What is going on in this baby’s mind? you’d asked people this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have said that baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric — that he couldn’t take perspective of another person 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 brilliant scientists.
Let me give you just one example this. One thing that this baby could be thinking about, could be going on in his mind, is trying to figure out what’s going in the mind of that other baby. After all, one of the that’s hardest for all of us to do is to figure what other people are thinking and feeling. And maybe the thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and isn’t actually exactly like what we think and feel. who’s followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some people to get. wanted to know if babies and young children could this really profound thing about other people. Now the question is: How could we ask them? Babies, 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 and and things like that. So how do we actually ask them the question?
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Well it turns that the secret was broccoli. What we did — Betty Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and — was actually to give the babies two bowls food: one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of the babies, even in Berkley, like the crackers and don’t like raw broccoli. (Laughter) But then what Betty did was to take a little taste of food each bowl. And she would act as if she it or she didn’t. So half the time, she acted as if she liked crackers and didn’t like the broccoli — just like a and any other sane person. But half the time, she would do is take a little bit of the 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 as if what she wanted was just the opposite of what babies wanted. We did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies. And then she would simply put her hand and say, “Can you give me some?”
So the question is: What would the baby give her, they liked or what she liked? And the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies, just barely and talking, would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers, but they would give the broccoli if she liked the broccoli. On the other hand, 15 month-olds stare at her for a long time if she acted if she liked the broccoli, like they couldn’t figure this out. But then they stared for a long time, they would just her the crackers, what they thought everybody must like. So are two really remarkable things about this. The first is that these 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 to help other people get what they wanted.
Even remarkably though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn’t do this suggests that 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact about human nature in the three months 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.
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The question you might ask though is: Why children learn so much? And how is it possible for them to learn so much in such short time? I mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, they pretty useless. And actually in many ways, they’re worse than useless, because we to put so much time and energy into just keeping alive. But if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we 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 how long a childhood a species has and how big their brains are to their bodies and how smart and flexible they are.
And sort of the posterbirds for this idea are the up there. On one side is a New Caledonian crow. crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are smart birds. They’re as smart 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, have our friend the domestic chicken. And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are as dumb as dumps. So they’re very, very good at pecking grain, and they’re not much good at doing anything else. it turns out that the babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. They depend on their to drop worms in their little open mouths for long as two years, which is a really long in the life of a bird. Whereas the chickens are actually mature a couple of months. So childhood is the reason why crows end up on the cover of Science and the chickens end up the soup pot.
There’s something about that long childhood that seems to be to knowledge and learning. Well what kind of explanation we have for this? Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited doing just one thing very well. So they seem be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment. creatures, like the crows, aren’t very good at doing anything in particular, but they’re extremely good learning about laws of different environments.
And of course, we human beings are way out on end of the distribution like the crows. We have bigger brains to 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 cover the world and even go to outer space. our babies and children are dependent on us for much longer the babies 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 in the world, but it has one big disadvantage. that one big disadvantage is that, until you actually do that learning, you’re going to be helpless. So you don’t want have the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself, “A slingshot or 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 that we have this early period when we’re completely protected. don’t have to do anything. All we have to do is learn. And as adults, we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children and put them to work to do things out there the world.
So one way of thinking about it is babies and young children are like the research and development of the human species. So they’re the protected blue sky who just have to go out and learn and have good ideas, and we’re and marketing. We have to take all those ideas that we learned when we children and actually put them to use. Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of and children as being like defective grownups, we should about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species — of like caterpillars and butterflies — except that they’re actually the brilliant who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we’re caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
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If this is true, if these babies are designed learn — and this evolutionary story would say children are 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 powerful computer on the planet. But real computers are actually getting to be a lot better. And there’s been 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 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 start with. They go out and test it 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 could do that. And that mathematics is at the core of the best machine learning programs that 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 think it looks something like this. This is Reverend Bayes’s notebook. So I think those babies are actually making complicated with conditional probabilities that they’re revising to figure out how the works. All right, now that might seem like an taller order 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 to test we used a machine that we have called the Blicket Detector. is a box that lights up and plays music when put some things on it and not others. And using this simple machine, my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing how good babies are at learning about the world. Let me mention one that we did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed this detector, you would be likely to think to begin with the way to make the detector go would be to put a on top of the detector. But actually, this detector works in bit of a 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 will actually activate two out three times. Whereas, if you do the likely thing, put the block on detector, it will only activate two out of six times. So the unlikely hypothesis actually stronger evidence. It looks as if the waving is a effective strategy than the other strategy. So we did just this; we gave four year-olds pattern of evidence, and we just asked them to make go. And sure enough, the four year-olds used the evidence to wave the on top of the detector.
Now there are two things that 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 probability measure. And the other interesting thing is that they’re using evidence to get to an idea, get to a hypothesis the world, that seems very unlikely to 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 unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly the same task. So these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find out the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to if children are doing experiments. When children do experiments call it “getting into everything” or else “playing.”
And there’s been a bunch of interesting studies recently have shown this playing around is really a kind experimental research program. Here’s one from Cristine Legare’s lab. What did was use our Blicket Detectors. And what she was show children that yellow ones made it go and red ones didn’t, and then she them an anomaly. And what you’ll see is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses the space of two minutes.
(Video) Boy: How about this? as the other side.
Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his hypothesis has just been falsified.
(Laughter)
Boy: This one up, and this one nothing.
AG: Okay, he’s got his notebook out.
Boy: What’s making this light up. (Laughter) 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, hypothesis two.
Boy: That’s why. Oh.
(Laughter)
AG: Now is his next idea. He told the experimenter to do this, to try putting out onto the other location. Not working either.
Boy: Oh, because light goes only to here, not here. Oh, the bottom of this box has electricity here, but this doesn’t have electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s a hypothesis.
Boy: It’s lighting up. So when you put four. So put four on this one to make it light up and two on one to make it light up.
AG: Okay,there’s his fifth hypothesis.
Now that is a — that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered this is actually quite typical. If you look at the way children play, when ask them to explain something, what they really do is do a series of experiments. is actually pretty typical of four year-olds.
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Well, what’s it like be this kind of creature? What’s it like to be one these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes? Well, if you go to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them said that babies and young children were barely conscious if were conscious at all. And I think just the opposite true. I think babies and children are actually more conscious 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 that 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 know something about the way the does this.
So what happens when we 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 shuts down activity in all the rest our brains. So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. we look at babies and young children, we see very different. I think babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of than a spotlight of consciousness. So babies and young children are very at narrowing down to just one thing. But they’re good at taking in lots of information from lots different sources at once. And if you actually look in their brains, see that they’re flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, the inhibitory parts haven’t come on yet. So when we that babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we really is that they’re bad at not paying attention. So they’re bad at getting rid all the interesting things that could tell them something just looking at the 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 of baby consciousness as adults, I the best thing is think about cases where we’re in a new situation that we’ve never been in before — when we in love with someone new, or when we’re in a new city for the time. And what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts, it expands, so those three days in Paris seem to be more of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending back home. And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you’ve been downstairs, actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters. what’s it like to be a baby? It’s like being love in Paris for the first time after you’ve three double-espressos. (Laughter) That’s a fantastic way to be, but it does 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 the street by ourselves. And it makes sense that we put a lot of effort making babies think 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 some of the time we should getting the adults to start thinking more like children.
(Applause)