babies' brains: this could enable us to test different pain relief treatments and see what would be most effective for this vulnerable population who can't speak for themselves.' 
  
 Rachel Edwards, who is 33 and from Oxford, gave permission for her son Alex to take part in the study. Alex was the first baby to be placed in the MRI scanner: 
  
 Rachel Edwards said: 'People know so little about how babies feel pain, you can tell they are in distress from their reaction and I was curious about why they react in the way they do. 
  
 'Before Alex went in I got to feel all the things he would feel as part of the study including the pencil-like retracting rod: it wasn't particularly painful, it was more of a precise feeling of touch. 
  
 'It was really reassuring how highly skilled the staff were and how good they were at calming and handling him. 
  
 'I fed him and put him down on this special bean bag that they suck all the air out of to help keep the babies' heads still. Then they put on earphones that cut out some of the sound but I think the noise actually soothed him. He was out for the count, he didn't wake up during the scanning and seemed really content afterwards.' ||||| In a first, researchers at Oxford University have watched infants as young as a day old as their brains process a light prodding of their feet. The results confirm that yes, babies do indeed feel pain, and that they process it similarly to adults. Until as recently as the 1980s, researchers assumed newborns did not have fully developed pain receptors, and believed that any responses babies had to pokes or pricks were merely muscular reactions. But new research published Tuesday morning changes that. 
  
 Taking advantage of the fact that newborns less than a week old tend to sleep through anything, Rebeccah Slater, an associate professor of pediatric neuroimaging at Oxford, and her colleagues placed 10 infants who were 1-6 days old in an fMRI machine. The researchers, who reported their findings in eLife, observed which areas of the infants’ brains became more active, or consumed more oxygen, as the scientists lightly poked their feet. They did the same for adults and compared the brain images. 
  
 In adult brains, 20 regions were activated by the painful stimulus, and the newborns shared 18 of these. “The infant’s brain is much more developed than I was expecting,” says Slater. “I might have thought that some information might have gone to the sensory areas of the brain — telling the baby something was happening on the foot, for example — but I didn’t necessarily think it would go to areas more commonly involved in emotional processing such as the anterior cingular cortex, which is thought be involved in the unpleasantness associated with an experience.” 
  
 Even at birth, then, a baby’s brain possesses the foundation for quickly evaluating anything he or she experiences, including painful stimuli. “I hope this provides incentive to more researchers to find better ways of measuring pain in babies, and prioritize the importance of providing the best pain relief possible in children,” says Slater. 
  
 The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now 
  
 Slater found that newborn brains are still immature in some ways, however. Any stimulus, whether it’s a painful one or a sensory one such as a smell, tends to activate widespread regions of the brain. That signals that the baby’s brain is still trying to learn what’s what and distinguish different stimuli. The poking triggered even the newborns’ olfactory system, for example, even though the sensation had nothing to do with smell. 
  
 Second, babies tend to register all stimuli as having the same intensity. Even light pokes “feel” the same as harder ones, reflecting their still inexperienced system in distinguishing levels of activation. 
  
 But the fact that they are experiencing pain in almost the same ways as adults do is very revealing. Now that there’s evidence that the brains of babies do indeed process pain, that may change the way doctors treat newborns, especially those who are premature or need extra medical attention in the neonatal intensive care unit. In a recent study, scientists tallied an average of a dozen procedures including needle sticks that babies experienced every day; more than 60% of those infants did not receive any pain medication, either in the form of a topical numbing cream or other pain relief. Having these experiences may make these babies more sensitive to pain later in life, says Slater. A study of circumcised baby boys, for example, found that those who received pain relief felt less pain when getting vaccinations three months later than those who didn’t receive any pain medication. 
  
 “Now that we have seen for the first time what is happening in babies’ brains while they experience something mildly painful,” says Slater, “there should be a big drive to try to treat pain in these children, especially those having a high number of procedures performed in their early days.” 
  
 Contact us at editors@time.com. |||||
A:
Researchers say their new study confirms what babies have been trying to tell us all along: Of course, they feel pain. In fact, they may be more sensitive to it than adults, according to a post at Science Daily. Oxford scientists used MRI scans to study the brains of newborns and found that they lit up in much the same way that adult brains do when exposed to pain. In the study, they mildly poked the babies' feet while they were sleeping, and they poked the feet of adults for comparison. In the resulting brain scans, 18 of the 20 regions that lit up in the grown-ups lit up in the infants as well. What's more, the babies had the same reaction to a mild poke that adults did to a poke that was four times stronger, suggesting that the wee ones have less of a tolerance for pain, reports HealthDay. “The infant’s brain is much more developed than I was expecting,” says lead researcher Rebeccah Slater, as quoted at Time. Slater and her team say the perception that babies don't have fully developed pain receptors is still evident in modern medicine, as reflected in an earlier study showing that 60% of babies undergoing presumably painful procedures during intensive care receive no pain medication. The scientists say that further research should refine ways to measure pain in infants and that, in the meantime, doctors should consider giving pain medication to babies for procedures that require it in older children. (Dads, meanwhile, can get a taste of the pain moms experience during childbirth.)