What going on 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 — that he couldn’t the perspective of another person or understand cause and effect. In the last 20 years, developmental has completely overturned that picture. So in some ways, we think that this baby’s thinking is like the of the most 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 figure out what’s going on in the mind of that other baby. all, one of the things that’s hardest for all of us do is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. And maybe the thing of all is to figure out that what other think and feel isn’t actually exactly like what we think and feel. Anyone who’s followed politics can testify how hard that is for some people to get. We wanted know if babies and young children could understand this really 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 of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things 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, I — was actually to give the babies two of food: one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. Now all the 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 each bowl. And she would act as if she liked it or she didn’t. So half time, she acted as if she liked the crackers and didn’t like the broccoli — 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 she would take a little bit of the crackers, she’d go, “Eww, yuck, crackers. I tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck.” So she’d act as what she wanted was just the opposite of what 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 some?”
So the question is: What would the baby give her, what 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 her 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 out. But then after they stared for a long time, they would just give her crackers, what they thought everybody must like. So there are two really remarkable about this. The first one is that these little 18 month-old babies already discovered this really profound fact about human nature, we don’t always want the same thing. And 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 suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact about human nature in three months from when they were 15 months old. children both know more and learn more than we ever would have thought. And this just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 that’s actually demonstrated it.
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The question you might though is: Why do children learn so much? And how is possible for them to learn so much in such a short time? I mean, after all, you look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. actually in many ways, they’re worse than useless, because we have to put so much time and energy just keeping them alive. But if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of we spend so much time taking care of useless babies, turns out that there’s actually an answer. If we across many, many different species of animals, not just us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there’s a relationship between how long a childhood species has and how big their brains are compared their bodies and how smart and flexible they are.
And sort of the for this idea are the birds up there. On one side a New Caledonian crow. And crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly birds. They’re as smart as chimpanzees in some respects. this is a bird on the cover of science who’s learned how use a tool to get food. On the other hand, we have friend the domestic chicken. And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps. they’re very, very good at pecking for grain, and they’re not much good at doing anything else. Well it out that the babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. They depend on moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long two years, which is a really long time in the life of a bird. Whereas chickens are actually mature within a couple of months. So childhood is the why the crows end up on the cover of and the chickens end up in the soup pot.
There’s something that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning. what kind of explanation could we have for this? Well animals, like the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing well. So they seem to be beautifully suited to grain in one environment. Other creatures, like the crows, aren’t good at doing anything in particular, but they’re extremely at learning about laws of different environments.
And of course, we beings are way out on the end of the distribution like crows. We have bigger 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 are dependent on us for longer than 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 little mouths.
All right, why would we see this correlation? an idea is that that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, great for getting on in the world, but it has one big disadvantage. And that one big disadvantage that, until you actually do all that learning, you’re to be helpless. So you don’t want to have the mastodon at you and be saying to yourself, “A slingshot or maybe a spear work. Which would actually be better?” You want to all that before the mastodons 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 early 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 those things that we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them to to do things out there in the world.
So one way of about it is that babies and young children are like research and development division of the human species. So they’re the protected blue sky guys who just have go out 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 babies and children as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a developmental stage of the same species — kind of like caterpillars butterflies — except that they’re actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden exploring, and we’re the caterpillars who are inching along narrow, grownup, adult path.
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If this is true, these babies are designed to learn — and this evolutionary story would say are for learning, that’s what they’re for — we might expect that they would really powerful learning mechanisms. And in fact, the baby’s brain seems to be the most powerful learning 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 all depends on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was a and mathematician in the 18th century. And essentially what did was to provide a mathematical way using probability to characterize, describe, the way that scientists find out about the world. So what do is they have a hypothesis that they think might be likely to start with. They go out test it against the evidence. The evidence makes them that hypothesis. Then they test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth. what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could do that. And mathematics is at the core of the best machine learning programs that we 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 it actually looks something like this. is Reverend Bayes’s notebook. So I think those babies are actually making calculations with conditional probabilities that they’re revising to figure how the world works. All right, now that might seem like even taller order to actually demonstrate. Because after all, if you ask even grownups about statistics, they extremely stupid. How could it be that children are statistics?
So to test this we used a machine that we have called the Blicket Detector. This is box that lights up and plays music when you some things on it and not others. And using this very simple machine, my lab others have done dozens of studies showing just how babies are at learning about the world. Let me mention just one we did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed you this detector, would be likely to think to begin with that the way to the detector go would be to put a block on top the detector. But actually, this detector works in a bit of a strange way. Because if you a block over the top of the detector, something you wouldn’t ever of to begin with, the detector will actually activate two 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 evidence. It looks as if the waving is a 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 year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on top of the detector.
Now there are two that are really interesting about this. The first one is, again, remember, are four year-olds. They’re just learning how to count. unconsciously, they’re doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure. And other interesting thing is that they’re using that evidence to get an idea, get to a hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely begin with. And in studies we’ve just been doing in my lab, similar studies, we’ve 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 using statistics to find about the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and we to see if children are doing experiments. When children do experiments call it “getting into everything” or else “playing.”
And there’s a bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around is really a kind of experimental program. Here’s one from Cristine Legare’s lab. What Cristine did was use our Blicket Detectors. what she did was show children that yellow ones made it go and red ones didn’t, and then showed them an anomaly. And what you’ll see is that this little boy will go through five in the space of two minutes.
(Video) Boy: How about this? Same as other side.
Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his first hypothesis just been falsified.
(Laughter)
Boy: This one lighted up, and one nothing.
AG: Okay, he’s got his experimental notebook out.
Boy: What’s making this up. (Laughter) I 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, two.
Boy: That’s why. Oh.
(Laughter)
AG: Now this is next idea. He told the experimenter to do this, to try putting it out the other location. Not working either.
Boy: Oh, because the light only to here, not here. Oh, the bottom of this box has electricity in here, but this doesn’t electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s a fourth hypothesis.
Boy: It’s lighting up. So you put four. So you put four on this one to it light up and two on this one to 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 is this actually quite typical. If you look at the way play, when you ask them to explain something, what they really 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 who can test five hypotheses two minutes? Well, if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them have said babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all. And think just the opposite is true. I think babies and are actually more conscious than we are as adults. Now here’s what we know how adult consciousness works. And adults’ attention and consciousness look kind of a spotlight. So what happens for adults is we decide that something’s relevant or important, we pay attention to it. Our consciousness of that thing that we’re attending becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. And we even know something the way the brain does this.
So what happens when we pay is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive 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 we have very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. If we look babies and young children, we see something very different. I think babies and young children seem to more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. So and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just thing. But they’re very good 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 with neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and inhibitory parts haven’t come on yet. So when we say that babies and children are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they’re bad at paying attention. So they’re bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell something and just looking at the thing that’s important. That’s kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect those butterflies who are designed to learn.
Well if we want to think a way of getting a 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 — when we fall in love with someone new, or when we’re in a city for the first time. And what happens then is that our consciousness contracts, it expands, so that those three days in Paris seem to be full 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 drinking downstairs, actually mimics the of those baby neurotransmitters. So what’s it like to be a baby? It’s like in love in Paris for the first time after you’ve had double-espressos. (Laughter) That’s a fantastic way to be, but does tend to leave you waking up crying at o’clock in the morning.
(Laughter)
Now it’s good to be grownup. I don’t want to say too much about how babies are. It’s good to be a grownup. We can do things like our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And makes sense that we put a lot of effort into making think like adults do. But if what we want is to be like butterflies, to have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, at least some of the time we should be getting the adults start thinking more like children.
(Applause)