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