What is on in this baby’s mind? If you’d asked people 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have said that baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric — that he couldn’t take the perspective of another or understand cause and effect. In the last 20 years, developmental has completely overturned that picture. So in some ways, think that this baby’s thinking is like the thinking the most brilliant scientists.
Let me give you just example of this. One thing that this baby could be about, that could be going on in his mind, is to figure out what’s going on in the mind that other baby. After all, one of the things that’s hardest for of us to do is to figure out what other are thinking and feeling. And maybe the hardest thing of all is to figure that what other people think and feel isn’t actually exactly like what we and feel. Anyone who’s followed politics can testify to how hard that is some people to get. We wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really profound about other people. Now the question is: How could ask them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, and if you ask three year-old to tell you what he thinks, what you’ll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about and birthdays and things like that. So how do 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 students, and I — was actually to give the babies two bowls of food: one bowl of broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of the babies, in Berkley, like the crackers and don’t like the broccoli. (Laughter) But then what Betty did was to a little taste of food from each bowl. And would act as if she liked it or she didn’t. half the time, she acted as if she liked the crackers and didn’t like the — just like a baby and any other sane person. half the time, what she would do is take a bit of the broccoli and go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm.” then she would take a little bit of the crackers, 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 simply put her hand out and say, “Can you me some?”
So the question is: What would the baby give her, what they or what she liked? And the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies, just walking and talking, would give her the crackers if she the crackers, but they would give her the broccoli she liked the broccoli. On the other hand, 15 month-olds would stare her for a long time if she acted as she liked the broccoli, like they couldn’t figure this out. But then after they for a long time, they would just give her the crackers, what they thought everybody must like. So are two really remarkable things about this. The first one is these little 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really profound fact human nature, that we don’t always want the same thing. And what’s more, they that they should actually do things to help other people get they wanted.
Even more remarkably though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn’t do this suggests these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact about human nature in the months from when they were 15 months old. So children 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 ask though is: Why do children learn so much? And is it possible for them to learn so much in such short time? I mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. actually in many ways, they’re worse than useless, because we have put so much time and energy into just keeping alive. But if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies, it turns that there’s actually an answer. If we look across many, many different species of animals, not 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 a species and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how and flexible they are.
And sort of the posterbirds for this are the birds up there. On one side is a New Caledonian crow. crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, incredibly 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 use a tool get food. On the other hand, we have our friend the chicken. And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are as dumb as dumps. So they’re very, very good at for grain, and they’re not much good at doing anything else. Well it out that the babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, fledglings. They depend on their moms to drop worms their little open mouths for as long as two years, which is a really long time in the life a bird. Whereas the chickens are actually mature 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 childhood seems to be connected to knowledge and learning. Well what kind of explanation could have for this? Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one very well. So they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in environment. Other creatures, like the crows, aren’t very good at doing in particular, but they’re extremely good at learning about of different environments.
And of course, we human beings are out on the end of the distribution like the crows. have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than any animal. We’re smarter, we’re more flexible, we can learn more, survive in more different environments, we migrated to cover the world and even to outer space. And our babies and children are on 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 worms into those open mouths.
All right, why would we see this correlation? Well an 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 one big disadvantage is that, until you actually do all that learning, you’re going to be helpless. you don’t want to have the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself, “A or maybe a 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 that problem is with kind of division of labor. So the idea is we have this early period when we’re completely protected. don’t have to do anything. All we have to do is learn. And then adults, we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children actually put them to work to do things out in the world.
So one way of thinking about it is that babies and young children are the research and development division of the human species. So they’re the protected blue sky guys just have to go out and learn and have good ideas, and we’re production and marketing. We to take all those ideas that we learned when were children and actually put them to use. Another 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 who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we’re the caterpillars are 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 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 seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet. real computers are actually getting to be a lot better. And there’s been a revolution in our understanding of learning recently. And it all depends on the ideas of this guy, the Thomas Bayes, who was a 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 what scientists do they have a hypothesis that they think might be to start with. They go out and test it the evidence. The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. they test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth. And what Bayes showed a mathematical way that you could do that. And mathematics is at the core of the best machine programs that we have now. And some 10 years ago, I suggested that babies might doing the same thing.
So if you want to 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 actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they’re revising to figure out how the works. All 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 be that are doing statistics?
So to test this we used a machine that we have called Blicket Detector. This is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some things it and not others. And using this very simple machine, my and others have done dozens of studies showing just how babies are at learning about the world. Let me just one that we 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 detector go would be to put block on top of the detector. But actually, this detector in a bit of a strange way. Because if you wave a block over the top of detector, something you wouldn’t ever think of to begin with, the will actually activate two out of three times. Whereas, you do the likely thing, put the block on the detector, will only activate two out of six times. So the unlikely hypothesis actually has evidence. It looks as if the waving is a more strategy than the other strategy. So we did just this; we gave year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we just asked them to make it go. And enough, the four year-olds used the evidence to wave the on top of the detector.
Now there are two that are really interesting about this. The first one is, again, remember, these are four year-olds. They’re just learning to count. But unconsciously, they’re doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a probability measure. And the 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 to with. And in studies we’ve just been doing in my lab, similar studies, we’ve show 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 wanted to see 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 have shown this playing around is really a kind of experimental research program. Here’s from Cristine Legare’s lab. What Cristine did was use our Detectors. And what she did was show children that yellow ones it go and red ones 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 space 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 got his experimental notebook out.
Boy: What’s making this up. (Laughter) I don’t know.
AG: Every scientist will recognize 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 told the experimenter do this, to try putting it out onto the other location. working either.
Boy: Oh, because the light goes only here, not here. Oh, the bottom of this box has in 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 put four this one to make it light up and two on this one to make it up.
AG: Okay,there’s his fifth hypothesis.
Now that is particularly — that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is is actually quite typical. If you look at the way children play, when you ask to explain something, what they really do is do a series of experiments. This is actually pretty typical four year-olds.
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Well, what’s it like to be this kind of creature? What’s it like be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses two minutes? Well, if you go back to those psychologists philosophers, a lot of them have said that babies and children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all. And I just the opposite is true. I think babies and children are more conscious than we are as adults. Now here’s what we know about how consciousness works. And adults’ attention and consciousness look kind like a spotlight. So what happens for adults is decide that something’s relevant or important, we should pay to it. Our consciousness of that thing that we’re attending to extremely bright and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. we even know something about 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 part of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, at learning, and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains. So we have very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. If we look at babies and young children, we see something different. I think babies and young children seem to have more of lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. So babies young children are very bad at narrowing down to one thing. But they’re very good at taking in lots information from lots of different sources at once. And you actually look in their brains, you see that they’re flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven’t come yet. So when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention, we really mean is that they’re bad at not paying attention. So they’re bad at 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 from butterflies who are designed to learn.
Well if we want to think a way of getting a taste of that kind baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think about where we’re put in a new situation that we’ve been in before — when we fall in love someone new, or when we’re in a new city for first time. And what happens then is not that consciousness contracts, it expands, so that those three days Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending back home. And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful you’ve been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters. So what’s like to be a baby? It’s like being in love in Paris the first time after you’ve had three double-espressos. (Laughter) That’s a fantastic way to be, it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o’clock in morning.
(Laughter)
Now it’s good to be a grownup. I don’t want to say too much how wonderful babies are. It’s good to be a grownup. We can do things like tie shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And it makes sense we put a lot of effort into making babies think like do. But if what we want is to be those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more children.
(Applause)