What going on in this baby’s mind? If you’d asked people this 30 years ago, most people, psychologists, would have said that this baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric — that he couldn’t take the perspective of person or understand cause and effect. In the last 20 years, developmental science has completely that picture. So in some ways, we think that baby’s thinking is like the thinking of the most scientists.
Let me give you just one example of this. One thing that this baby could be thinking about, could be going on in his mind, is trying to figure what’s going on in the mind of that other baby. After all, of the things that’s hardest for all of us to is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. And the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and feel isn’t actually like what we think and feel. Anyone who’s followed politics can testify to how hard that is for 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 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 a stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that. how do we actually ask them the question?
footnote
Well it turns out that the secret broccoli. What we did — Betty Rapacholi, who was of my students, and I — was actually to the babies two bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of babies, even in 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. she would act as if she liked it or she didn’t. 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 would do is take a little bit of the and go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm.” And then she take a little bit of the crackers, and she’d go, “Eww, yuck, crackers. I tasted crackers. Eww, yuck.” So she’d act as if what she wanted was the opposite of what the babies wanted. We did this 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, just walking and talking, would give her the crackers if liked the crackers, but they would give her the broccoli if liked the broccoli. On the other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at her for long time 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 just give her the crackers, what they thought everybody must like. 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 about nature, that we don’t always want the same thing. what’s more, they felt that they should actually do things help other 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, profound fact human nature in the three months from when they were 15 months old. So children both more and learn more than we ever would have thought. And this is one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 that’s actually demonstrated it.
footnote
The question you might though 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 worse than useless, because we to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive. But if we to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much taking care of useless babies, it turns out that there’s actually answer. If we look across many, many different species animals, not just us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even marsupials like kangaroos wombats, it turns out that there’s a relationship between how long a childhood species has and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart flexible they are.
And sort of the posterbirds for idea are the birds up there. On one side is a Caledonian crow. And crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly smart birds. They’re smart as chimpanzees in some respects. And this is a bird on the of science who’s learned how to use a tool to food. On the other hand, we have our friend the domestic chicken. And chickens and and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps. So they’re very, very at pecking for grain, and they’re not much good at doing anything else. Well turns out that the babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. depend on their moms to drop worms in their open mouths for as long as two years, which a really long time in the life of a bird. Whereas the chickens are mature within a couple of months. So childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the of Science and the chickens end up in the soup pot.
There’s something about long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning. Well kind of explanation could we have for this? Well some animals, like the chicken, to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well. So they to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment. Other creatures, like crows, aren’t very good at doing anything in particular, but they’re extremely good at about laws of different environments.
And of course, we human beings are way out the end of the distribution like the crows. We have brains relative to our bodies by far than any other animal. We’re smarter, we’re flexible, we can learn more, we survive in more different environments, we migrated to cover the world and go to outer space. And our babies and children dependent on us for much longer than the babies any other species. My son is 23. (Laughter) And at least 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, it has one big disadvantage. And that one big disadvantage is that, until you do all that learning, you’re going to be helpless. So you don’t want to have mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself, “A slingshot or maybe a spear work. Which would actually be better?” You want to know all that before the actually show up. And the way the evolutions seems have solved that problem is with a kind of of labor. So the idea is that we have this period when we’re completely protected. We don’t have to anything. All we have to do is learn. And then as adults, we can take all things that we learned when we were babies and children and actually them to work to do things out there in the world.
So one of thinking about it is that babies and young children like the research and development division of the human species. So they’re the protected blue sky guys who just to go out and learn and have good ideas, and we’re production marketing. We have to take all those ideas that we learned when were children and actually put them to use. Another way of thinking it is instead of thinking of babies and children being like defective grownups, we should think about them being a different developmental stage of the same species — kind of caterpillars and butterflies — except that they’re actually the brilliant who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we’re the caterpillars who are along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
footnote
If this true, if these babies are designed to learn — and evolutionary story would say children are for learning, that’s they’re for — we might expect that they would have powerful learning mechanisms. And in fact, the baby’s brain seems to be most powerful 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 machine learning recently. And all depends on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was a and mathematician in the 18th century. And essentially what Bayes did was to provide a mathematical using probability theory to characterize, describe, the way that scientists out about the world. So what scientists do is they have hypothesis that they think might be 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 that babies 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 think those babies are actually 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 even grownups about statistics, look extremely stupid. How 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 you some things on it and not others. And using this very 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 you this detector, you would be to think to begin with that the way to make the go would be to put a block on top the detector. But actually, this detector works in a of a strange way. Because if you wave a block the top of the detector, something you wouldn’t ever think of to with, the detector will actually activate two out of three times. Whereas, if you do the likely thing, the block on the detector, it will only activate two out of six times. 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 them to make 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 really interesting about this. The first one is, again, remember, these are four year-olds. They’re just how to count. But unconsciously, they’re doing these quite complicated calculations will give them a conditional probability measure. And the other interesting is that they’re using that evidence to get to an idea, get a hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely to begin with. in studies we’ve just been doing in my lab, similar studies, we’ve show that four year-olds are better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we them exactly the same task. So in these circumstances, the children are using statistics find out about the world, but after all, scientists also experiments, and we wanted to see if children 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 Cristine Legare’s lab. What Cristine did was use our Blicket Detectors. And what she did show children that yellow ones made it go and red didn’t, and then she showed them an anomaly. And you’ll see is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses in the of two minutes.
(Video) Boy: How about this? Same the other side.
Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his first hypothesis has 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 to be like this, and this needs to be like this.
AG: Okay, two.
Boy: That’s why. Oh.
(Laughter)
AG: Now this is next idea. He told the experimenter to do this, to try it out onto the other location. Not working either.
Boy: Oh, because the light goes to here, not here. Oh, the bottom of this box has electricity here, but this doesn’t have electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s a fourth hypothesis.
Boy: It’s lighting up. when you put four. So you put four on one to make it light up and two on this to make it light up.
AG: Okay,there’s his fifth hypothesis.
Now that is a particularly — that is particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is this actually quite typical. If you look at the way children play, when you ask them explain something, what they really do is do a of experiments. This is actually pretty typical of four year-olds.
footnote
Well, what’s like to be this kind of creature? What’s it like to be of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes? Well, if go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them have said babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious all. And I think just the opposite is true. I babies and children are 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 like 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 extremely bright vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. And even know something about the way the brain does this.
So what happens when we pay attention is that the cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, sends a signal that makes a part of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains. So we a very focused, purpose-driven kind of 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 lantern consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. So babies and young children very bad at narrowing down to just one thing. But they’re very good at taking in lots information from lots of different sources at once. And if actually look in their brains, you see that they’re flooded with these that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the parts haven’t come on yet. So when we say babies and young children are bad at paying attention, we really mean is that they’re bad at not paying attention. they’re bad at getting rid of all the interesting that could tell them something and just looking at thing that’s important. That’s the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might from those butterflies who are designed to learn.
Well we want to think about a way of getting taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, 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 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 and experience than all the months of being walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home. And by the way, that coffee, that coffee you’ve been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect of 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 a fantastic to be, but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o’clock the morning.
(Laughter)
Now it’s good to be a grownup. I don’t want say too much about how wonderful babies are. It’s good to a grownup. We can do things 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 at least some of the we should be getting the adults to start thinking more children.
(Applause)