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