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