What going on in this baby’s mind? If you’d asked this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have that this baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric — that couldn’t take the perspective of another person or understand cause effect. In the last 20 years, developmental science has completely overturned that picture. So in some ways, think that this baby’s thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.
Let me give just one example of this. One thing that this could be thinking about, that could be going on his mind, is trying to figure out what’s going on in the mind that other baby. After all, one of the things that’s hardest for all of us do is to figure out what other people are and feeling. And maybe the hardest thing of all to figure out that what other people think and feel isn’t actually exactly what we think and feel. Anyone who’s followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some to get. We wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really thing about other people. Now the question is: How could ask them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, and if you a three year-old to tell you what he thinks, what you’ll get is beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays things like that. So how do we actually ask the question?
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Well it turns out that the secret was broccoli. What we did — Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I — actually to give the babies two bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of the babies, in Berkley, like the crackers and don’t like the raw broccoli. (Laughter) But then what Betty did to take a little taste of food from each bowl. she would act as if she liked it or 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 she would do is take a bit of the broccoli and go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm.” And then would take 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. did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies. And then she simply put her hand out and say, “Can you me some?”
So the question is: What would the baby give her, what they or what she liked? And the remarkable thing was 18 month-old babies, just barely walking and talking, would give her the crackers if she the crackers, but they would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli. the other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at her for a long time 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 the crackers, what they thought everybody like. So there are two really remarkable things about this. The first one is that little 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really profound fact human nature, that we don’t always want the same thing. what’s more, they felt that they should actually do things to other people get what they wanted.
Even more remarkably though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn’t do this that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact about nature in the three months from when they were 15 old. So children both know more and learn more than ever would have thought. And this is just one hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that’s demonstrated it.
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The question you might ask though is: Why do children learn so much? And is it possible for them to learn so much in such a short time? mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. actually in many ways, they’re worse than useless, because we have put so much time and energy into just keeping alive. But if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies, it turns out there’s actually an answer. If we look across many, many species of animals, not just us primates, but also other mammals, birds, even marsupials like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there’s a relationship between long a childhood a species has and how big their brains are compared to bodies and how smart and flexible they are.
And sort the posterbirds for this idea are the birds up there. On one side is 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 the cover of science who’s learned how to use a tool to food. On the other hand, we have our friend domestic chicken. And chickens and ducks and geese and are basically as dumb as dumps. So they’re very, very good at pecking for grain, and they’re much good at doing anything else. Well it turns out that the babies, the Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. They depend on their moms to drop worms 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 actually mature within a of months. So childhood is the reason why the crows up on the cover of Science and the chickens up in the soup pot.
There’s something about that long that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning. what kind of explanation could we have for this? Well some animals, like the chicken, seem be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well. So they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking in one environment. Other creatures, like the crows, aren’t good at doing anything in particular, but they’re extremely good at learning about of different environments.
And of course, we human beings are 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 to the world and even go to outer space. And our and children are dependent on us for much longer than the 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? Well an idea is that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting on in the world, it has one big disadvantage. And that one big is 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 or maybe a spear might work. Which would actually be better?” want to know all that before the mastodons actually up. And the way the evolutions seems to have solved problem 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 we have to do learn. And then as adults, we can take all those things we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them to work to things out there in the world.
So one way thinking about it is 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 to go and learn and have good ideas, and we’re production marketing. We have to take all those ideas that learned when we were children and actually put them to use. way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of and children as being like defective grownups, we should think them as being a different developmental stage of the same species — kind of like caterpillars and — except that they’re actually the brilliant butterflies who flitting around the garden and exploring, and we’re the caterpillars who are inching along narrow, grownup, adult path.
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If this is true, if these babies are designed to — and this evolutionary story would say children are learning, that’s what they’re for — we might expect that they would have really learning mechanisms. And in fact, the baby’s brain seems be the most powerful learning computer on the planet. real computers are actually getting to be a lot better. there’s been a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently. it all depends on the ideas of this guy, Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was a statistician and mathematician the 18th century. And essentially what Bayes did was provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, the way that scientists out about the world. So what scientists do is have a hypothesis that they think might be likely to with. They go out and test it against the evidence. The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. Then test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth. And what Bayes showed a 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 beautiful brown eyes, I think it actually looks something this. This is Reverend Bayes’s notebook. So I think babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they’re revising to figure out how the works. All right, now that might seem like an even order to actually demonstrate. Because after all, if you ask grownups about statistics, they look extremely stupid. How could it be children are doing statistics?
So to test this we used machine that we have called the Blicket Detector. This is a box that up and plays music when you put some things on it and not others. And using this very machine, my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how babies are at learning about the world. Let me mention just one that we did Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed you this detector, you would be likely to to begin with that the way to make the detector go would be to put block on top of the detector. But actually, this detector works in a bit of strange way. Because if you wave a block over the top the detector, something you wouldn’t ever think of to begin with, the detector actually activate two out of three times. Whereas, if do the likely thing, put the block on the detector, it will only two out of six times. So the unlikely hypothesis 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 just asked them to it go. And sure enough, the four year-olds used the to wave the object on top of the detector.
Now are two things that are really interesting about this. The first one is, again, remember, are four 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 interesting thing that they’re using that evidence to get to an idea, get to a hypothesis about world, that seems very unlikely to begin with. And in studies we’ve just doing in my lab, similar studies, we’ve show that year-olds are actually better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we them exactly the same task. So in these circumstances, children are using statistics to find out about the world, after all, scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to see if are doing experiments. When children do experiments we call “getting into everything” or else “playing.”
And there’s been a of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around really a kind of experimental 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 five hypotheses in the space of two minutes.
(Video) Boy: How this? Same as the other side.
Alison Gopnik: Okay, so first 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 making light up. (Laughter) I don’t know.
AG: Every scientist will 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, to try it out onto the other location. Not working either.
Boy: Oh, the light goes only to here, not here. Oh, the bottom of this box electricity in here, but this doesn’t have electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s fourth hypothesis.
Boy: It’s lighting up. So when you 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 particularly — that is a particularly and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical. If you look the way children play, when you ask them to explain something, what really do is do a series of experiments. This is actually pretty typical of 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 brilliant butterflies can test five hypotheses in two minutes? Well, if go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot them have said that babies and young children were conscious if they were conscious at all. And I think just the opposite is true. I babies and children are actually more conscious than we are adults. Now here’s what we know about how adult works. And adults’ attention and consciousness look kind of a spotlight. So what happens for adults is we decide something’s relevant or important, we should pay attention to it. Our of that thing that we’re attending to becomes extremely bright vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. And we even know about the way the brain does this.
So what happens when we pay attention is the 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 down activity in all rest of our brains. So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. If we at babies and young children, we see something very different. I think and young children seem to have more of a of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. So babies and young children are very bad narrowing down to just one thing. But they’re very at taking in lots of information from lots of sources at once. And if you actually look in their brains, see that they’re flooded with these neurotransmitters that are 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 paying attention, what we 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 thing that’s important. That’s the kind of attention, the of consciousness, that we might expect from those butterflies are designed to learn.
Well if we want to about a way of getting a taste of that kind baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think about cases where we’re in a new situation that we’ve never been in before — when we fall 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, expands, so that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending 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 love in Paris for the first after you’ve had three double-espressos. (Laughter) That’s a fantastic way to be, but it does tend leave you waking up crying at three o’clock in the morning.
(Laughter)
Now it’s to be a grownup. I don’t want to say too about how wonderful babies are. It’s good to be a grownup. We can things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street ourselves. And it makes sense that we put a lot of into making babies think like adults do. But if what we want is 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)