What is going in this baby’s mind? If you’d asked people this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, have said that this baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric — he couldn’t take the perspective of another person or cause and effect. In the last 20 years, developmental science has overturned that picture. So in some ways, we think that this baby’s is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.
Let me give you just one example of this. One that this baby could be thinking about, that could be going on his mind, is trying to figure out what’s going on the mind of that other baby. After all, one of the things that’s hardest for all of to do is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. And maybe hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think feel isn’t actually exactly like what we think and feel. Anyone who’s followed can testify to how hard that is for some to get. We wanted to know if babies and young children could understand really profound thing about other people. Now the question is: How could ask them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, and if you ask a three year-old to tell what he thinks, what you’ll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies birthdays and things like that. So how do we actually ask them the question?
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Well turns out that the secret was broccoli. What we did — Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I — was actually give the babies two bowls of food: one bowl of broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of the babies, even in Berkley, the crackers and don’t like the raw broccoli. (Laughter) then what Betty did was to take a little taste of food each bowl. And she would act as if she liked it she didn’t. So half the time, she acted as if she liked the crackers and didn’t the broccoli — just like a baby and any other sane person. But half the time, she would do is take a little bit of broccoli and go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm.” And then she would take a bit of the crackers, and she’d go, “Eww, yuck, crackers. I tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck.” she’d act as if what she wanted was just the opposite of what the babies wanted. We this 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: would the baby give her, what they liked or what liked? And the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies, barely walking and talking, would give her the crackers she liked 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 time if she acted as if she liked the broccoli, they couldn’t figure this out. But then after they for a long time, they would just give her 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 babies have already discovered this really profound about human nature, that we don’t always want the same thing. And what’s more, felt that they should actually do things to help people 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, fact about 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 to learn so much in such a short time? mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, seem pretty useless. And actually in many ways, they’re than useless, because we have to put so much time and into just keeping them alive. But if we turn to evolution for an answer this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies, it out that there’s actually an answer. If we look many, many different species of animals, not just us primates, but including 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 to their bodies and how smart and flexible they are.
And sort the posterbirds for this idea are the birds up there. On one side is a New Caledonian crow. crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly smart birds. They’re as smart as chimpanzees some respects. And this is a bird on the of science who’s learned how to use a tool to get food. On the other hand, have our friend the domestic chicken. And chickens and and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps. So they’re very, good at pecking for grain, and they’re not much good at anything 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 as two years, which is really long time in the life of a bird. Whereas the chickens are actually within a couple of months. So childhood is the why the crows end up on the cover of Science and the chickens end in the soup pot.
There’s something about that long that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning. Well what kind explanation could we have for this? Well some animals, like chicken, seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well. So they seem be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment. Other creatures, like the crows, aren’t very good doing anything in particular, but they’re extremely good at about laws of different environments.
And of course, we human beings are way out on the end 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 can learn more, we survive more different environments, we migrated to cover the world and go to outer space. And our babies and children are dependent us for much longer than the babies of any other species. My son 23. (Laughter) And at least until they’re 23, we’re still popping those into those little open mouths.
All right, why would we see this correlation? an idea is that that strategy, that learning strategy, an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting on in world, but it has one big disadvantage. And that big disadvantage is that, until you actually do all that learning, you’re going be helpless. So you don’t want to have the mastodon charging at you and saying to yourself, “A slingshot or maybe a spear might work. would actually be better?” You want to know all before the mastodons actually show up. And the way the evolutions seems to have that problem is with a kind of division of labor. So the idea is we have this early period 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 we learned when were babies and children and actually put them to work do 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. they’re the protected blue sky guys who just have go out and learn and have good ideas, and we’re production and marketing. have to take all those ideas that we learned we were children and actually put them to use. way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups, should think about them as being a different developmental stage of same species — kind of like caterpillars and butterflies — except that they’re actually the brilliant butterflies who are 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 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 fact, the baby’s brain seems to be the most learning computer on the planet. But real computers are actually getting to be a better. And there’s been a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently. And it all on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was a statistician and mathematician the 18th century. And essentially what Bayes did was to a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, way that scientists find out about the world. So scientists do is they have a hypothesis that they might be likely to start with. They go out and test against the evidence. The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. they test that new hypothesis and so on and forth. And what Bayes showed 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 babies might be doing the same thing.
So if want to know what’s going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I it 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 to actually demonstrate. Because after all, if you ask even about statistics, they look extremely stupid. How could it be that children are doing statistics?
So test this we used a machine that we have called the Detector. This is a box that lights up and plays music when you some things on it and not others. And using this very machine, my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing how good babies are at learning about the world. Let mention just one that we did with Tumar Kushner, my student. 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 works in a bit of a strange way. Because if you wave a block the top of the detector, something you wouldn’t ever think of to begin with, the detector will actually two out of three times. Whereas, if you do likely thing, put the block on the detector, it only activate two out of six times. So the unlikely actually has stronger evidence. It looks as if the waving is a more effective strategy the other strategy. So we did just this; we four year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we just them to make it go. And sure enough, the four year-olds used the evidence to wave object on top of the detector.
Now there are two that are really interesting about this. The first one is, again, remember, these four year-olds. They’re just 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, get a hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely begin with. And in studies we’ve just been doing my lab, similar studies, we’ve show that four year-olds are actually better at finding out an hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly same task. So in these circumstances, the children are statistics to find out about the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and we to see if children are doing experiments. When children do experiments we call it “getting into everything” or “playing.”
And there’s been a bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around is a kind of experimental research program. Here’s one from Cristine Legare’s lab. What Cristine did was use Blicket Detectors. And what she did was show children that yellow ones it go and red ones didn’t, and then she them an anomaly. And what you’ll see is that this little boy go through five hypotheses in the 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: This lighted up, and this one nothing.
AG: Okay, he’s his experimental notebook out.
Boy: What’s making this light up. (Laughter) I don’t know.
AG: Every will 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: this is his next idea. He told the experimenter do this, to try putting it out onto the other location. Not 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 four on this one 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 — is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what Cristine is this is actually quite typical. If you look at the way play, when you ask them to explain something, what they really do is do series of experiments. This is actually pretty typical of year-olds.
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Well, what’s it like to be this kind creature? What’s it like to be one of these brilliant 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 just the opposite is true. I think babies and are actually more conscious than we are as adults. here’s what we know about how adult consciousness works. And adults’ attention and consciousness kind of like a spotlight. So what happens for adults is we that something’s relevant or important, we should pay attention it. Our consciousness of that thing that we’re attending becomes extremely bright 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 pay is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of brains, sends a signal that makes a little part of brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts down activity in all the rest of 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 to have more of a 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 at taking in lots of information from lots of sources at once. And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they’re flooded these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory haven’t come on yet. So when we say that babies and young children are at paying attention, what we really mean is that they’re 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 who are to learn.
Well if we want to think about a way getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing think about cases where we’re put in a new situation that we’ve been in before — when we fall in love with new, or when we’re in a new city for the first time. And happens then is not that our consciousness contracts, it expands, so that those days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home. And by way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you’ve been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect of baby neurotransmitters. So what’s it like to be a baby? It’s being in love in Paris for the first time after you’ve 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 good to be grownup. I don’t want to say too much about how wonderful are. It’s good to be a grownup. We can do like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And it sense that we put a lot of effort into making babies like adults do. But if what we want is to 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 more children.
(Applause)