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