What is going on this baby’s mind? If you’d asked people this 30 years ago, people, including psychologists, would have said that this baby was irrational, illogical, — that he couldn’t take the perspective of another person or understand cause and effect. In last 20 years, developmental science has completely overturned that picture. in some ways, we think that this baby’s thinking is the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.
Let me give just one example of this. One thing that this could be thinking about, that could be going on his 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 figure what other people are thinking and feeling. And maybe hardest thing of all is to figure out that other people think and feel isn’t actually exactly like what we think and feel. who’s followed politics can testify to how hard that is for people to get. We wanted to know if babies and young could understand this really profound thing about other people. Now the question is: How could ask them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, and if you a three year-old to tell you what he thinks, what you’ll get is beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and like that. So how do we actually ask them question?
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Well it turns out that the was broccoli. What we did — Betty Rapacholi, who one of my students, and I — was actually give the babies two bowls of food: one bowl raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of the babies, even in Berkley, like crackers and don’t like the raw broccoli. (Laughter) But what Betty did was to take a little taste food from each bowl. And she would act as if she it or she didn’t. So half the time, she acted if she liked the crackers and didn’t like the broccoli — just like a baby any other sane person. But half the time, what she would is take a little bit of the broccoli and go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm.” And then she would 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 the wanted. We did this with 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 the baby give her, what they liked or what she liked? And the remarkable thing was 18 month-old babies, just barely walking and talking, would give her the crackers if she the crackers, but they would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli. On other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at her for a long time if she acted as if she the broccoli, like they couldn’t figure this out. But then they stared for a long time, they would just give the 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 have already discovered this profound fact about human nature, that we don’t always the same thing. And what’s more, they felt that they should do things to help other people get what they wanted.
Even more though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn’t do this that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact human nature in the three months from when they were 15 old. So children both know more and learn more we ever would have thought. And this is just one of hundreds hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that’s actually demonstrated it.
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The question might ask though is: Why do children learn so much? And how is it possible for them to so much in such a short time? I mean, all, if you look at babies superficially, they seem useless. And actually in many ways, they’re worse than useless, because we have put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive. But if we turn to evolution for answer to this puzzle of 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 animals, not just us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even marsupials like and wombats, it turns out that there’s a relationship how long a childhood a species has and how big brains are compared to their bodies and how smart and flexible are.
And sort of the posterbirds for this idea the birds up there. On one side is a New Caledonian crow. And crows and corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly smart birds. They’re smart as chimpanzees in some respects. And this is a bird the cover of science who’s learned how to use a to get food. On the other hand, we have our the domestic chicken. And chickens and ducks and geese and are basically as dumb as dumps. So they’re very, very good at pecking for grain, and they’re 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 mouths for as long as two years, which is a really time in the life of a bird. Whereas the chickens are actually within a couple of months. So childhood is the reason why the end up on the cover of Science and the chickens end up in the pot.
There’s something about that long childhood that seems to be connected knowledge and learning. Well what kind of explanation could have for 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 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 out on the end of the distribution like the crows. have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than other animal. We’re smarter, we’re more flexible, we can more, we survive in more different environments, we migrated to cover the and even go to outer space. And our babies and children are dependent on us much longer than the babies of any other species. My is 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, is 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 to be helpless. So you don’t want to have the mastodon charging at you be saying to yourself, “A slingshot or maybe a spear might work. would actually be better?” You want to know all that before mastodons actually show up. And the way the evolutions seems to have that problem is with a kind of division of labor. So idea is that we have this early period when we’re completely protected. don’t have to do anything. All we have to do learn. And then as adults, we can take all those things that we learned when we babies and children and actually put them to work to do things out there in the world.
So way of thinking about it is that babies and young children are like the research development division of the human species. So they’re the blue sky guys who just have to go out learn and have good ideas, and we’re production and marketing. We have to take all those that we learned when we were children and actually them to use. Another way of thinking about it instead of thinking of babies and children as being defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental of the same species — kind of like caterpillars and — except that they’re actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around garden and exploring, and we’re the caterpillars who are along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
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If this true, if these babies are designed to learn — this evolutionary story would say children are for learning, that’s what they’re for — we might expect that would have really powerful learning mechanisms. And in fact, the baby’s brain seems be the most powerful learning computer on the planet. But real are actually getting to be a lot better. And there’s been a revolution in our understanding of machine recently. And it all depends on the ideas of guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was a statistician and in the 18th century. And essentially what Bayes did was to a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, the way that scientists out about the world. So what scientists do is they a hypothesis that they think might be likely to start with. They go out and it against the evidence. The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. Then they test that hypothesis and so on and so forth. And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way you could do that. And that mathematics is at the core the best machine learning programs that we have now. And some 10 years ago, I suggested that babies be doing the same thing.
So if you want to what’s going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I think it actually looks something like this. This is Bayes’s notebook. So I think those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they’re revising figure out how the world works. All right, now that might seem like an even taller to actually demonstrate. Because after all, if you ask even grownups 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 the Blicket Detector. is a box that lights up and plays music when you put things on it and not others. And using this very simple machine, my lab and have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at learning about the world. me mention just one that we did with Tumar Kushner, student. If I showed you this detector, you would be likely to think to with that the way to make the detector go would to put a block on top of the detector. But actually, this detector works a bit of a strange way. Because if you wave a block over the of the detector, something you wouldn’t ever think of to begin with, detector will actually activate two out of three times. Whereas, if you do the likely thing, put block on the detector, it will only activate two out of six times. So the unlikely actually has stronger evidence. It looks as if the is a more effective strategy than the other strategy. we did just this; we gave four year-olds this of evidence, and we just asked them to make it go. And sure enough, the four year-olds the evidence to wave the object on top of detector.
Now there are two things that are really interesting about this. The first is, again, remember, these are four year-olds. They’re just how to count. But unconsciously, they’re doing these quite complicated calculations that give them a conditional probability measure. And the other interesting thing is that they’re that evidence to get to an idea, get to hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely to begin with. 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 find out about the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to if children are doing experiments. When children do experiments we call it “getting everything” or else “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. 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 them an anomaly. And what you’ll see is that this little boy go through five hypotheses in the space of two minutes.
(Video) Boy: How this? Same as the other side.
Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his hypothesis has just been falsified.
(Laughter)
Boy: This one lighted up, this one nothing.
AG: Okay, he’s got his experimental out.
Boy: What’s making this light up. (Laughter) I don’t know.
AG: scientist will 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, hypothesis two.
Boy: That’s why. Oh.
(Laughter)
AG: Now is his next idea. He told the experimenter to do this, try putting it out onto the other location. Not working either.
Boy: Oh, the light goes only to here, not here. Oh, bottom of this box has electricity in here, but doesn’t have electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s a fourth 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 this one to make it up.
AG: Okay,there’s his fifth hypothesis.
Now that is a particularly — is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what discovered is this is actually quite typical. If you look the way children play, when you ask them to explain something, they really do is do a series of experiments. This actually pretty typical of four 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 in two minutes? Well, if you go back to 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 know about how adult consciousness works. And adults’ attention and consciousness kind of like a spotlight. So what happens for 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 bright vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. And we even know something about the way brain does this.
So what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, sort of executive part of our brains, sends a that makes a little part of our brain much flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts down activity in all rest of our brains. So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. If we at babies and young children, we see something very different. I think babies and young children seem have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. So babies and young children are bad at narrowing down to just one thing. But they’re very good at in lots of information from lots of different sources 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 the parts haven’t come on yet. So when we say that and young children are bad at paying attention, what we mean is that they’re bad at not paying attention. they’re bad at getting rid of all the interesting that could tell them something and just looking at thing that’s important. That’s the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect from butterflies who are designed to learn.
Well if we want to think about a way of a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think about cases we’re put in a new situation that we’ve never been in — when we fall in love with 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 in Paris seem to be more full consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home. And the way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you’ve been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect those baby neurotransmitters. So 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 tend to leave you up crying at three o’clock in 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 a lot of effort into making babies think like 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 to start thinking more children.
(Applause)