What is going on in baby’s mind? If you’d asked people this 30 years ago, people, including psychologists, would have said that this baby irrational, illogical, egocentric — that he couldn’t take the perspective of another or understand cause and effect. In the last 20 years, science has completely overturned that picture. So in some ways, think that this baby’s thinking is like the thinking of the most scientists.
Let me give you just one example of this. thing that this 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 things that’s for all of us to do is to figure out other people are thinking and feeling. And maybe the 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 how hard that for some people to get. We wanted to know if babies and young could understand this really profound thing about other people. Now the question is: could we ask them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, if you ask a three year-old to tell you 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?
footnote
Well it turns that the secret was broccoli. What we did — Betty Rapacholi, who was one my students, and I — was actually to give babies two bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of the babies, even Berkley, like the crackers and don’t like the raw broccoli. (Laughter) But then Betty did was 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 acted as if liked the crackers and didn’t like the broccoli — just like a baby any other sane person. But half the time, what she would do take a little bit of the broccoli and go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm.” And then she would a little bit of the crackers, and 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 out and say, “Can you give me some?”
So question is: What would the baby give her, what they liked or what she liked? And remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies, just barely walking and talking, give her the crackers if she liked the crackers, but they give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli. On the other hand, 15 month-olds would at her for a long time if she acted as if she the broccoli, like they couldn’t figure this out. But after they 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, that we don’t always the same thing. And what’s more, they felt that they should actually do things to help other get what they wanted.
Even more remarkably though, the that 15 month-olds didn’t do this suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact about human nature the three months from when they were 15 months old. children both know more and learn more than we ever would have thought. And this is just one hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that’s demonstrated it.
footnote
The question you might ask is: Why do children learn so much? And how it possible for them to learn so much in such a time? I mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. And in many ways, they’re worse than useless, because we have to put so much and energy into just keeping them alive. But if we turn to for an answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much taking care of useless babies, it turns out that there’s actually an answer. If we look across many, many species of animals, not just us primates, but also including mammals, birds, even marsupials like kangaroos and wombats, it turns that there’s a relationship between how long a childhood a species has and how their brains are compared to their bodies and how and flexible they are.
And sort of the posterbirds this idea are the birds up there. On one side a New Caledonian 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 tool to get food. On the other hand, we our 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 good at anything else. Well it turns out that the babies, the New crow babies, are fledglings. They depend on their moms drop worms in their little open mouths for as as two years, which is a really long time in the life of bird. Whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple months. So childhood is the reason why the crows end up the cover of Science and the chickens end up in the pot.
There’s something about that long childhood that seems be connected to knowledge and learning. Well what kind explanation could we have for this? Well some animals, the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited to doing one thing very well. So they seem to be suited to pecking grain in one environment. Other creatures, like crows, aren’t very good at doing anything in particular, they’re extremely good at learning about laws of different environments.
And of course, we human beings way out on the end of the distribution like the crows. We bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than any animal. We’re smarter, we’re more flexible, we can learn more, we survive in more environments, we migrated to cover the world and even go to space. And our babies and children are dependent on us for longer than 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 mouths.
All right, why would we see this correlation? Well an idea that that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting on in the world, but 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 the charging at you and be saying to yourself, “A or maybe a spear might work. Which would actually be better?” You want to know all that the mastodons actually show up. And the way the evolutions seems to have solved problem is with a kind of division of labor. So idea is that we have this early period when we’re protected. We don’t have to do anything. All we have to do learn. And then as adults, we can take all those that we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them work to do things out there in the world.
So one way of thinking about it that babies and young children are like the research and development division of human species. So they’re the protected blue sky guys who just have go out and learn and have good ideas, and we’re production and marketing. We have to take all those that we learned when we were children and actually put them to use. Another way thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different stage of the same species — kind of like and butterflies — except that they’re actually the brilliant who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we’re the who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
footnote
If is true, if these babies are designed to learn — and this evolutionary story say 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 most learning computer on the planet. But real computers are actually to be a lot better. And there’s been a revolution in our understanding of learning recently. And it all depends on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Bayes, who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century. essentially what Bayes did was to provide a mathematical way probability theory to characterize, describe, the way that scientists find out about world. So what scientists do is they have a hypothesis that they think be likely to start with. They go out and test it against the evidence. The evidence makes them that hypothesis. Then they test that new hypothesis and so and so forth. And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could that. And that mathematics is at the core of the best learning programs that we have now. And some 10 ago, I suggested that babies might be doing the same thing.
So if you want know what’s going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I think it actually something like this. This is Reverend Bayes’s notebook. So think those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they’re revising to out how the world works. All right, now that seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate. Because 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 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 done dozens of studies just how good babies are at learning about the world. Let me mention just one that did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed this detector, you would be likely to think to with that the way to make the detector go would to put a block on top of the detector. But actually, this detector works in bit of a strange way. Because if you wave a over the top of the detector, something you wouldn’t ever think of begin with, the detector will actually activate two out three times. Whereas, if you do the likely thing, the 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 a more effective strategy than the other strategy. So we did just this; gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we asked them to make it go. And sure enough, four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object top of the detector.
Now there are two things that are really interesting this. The first one is, again, remember, these are four year-olds. They’re just learning how count. But unconsciously, they’re doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure. the other interesting thing is that they’re using that to get to an idea, get to a hypothesis the world, that seems very unlikely to begin with. And studies we’ve just been doing in my lab, similar studies, we’ve show that four year-olds are actually better at out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly the same task. So these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find out about world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and wanted to see if children are doing experiments. When do experiments we call 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 did was use our Blicket Detectors. And what she did was show children that yellow ones it 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 as 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 experimental notebook out.
Boy: What’s making light up. (Laughter) I don’t know.
AG: Every scientist will recognize that expression 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 putting it onto the other location. Not working either.
Boy: Oh, because the light goes only to here, here. Oh, the bottom of this box has electricity here, but this doesn’t have electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s fourth hypothesis.
Boy: It’s lighting up. So when you put four. So you put on this one to make it light up and two on this one to it light up.
AG: Okay,there’s his fifth hypothesis.
Now that is a particularly — is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical. you look at the way children play, when you ask them to something, what they really do is do a series of experiments. This is actually pretty typical four year-olds.
footnote
Well, what’s it like to be this of creature? What’s it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test hypotheses in two minutes? Well, if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot them have said that babies and young children were barely conscious they were conscious at all. And I think just the opposite is true. I think babies and children actually more conscious than we are as adults. Now here’s what we about how adult consciousness works. And adults’ attention and consciousness look kind of a spotlight. So what happens for adults is we decide that something’s relevant important, we should pay attention to it. Our consciousness of that thing that we’re attending to becomes extremely and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. And we even know something about the the brain does this.
So what happens when we pay attention is that prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, a signal that makes a little part of our much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts activity in all the rest of our brains. So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind attention. If we look at babies and young children, we see very different. I think babies and young children seem have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight consciousness. So babies and young children are very bad at down to just one thing. But they’re very good at taking in lots of information lots of different sources at once. And if you actually look their brains, you see that they’re flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven’t come on yet. when we say that babies and young children are bad paying attention, what we really mean is that they’re bad at paying attention. So they’re bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that tell them something and just looking at the thing that’s important. That’s kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn.
Well if we to think about a way of getting a taste that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think cases where we’re put in a new situation that we’ve never in before — when we fall in love with new, or when we’re in a new city for the first time. And what then is not that our consciousness contracts, it expands, that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie home. And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful you’ve been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect of those neurotransmitters. So what’s it like to be a baby? It’s like being in in Paris for the first time after you’ve had double-espressos. (Laughter) That’s a fantastic way to be, but does tend to leave you waking up crying at o’clock in the morning.
(Laughter)
Now it’s good to be a grownup. I don’t to say too much about how wonderful babies are. It’s to be a grownup. We can do things like tie our shoelaces cross the street 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, maybe at least of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking like children.
(Applause)