What going on in this baby’s mind? If you’d asked this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have said that baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric — that he couldn’t take the of another person or understand cause and effect. In the 20 years, developmental science has completely overturned that picture. in some ways, we think that this baby’s thinking like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.
Let me give you just example of this. One thing that this baby could be thinking about, that could be going in his mind, is trying to figure out what’s going on in the of that other baby. After all, one of the things that’s hardest all of us to do is to figure out what other are thinking and feeling. And maybe the hardest thing of all is figure out that what other people think and feel isn’t actually exactly like what we think and feel. who’s followed politics can testify to how hard that for some people to get. We wanted to know if and young children could understand this really profound thing about other people. Now the is: How could we ask them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, if you ask a three year-old to tell you what he thinks, what you’ll get is a beautiful of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that. So how do we actually ask the question?
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Well it turns out that the secret was broccoli. What we — Betty Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I — was to give the babies two bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious crackers. Now all of the babies, even in Berkley, the crackers and don’t like the raw broccoli. (Laughter) But then what did was to take a little taste of food from each bowl. And would act as if she liked it or she didn’t. So half the time, she acted as she liked the crackers and didn’t like the broccoli — like a baby and any other sane person. But half the time, what would do is take a little bit of the broccoli and go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I the broccoli. Mmmmm.” And then she would take a little of the crackers, and she’d go, “Eww, yuck, crackers. tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck.” So she’d act as if what she wanted was the opposite of what the babies wanted. We did this 15 and 18 month-old babies. And then she would put her hand out and say, “Can you give me some?”
So question is: What would the baby give her, what they liked or what she liked? And remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies, just barely walking and talking, would give her crackers if she liked the crackers, but they would give her the broccoli if she liked broccoli. On the other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at for a long time if she acted as if liked the broccoli, like they couldn’t figure this out. But then after stared for a long time, they would just give the crackers, what they thought everybody must like. So there are two remarkable things about this. The first one is that these little 18 month-old have already discovered this really profound fact about human nature, that we don’t always want the thing. And what’s more, they felt that they should actually do things help other people get what they wanted.
Even more remarkably though, the fact 15 month-olds didn’t do this suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact human nature in the three months from when they 15 months old. So children both know more and more than we ever would have thought. And this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of over the last 20 years that’s actually demonstrated it.
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question you might ask though is: Why do children so much? And how is it possible for them learn so much in such a short time? I mean, all, if you look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. actually in many ways, they’re worse than useless, because we have to put so much time energy into just keeping them alive. But if we turn evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we so much time taking care of useless babies, it out that there’s actually an answer. If we look many, many different species of animals, not just us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there’s a relationship between how long a childhood a has and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart and flexible are.
And sort of the posterbirds for this idea are the birds up there. On one side is New Caledonian crow. And crows and other corvidae, ravens, and so forth, are incredibly smart birds. They’re as smart as chimpanzees in some respects. And is a bird on the cover of science who’s learned how to use a to get food. On the other hand, we have our friend domestic chicken. And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as as dumps. So they’re very, very good at pecking for grain, and they’re not much at doing anything else. Well it turns out that babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. They depend on their to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long two years, which is a really long time in the life of a bird. Whereas the chickens actually mature within a couple of months. So childhood the reason why the crows end up on the cover of Science and the chickens up in the soup pot.
There’s something about that long childhood seems to be connected to knowledge and learning. Well what kind of could we have for this? Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited doing just one thing very well. So they seem be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment. creatures, like the crows, aren’t very good at doing anything in particular, but they’re extremely good learning about laws of different environments.
And of course, we beings are way out on the end of the distribution the crows. We have bigger brains relative to our by far than any other animal. We’re smarter, we’re more flexible, we can learn more, we survive more different environments, we migrated to cover the world and go to outer space. And our babies and children are on us for much longer than the babies of other species. My son is 23. (Laughter) And at least they’re 23, we’re still popping those worms into those little mouths.
All right, why would we see this correlation? Well an is that that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, great strategy getting on in the world, but it has one disadvantage. And that one big disadvantage is that, until you do all that learning, you’re going to be helpless. So you don’t want to have mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself, “A slingshot or maybe spear might work. Which would actually be better?” You want to know that before the mastodons actually show up. And the way evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with kind of division of labor. So the idea is that we this early period when we’re completely protected. We don’t have to anything. All we have to do is learn. And then as adults, can take all those things that we learned when were babies and children and actually put them to work to things out there in the world.
So one way thinking about it is that babies and young children like the research and development division of the human species. So they’re the blue sky guys who just have to go out learn and have good ideas, and we’re production and marketing. We to take all those ideas that we learned when were children and actually put them to use. Another way thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children being like defective grownups, we should think about them being a different developmental stage of the same species — kind of caterpillars and butterflies — except that they’re actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around garden and exploring, and we’re the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
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this is true, if these babies are designed to — and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning, that’s what they’re for — we expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms. And fact, the baby’s brain seems to be the most learning computer on the planet. But real computers are actually getting to be a lot better. there’s been a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently. And all depends on the ideas of this guy, the Thomas Bayes, who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century. And what Bayes did was to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, the way that find out about the world. So what scientists do they have a hypothesis that they think might be to start with. They go out and test it against evidence. The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. Then they test that new hypothesis and so on so forth. And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that could do that. And that mathematics is at the core the best machine learning programs that we have now. And some 10 years ago, I suggested that babies be doing the same thing.
So if you want know what’s going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I think it actually looks like this. This is Reverend Bayes’s notebook. So I those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional that they’re revising to figure out how the world works. All right, that might seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate. Because after all, if you ask grownups about statistics, they look extremely stupid. How could it be that children are statistics?
So to test this we used a machine that we have called the Blicket Detector. is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some on it and not others. And using this very simple machine, lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just good babies are at learning about the world. Let me mention one that we did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If showed you this detector, you would be likely to think to begin with that the to make the detector go would be to put a on top of the detector. But actually, this detector works a bit of a strange way. Because if you wave a block the top of the detector, something you wouldn’t ever think of to begin with, the will actually activate two out of three times. Whereas, if you do the likely thing, the block on the detector, it will only activate two out of times. So the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence. It looks as if waving is a more effective strategy than the other strategy. So did just this; we gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we just asked them to it go. And sure enough, the four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on top the detector.
Now there are two things that are really interesting about this. The first is, again, remember, these are four year-olds. They’re just learning to count. But unconsciously, they’re doing these quite complicated calculations that give them a conditional probability measure. And the other interesting is that they’re using that evidence to get to an idea, to a hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely to begin with. And in we’ve just been doing in my lab, similar studies, we’ve show that four year-olds are actually better at finding an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly same task. So in these circumstances, the children are statistics to find out about the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, we wanted to see if children are doing experiments. When do experiments we call it “getting into everything” or else “playing.”
And there’s been a bunch interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around is really a kind experimental research program. Here’s one from Cristine Legare’s lab. What Cristine was use our Blicket Detectors. And what she did was children that yellow ones made it go and red didn’t, and then she showed them an anomaly. And what you’ll is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses the space of two minutes.
(Video) Boy: How about this? Same as the side.
Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his first hypothesis has just been falsified.
(Laughter)
Boy: This one lighted up, this one nothing.
AG: Okay, he’s got his experimental out.
Boy: What’s making this light up. (Laughter) I don’t know.
AG: scientist will recognize that expression of despair.
(Laughter)
Boy: Oh, it’s this needs to be like this, and this needs be like this.
AG: Okay, hypothesis two.
Boy: That’s why. Oh.
(Laughter)
AG: Now is his next idea. He told the experimenter to do this, to try putting it onto the other location. Not working either.
Boy: Oh, the light goes only to here, not here. Oh, the bottom this box has electricity in here, but this doesn’t have electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s a hypothesis.
Boy: It’s lighting up. So when you put four. So you put on this one to make it light up and two on this one to make it up.
AG: Okay,there’s his fifth hypothesis.
Now that is a particularly — that is a particularly and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical. If you look at way children play, when you ask them to explain something, what they really is do a series of experiments. This is actually pretty typical four year-olds.
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Well, what’s it like to this kind of creature? What’s it like to be one these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes? Well, if you back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them have that babies and young children were barely conscious if they conscious at all. And I think just the opposite is true. I babies and children are actually more conscious than we as adults. Now here’s what we know about how adult consciousness works. And adults’ attention consciousness look kind of like a spotlight. So what happens for adults is we that something’s relevant or important, we should pay attention to it. consciousness of that thing that we’re attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else of goes dark. And we even know something about the way the brain does this.
So happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the of executive part of our brains, sends a signal that makes a little part our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and down activity in all the rest of our brains. So we have a very focused, purpose-driven of attention. If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different. I babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. So babies and young children are very at narrowing down to just one thing. But they’re good at taking in lots of information from lots of different at once. And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they’re flooded with neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven’t come on yet. So we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention, we really mean is that they’re bad at not attention. So they’re bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell them and just looking at the thing that’s important. That’s the kind attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect from those who are designed to learn.
Well if we want to think about a way of a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, think the best thing is think about cases where we’re in a new situation that we’ve never been in before — when we in love with someone new, or when we’re in a city for the first time. And what happens then is not that consciousness contracts, it expands, so that those three days Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home. And by the way, coffee, that wonderful coffee you’ve been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters. what’s it like to be a baby? It’s like being love in Paris for the first time after you’ve three double-espressos. (Laughter) That’s a fantastic way to be, it does tend to leave you waking up crying three o’clock in the morning.
(Laughter)
Now it’s good to be a grownup. I don’t want say too much about how wonderful babies are. It’s to be a grownup. We can do things like our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And it makes sense we put a lot of effort into making babies think adults do. But if what we want is to be like those butterflies, have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time we should be getting adults to start thinking more like children.
(Applause)