What is going on in this baby’s mind? If you’d people this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would said that this baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric — that he couldn’t take the perspective of another or understand cause and effect. In the last 20 years, science has completely overturned that picture. So in some ways, we think this baby’s thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.
Let me give you one example of 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 baby. After all, one of the things that’s hardest for all of us to do to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. And maybe the hardest thing of all to figure out that what other people think and feel isn’t exactly like what we think and feel. Anyone who’s politics can testify to how hard that is for people to get. We wanted to know if babies young children could understand this really profound thing about other people. Now question is: How could we ask them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, and if you ask a three year-old to you what he thinks, what you’ll get is a beautiful stream consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that. So do we actually ask them the question?
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Well it turns out that the secret broccoli. What we did — Betty Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I — was to give the babies two bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli and bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of the babies, even in Berkley, like the and don’t like the raw broccoli. (Laughter) But then what Betty did to take a little taste of food from each bowl. she would act as if she liked it or didn’t. So half the time, she acted as if she the crackers and didn’t like the broccoli — just like baby and any other sane person. But half the time, what she would is take a little bit of the broccoli and go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I 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 opposite of what the babies wanted. We did this 15 and 18 month-old babies. And then she would put her hand out and say, “Can you give me some?”
So question is: What would the baby give her, what they or what she liked? And the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies, barely walking and talking, would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers, but they give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli. On other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at her for a long if she acted as if she liked the broccoli, they couldn’t figure this out. But then after they stared a long time, they would just give her the crackers, what they thought everybody like. So there are two really remarkable things about this. The first one is that these 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really profound fact about human nature, that we don’t want the same thing. And what’s more, they felt they should actually do things to help other people what they wanted.
Even more remarkably though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn’t do this that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact about human nature the three months from when they were 15 months old. So children both know more and learn than we ever would have thought. And this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over last 20 years that’s actually demonstrated it.
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question you might ask though is: Why do children so much? And how is it possible for them learn so much in such a short time? I mean, after all, if look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. And actually 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 to this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking of useless babies, it turns out that there’s actually an answer. If we look across many, different species of animals, not just us primates, but also other mammals, birds, even marsupials like kangaroos and wombats, turns out that there’s a relationship between how long a childhood a has and how big their brains are compared to their bodies how smart and flexible they are.
And sort of the posterbirds for this are the birds up there. On one side is a Caledonian crow. And crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks so forth, are incredibly smart birds. They’re as smart as chimpanzees in some respects. And this is bird on the cover of science who’s learned how to use a to get food. On the other hand, we have 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. Well turns out that the babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. They depend their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long two years, which is a really long time in life of a bird. Whereas the chickens are actually mature within 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 that long childhood that seems to be connected to and learning. Well what kind of explanation could we for this? Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to be beautifully to doing just one thing very well. So they seem to be beautifully suited to grain in one environment. Other creatures, like the crows, aren’t very good at anything in particular, but they’re extremely good at learning about laws different environments.
And of course, we human beings are way out on the end of the like the crows. We have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than other animal. We’re smarter, we’re more flexible, we can learn more, we survive more different environments, we migrated to cover the world even go to outer space. And our babies and children are dependent on us for much longer the babies of any other species. My son is 23. (Laughter) And at least until they’re 23, we’re still those worms into those little open mouths.
All right, would we see this correlation? Well an idea is that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, strategy for getting on in the world, but it has one disadvantage. And that one big disadvantage is that, until you actually do all that learning, you’re going to helpless. So you don’t want to have the mastodon at you and be saying to yourself, “A slingshot or maybe spear might work. Which would actually be better?” You want to know all that the mastodons actually show up. And the way the evolutions seems to have solved problem is with a kind of division of labor. So the is that we have this early period when we’re protected. We don’t have to do anything. All we have to do learn. And then as adults, we can take all things that we learned when we were babies and and actually put them to work to do things out in the world.
So one way of thinking about is that babies and young children are like the and development division of the human species. So they’re the protected blue sky guys just have to go out and learn and have ideas, and we’re production and marketing. We have to all those ideas that we learned when we were children actually put them to use. Another way of thinking it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of same species — kind of like caterpillars and butterflies — except they’re actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we’re the caterpillars who inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
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If this true, if these babies are designed to learn — and this evolutionary story say children are for learning, that’s what they’re for — we might that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms. And in fact, baby’s brain seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet. But real computers are getting to be a lot better. And there’s been a in our understanding of machine learning recently. And it depends on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was statistician and mathematician in the 18th century. And essentially Bayes did was to provide a mathematical way using probability to characterize, describe, the 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 it against the evidence. The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. they test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth. And Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could that. And that mathematics is at the core of the best learning programs that we have now. And some 10 ago, I suggested that babies might be doing the thing.
So if you want to know what’s going underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I think it actually looks something this. This is Reverend Bayes’s notebook. So I think those babies are actually making calculations with conditional probabilities that they’re revising to figure out how the world works. right, now that might seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate. Because all, if you ask even grownups about statistics, they look extremely stupid. How could it that children are doing statistics?
So to test this we used a that we have called the Blicket Detector. This is a box that lights and plays music when you put some things on it and others. And using this very simple machine, my lab and have done dozens of studies showing just how good are at learning about the world. Let me mention one that we did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed you detector, you would be likely to think to begin that the way to make the detector go would be to a block on top of the detector. But actually, this detector in a bit of a strange way. Because if you wave block over the top of the detector, something you wouldn’t ever think of to with, the detector will actually activate two out of times. Whereas, if you do the likely thing, put the block the detector, it will only activate two out of times. So the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence. It looks as if the waving is a effective strategy than the other strategy. So we did this; we gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we asked them to make it go. And sure enough, four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on top the detector.
Now there are two things that are interesting about this. The first one is, again, remember, these are four year-olds. They’re learning how to count. But unconsciously, they’re doing these quite calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure. And the other interesting thing is they’re using that evidence to get to an idea, to a hypothesis about the world, that seems very 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 the same task. So in these circumstances, the children are using statistics find out about the world, but after all, scientists do experiments, and we wanted to see if children are doing experiments. When children do experiments we it “getting into everything” or else “playing.”
And there’s a bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown this around is really a kind of experimental research program. Here’s one from Legare’s lab. What Cristine did was use our Blicket Detectors. And what she did was show children that ones made it go and red ones didn’t, and then she showed them 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? Same as the side.
Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his first hypothesis has just falsified.
(Laughter)
Boy: This one lighted up, and this nothing.
AG: Okay, he’s got his experimental notebook out.
Boy: What’s making light up. (Laughter) I don’t know.
AG: Every scientist recognize that expression of 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 his next idea. He the experimenter to do this, to try putting it onto 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, this doesn’t have electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s a fourth hypothesis.
Boy: It’s lighting up. So when you put four. So you four on this one to make it light up two on this one to make it light up.
AG: Okay,there’s his fifth hypothesis.
Now that a particularly — that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what discovered is this is actually quite typical. If you at the way children play, when you ask them 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 like to be this kind of creature? What’s it like to be of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses two minutes? Well, if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot them have said that babies and young children were conscious if they were conscious at all. And I think the opposite is true. I think babies and children actually more conscious than we are as adults. Now here’s we know about how adult consciousness works. And adults’ and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight. So what for adults is we decide that something’s relevant or important, we should pay to it. Our consciousness of that thing that we’re attending to becomes extremely and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. we even know something about the way the brain this.
So what happens when we pay attention is the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, a signal that makes a little part of our brain much 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 have more of a lantern of consciousness than a of consciousness. So babies and young children are very at narrowing down to just one thing. But they’re very good taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once. if you actually look in their brains, you see that they’re flooded with these neurotransmitters that are good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven’t come on yet. So we say that babies and young children are bad at attention, what we really mean is that they’re bad at not paying attention. they’re bad at getting rid of all the interesting things could tell them something and just looking at the thing that’s important. That’s kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect from those butterflies who are to learn.
Well if we want to think about way of getting a taste of that kind of consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is about cases where we’re put in a new situation we’ve never been in before — when we fall in with someone new, or when we’re in a new city the first time. And what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts, expands, so that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie home. And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you’ve been drinking downstairs, actually mimics effect 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 wonderful are. It’s good to be a grownup. We can do things tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And it makes sense that we put a lot effort into making babies think like adults do. But if what we is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the we should be getting the adults to start thinking more children.
(Applause)