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