What is going on in this baby’s mind? If you’d 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 one example of this. One thing that this baby be thinking about, that could be going on in his mind, is trying figure out what’s going on in the mind of other baby. After all, one of the things that’s hardest for of us to do is to figure out what other people 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 that for some people to get. We wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really thing about other people. Now the question is: How we ask them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, and if you ask a three year-old tell you what he thinks, what you’ll get is a beautiful of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that. how do we actually ask them the question?
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it turns out that the secret was broccoli. What we did — Betty Rapacholi, who was one of students, and I — was actually to give the two bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of the babies, even in Berkley, like the and don’t like the raw broccoli. (Laughter) But then what 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 the time, she acted as if she liked the crackers and didn’t like the broccoli — like a baby and any other sane person. But the time, what she would do is take a 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. tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck.” So she’d act as if what she wanted was just opposite of what the babies wanted. We did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies. And then she simply put her hand out and say, “Can you give me some?”
So the question is: 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, would give her the crackers if liked the crackers, but they would give her the if she liked the broccoli. On the other hand, 15 month-olds stare at her for a long time if she acted as she liked the broccoli, like they couldn’t figure this out. But after they stared for a long time, they would just give her crackers, what they thought everybody must like. So there are really remarkable things about this. The first one is these little 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really profound about human nature, that we don’t always want the same thing. And what’s more, they 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 deep, profound fact about human nature in the three months from when were 15 months old. So children both know more and learn more we ever would have thought. And this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of over the last 20 years that’s actually demonstrated it.
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The question you might though is: Why do children learn so much? And is it possible for them to learn so much in 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 answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking of useless babies, it turns out that there’s actually an answer. If look across many, many different species of animals, not just us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, marsupials like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there’s a relationship between how long a childhood a species and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart flexible they are.
And sort of the posterbirds for this idea are the birds 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 as chimpanzees in some respects. And this is a on the cover of science who’s learned how to a tool to get food. On the other hand, we our friend the domestic chicken. And chickens and ducks and geese turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps. So they’re very, very good at for grain, and they’re not much good at doing else. Well it turns out that the babies, the Caledonian crow 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 the life 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 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 have this? Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to be 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 very good at doing in particular, but they’re extremely good at learning about laws different environments.
And of course, we human beings are way on the end of the distribution like the crows. We have bigger brains relative our bodies by far than any other animal. We’re smarter, we’re more flexible, we learn more, we survive in more different environments, we migrated to cover the world and go to outer space. And our babies and children are on us for much longer than the babies of other species. My son is 23. (Laughter) And at until they’re 23, we’re still popping those worms into little 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 getting on in the world, but it has one disadvantage. And that one big disadvantage is that, until actually do all that learning, you’re going to be helpless. So don’t want to have the mastodon charging at you be saying to yourself, “A slingshot or maybe a spear might work. Which actually be better?” You want to know all that before mastodons actually show up. And the way the evolutions to have solved that problem is with a kind of division of labor. the idea is that we have this early period when we’re completely protected. We don’t to do anything. All we have to do is learn. And as adults, we can take all those things that we learned we were babies and children and actually put them to work do things out there in the world.
So one of thinking about it is that babies and young are like the research and development division of the human species. So they’re the protected sky guys who just have to go out and learn and good ideas, and we’re production and marketing. We have take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and put them to use. Another way of thinking about it instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups, should think about them as being a different developmental stage the same species — kind of like caterpillars and — except that they’re actually the brilliant butterflies who are around the garden and exploring, and we’re the caterpillars who are along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
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If is true, if these babies are designed to learn — and evolutionary story would say children are for learning, that’s what they’re for — might expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms. And in fact, the baby’s seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet. But real computers actually getting to be a lot better. And there’s a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently. And it depends on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century. And what Bayes did was to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, way that scientists find out about the world. So what scientists is they have a hypothesis that they think might likely to start with. They go out and test it against evidence. The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. Then test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth. what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could do that. that mathematics is at the core of the best machine programs that we have now. And some 10 years ago, I suggested babies might be doing the same thing.
So if you want know what’s going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I think actually looks something like this. This is Reverend Bayes’s notebook. So I those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional 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 statistics, they look extremely stupid. How could it be children are doing statistics?
So to test this we used a that we have called the Blicket Detector. This is a that lights up and plays music when you put things on it and not others. And using this very simple machine, my lab and have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at learning the world. Let me mention just one that we did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed this detector, you would be likely to think to begin with that the way to make the detector would be to put a block on top of the detector. actually, this detector works in a bit of a strange way. Because if you wave block over the top of the detector, something you wouldn’t ever of to begin with, the detector will actually activate out of three times. Whereas, if you do the likely thing, put block on the detector, it will only activate two of six times. So the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence. It looks as if the is 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 evidence to wave the object top of the detector.
Now there are two things that are 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 is that they’re using that evidence to get to an idea, get to a hypothesis about the world, seems very unlikely to begin with. And in studies we’ve just been doing in lab, similar studies, we’ve show that four year-olds are actually better at finding out an unlikely than adults are when we give them exactly the same task. So these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find out about the world, but after all, scientists do experiments, and we wanted to see if children are experiments. When children do experiments we call it “getting into everything” or else “playing.”
And there’s been bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing is really a kind of experimental research program. Here’s one from Cristine Legare’s lab. What Cristine was use our Blicket Detectors. And what she did show children that yellow ones made it go and ones didn’t, and then she showed them an anomaly. And what you’ll is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses in the of two minutes.
(Video) Boy: How about this? Same as the side.
Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his first hypothesis has been falsified.
(Laughter)
Boy: This one lighted up, and this one nothing.
AG: Okay, he’s got experimental notebook out.
Boy: What’s making this light up. (Laughter) I don’t know.
AG: Every scientist recognize that expression of despair.
(Laughter)
Boy: Oh, it’s because needs to be like this, and this needs to like this.
AG: Okay, hypothesis two.
Boy: That’s why. Oh.
(Laughter)
AG: Now is his next idea. He told the experimenter to do this, try putting it out onto the other location. Not working either.
Boy: Oh, because the light goes to here, not here. Oh, the bottom of this has electricity in here, but this doesn’t have electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s a hypothesis.
Boy: It’s lighting up. So when you put four. So you put four on this to make it light up and two on this one to make light up.
AG: Okay,there’s his fifth hypothesis.
Now that is a particularly — that a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what discovered is this is actually quite typical. If you look at the children play, when you ask them to explain something, what they 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 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 philosophers, a lot of them have said that babies young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all. And I think the opposite is true. I think babies and children are actually conscious than we are as adults. Now here’s what we know about 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 bright and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. And we even something about the way the brain does this.
So what happens when pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort executive part of our brains, sends a signal that makes a little part of brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and down activity in all the rest of our brains. So have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. If we look at babies and children, we see something very different. I think 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 narrowing 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 in their brains, you see that they’re flooded with these neurotransmitters that really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory haven’t come on yet. So when we say that babies young children are bad at paying attention, what we mean is that they’re bad at not paying attention. they’re bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could them something and just looking at the thing that’s important. That’s kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might 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 is think about cases where we’re put in a new that we’ve never been in before — when we fall in love with someone new, or we’re in a new city for the first time. what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts, expands, so that those three days in Paris seem to more full of consciousness and experience than all the of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home. And the way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you’ve been 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 time after you’ve had three double-espressos. (Laughter) That’s a fantastic way to be, but it tend to leave you waking up crying at three o’clock in morning.
(Laughter)
Now it’s good to be a grownup. don’t want to say too much about how wonderful babies are. It’s good to a grownup. We can do things like tie our shoelaces cross the street by ourselves. And it makes sense we put a lot of effort into making babies think like adults do. But if what want is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time we should getting the adults to start thinking more like children.
(Applause)