What is going on in this baby’s mind? If you’d people this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have said this baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric — that he couldn’t take the perspective of another person understand cause and effect. In the last 20 years, developmental science has completely 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 of this. thing that this baby could be thinking about, that could be going on in mind, is trying to figure out what’s going on in mind of that other baby. After all, one of the that’s hardest for all of us to do is to out what other people are thinking and feeling. And maybe hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and isn’t actually exactly like what we think and feel. Anyone who’s followed can testify to how hard that is for some people to get. wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really profound about other people. Now the question is: How could we them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, and if you a three year-old to tell you what he thinks, you’ll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue ponies and birthdays and things like that. So how do actually ask them the question?
footnote
Well it out 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 of food: one bowl of raw and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of the babies, even in Berkley, like the crackers don’t like the raw broccoli. (Laughter) But then what 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 didn’t like the broccoli — just like a baby and any sane person. But half the time, what she would do is take a little bit of the broccoli go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm.” And then she would take a bit of the crackers, and she’d go, “Eww, yuck, crackers. tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck.” So she’d act as if what wanted was just 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: What would the give her, what they liked or what she liked? 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 after they stared 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. what’s more, they felt that they should actually do things to help other people get what wanted.
Even more remarkably though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn’t do this suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned deep, profound fact about human nature in the three months when they were 15 months old. So children both know more learn more than we ever would have thought. And this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of over the last 20 years that’s actually demonstrated it.
footnote
question you might ask though is: Why do children learn so much? how is it possible for them to learn so much such a short time? I mean, after all, if you at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. And actually in many ways, they’re worse than useless, because we to put so much time and energy into just them 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 turns 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, it out that there’s a relationship between how long a a species has and how big their brains are compared their bodies and how smart and flexible they are.
And of the posterbirds for this idea are the birds there. On one side is a New Caledonian crow. And crows other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly smart birds. They’re as smart as in some respects. And this is a bird on cover of science who’s learned how to use a to get food. On the other hand, we have our friend the domestic chicken. chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps. So they’re very, good at pecking for grain, and they’re not much good at doing anything else. Well it turns that the babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. depend on their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as as two years, which is a really long time in the life of a bird. Whereas the are actually mature within a couple of months. So childhood the reason why the crows end up on the cover of Science and the chickens end up in soup pot.
There’s something about that long childhood that seems to be to knowledge and learning. Well what kind of explanation could we have this? Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited doing just one thing very well. So they seem to be beautifully to pecking grain in one environment. Other creatures, like the crows, aren’t very good at doing anything particular, but they’re extremely good at learning about laws of environments.
And of course, we human beings are way out on the end of distribution like the crows. We have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far any other animal. We’re smarter, we’re more flexible, we can learn more, we survive in more different environments, migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space. our babies and children are dependent on us for much than the babies of any other species. My son 23. (Laughter) And at least until they’re 23, we’re popping those worms into those little open mouths.
All right, why we see this correlation? Well an idea is that that strategy, that learning strategy, an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting on in the world, it has one big disadvantage. And that one big is that, until you actually do all that learning, you’re going to be helpless. So you don’t want to the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself, “A or maybe a spear might work. Which would actually better?” You want to know all that before the mastodons actually show up. And the way evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with a kind of of labor. So the idea is that we have this early when we’re completely protected. We don’t have to do anything. All we have to do is learn. And as adults, we can take all those things that learned when we were babies and children 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 research and division of the human species. So they’re the protected sky guys who just have to go out and and have good 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 about it is instead of thinking of babies and as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as a different developmental stage of the same species — kind like caterpillars and 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.
footnote
If this is true, these babies are designed to learn — and this evolutionary story would say children for learning, that’s what they’re for — we might expect that they would have powerful learning mechanisms. And in fact, the baby’s brain seems to the most powerful learning computer 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 Thomas Bayes, who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century. And essentially what Bayes did to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, the that scientists find out about the world. So what scientists is they have a hypothesis that they think might likely to start with. They go out and test against the evidence. The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. they test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth. And what Bayes showed was a mathematical that you could do that. And that mathematics is at the core of the best machine programs that we have now. And some 10 years ago, I suggested that babies might be doing same thing.
So if you want to know what’s going on underneath beautiful brown eyes, I think it actually looks something this. This is Reverend Bayes’s notebook. So I think those babies are actually making complicated calculations conditional probabilities that they’re revising to figure out how world works. All right, now that might seem like an even order to actually demonstrate. Because after all, if you even grownups about statistics, they look extremely stupid. How could be that children are doing statistics?
So to test this we used a machine that have called the Blicket Detector. This is a box that lights up and plays music when you put 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 just one that did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed this detector, you would be likely to think to begin that the way to make the detector go would be to put a on top of the detector. But actually, this detector works in a bit of strange way. Because if you wave a block over the top of the detector, something wouldn’t ever think of to begin with, the detector will actually activate two out of three times. Whereas, you do the likely thing, put the block on the detector, it will only two out of six times. So the unlikely hypothesis has stronger evidence. It looks as if the waving is a more effective strategy than the other strategy. we did just this; we gave four year-olds this pattern evidence, and we just asked them to make it go. And enough, the 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 just how to count. But unconsciously, they’re doing these quite complicated that will give them a conditional probability measure. And the other interesting thing that they’re using that evidence to get to an idea, to a hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely to with. And in studies we’ve just been doing in lab, similar studies, we’ve show that four year-olds are better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are we give them exactly the same task. So in these circumstances, children are using statistics to find out about the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, we wanted to see if children are doing experiments. children do experiments we call it “getting into everything” or “playing.”
And there’s been a bunch of interesting studies that have shown this playing around is really a of experimental research program. Here’s one from Cristine Legare’s lab. Cristine did was use our Blicket Detectors. And what did was show children that yellow ones made it go and red didn’t, and then she showed them an anomaly. And what you’ll 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 first hypothesis has just been falsified.
(Laughter)
Boy: one lighted up, and this 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 needs to be 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 to 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 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 hypothesis.
Now that is a particularly — that is a particularly and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is this actually quite typical. If you look at the way children play, you ask them to explain something, what they really do is a series of experiments. This is actually pretty typical four year-olds.
footnote
Well, what’s it like to be this kind of creature? What’s like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in minutes? Well, if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers, lot of 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 are actually more conscious we are as adults. Now here’s what we know about how adult consciousness works. And adults’ attention and look kind of like a spotlight. So what happens for 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 something about the way the brain does this.
So what happens when we attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, sends a that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and down activity in all the rest of our brains. So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind attention. If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different. I babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern consciousness than a spotlight 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 once. And if you actually look in their brains, see that they’re flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven’t come on yet. So when we say babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we mean is that they’re bad at not paying attention. So they’re at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell something and just looking at the thing that’s important. That’s the kind attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect from those butterflies who designed to learn.
Well if we want to think about a of getting a taste of that kind of baby as adults, I think the best thing is think about cases where we’re put a new situation that we’ve never been in before — when we fall in with someone new, or when we’re in a new city for the first time. what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts, 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, meeting-attending zombie back home. And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you’ve been 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 for the first time you’ve had three double-espressos. (Laughter) That’s a fantastic way be, but it does tend to leave you waking up crying three o’clock in the morning.
(Laughter)
Now it’s good to be grownup. I don’t want to say too much about how wonderful babies are. It’s to be a grownup. We can do things like tie our shoelaces cross the street by ourselves. And it makes sense that we put lot of effort into making babies think like adults do. But if what we is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some the time we should be getting the adults to thinking more like children.
(Applause)