What going on in this baby’s mind? If you’d asked this 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 person or understand cause effect. In the last 20 years, developmental science 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 one of this. One 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 the mind of that baby. After all, one of the things that’s hardest for all of us to is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. And the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people and feel isn’t actually exactly like what we think feel. Anyone who’s followed politics can testify to how hard is for some people to get. We wanted to know babies and young children could understand this really profound about other people. Now the question is: How could we ask them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, and you ask a three year-old to tell you what thinks, what you’ll get is a beautiful stream of monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that. So how do we actually ask the question?
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Well it turns out that the secret was broccoli. What we did — Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I — actually to give the babies two bowls of food: bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. all of the babies, even in Berkley, like the and don’t like the raw broccoli. (Laughter) But then what Betty did was to a little taste of food from each bowl. And she 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, what she do is take a little bit of the broccoli go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm.” And she would take a little bit of the crackers, and she’d go, “Eww, yuck, crackers. tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck.” So she’d act as if what she wanted 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 and say, “Can you give me some?”
So the is: What would the baby give her, what they liked or what she liked? 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 if liked the broccoli. On the other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at her for long time if she acted as if she liked broccoli, like they couldn’t figure this out. But then after they stared for a long time, they would give her the crackers, what they thought everybody must like. there are two really remarkable things about this. The one is that these little 18 month-old babies have discovered this really profound fact about human nature, that don’t always want the same thing. And what’s more, they felt that they should actually things to help other people get what they wanted.
Even remarkably though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn’t do this suggests 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 than ever would have thought. And this is just one of and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that’s demonstrated it.
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The question you might ask is: Why do children learn so much? And how is it possible them to learn so much in such a short time? mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. actually in many ways, they’re worse than useless, because we to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive. But we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we so much time taking care of useless babies, it turns out there’s actually an answer. If we look across many, many different of animals, not just us primates, but also including 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 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 so forth, are incredibly smart birds. They’re as smart as chimpanzees some respects. And this is a bird on the cover of science who’s learned how to a tool to get food. On the other hand, we have our friend domestic chicken. And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are as dumb as dumps. So they’re very, very good pecking for grain, and they’re not much good at doing anything else. Well it turns out that babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. They depend on their moms to drop worms in their open mouths for as long as two years, which is really long time in the life of a bird. Whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple months. So childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the cover Science and the chickens end up in the soup pot.
There’s something about long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge 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 pecking in one environment. Other creatures, like the crows, aren’t very good at doing anything in particular, they’re extremely good at learning about laws of different environments.
And of course, we beings are way out on the end of the like the crows. We have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far any other animal. We’re smarter, we’re more flexible, we learn more, we survive in more different environments, we migrated cover the world and even go to outer space. And 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 still popping those into those little open mouths.
All right, why would we see this correlation? Well idea is that that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, great strategy getting on in the world, but it has one big disadvantage. And that one big disadvantage is that, you actually do all that learning, you’re going to helpless. So you don’t want to have the mastodon charging at you and saying to yourself, “A slingshot or maybe a spear work. Which would actually be better?” You want to know all that before the actually show up. And the way the evolutions seems have solved that problem is with a kind of division labor. So the idea is that we have this 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 actually put them to work to do things out in the world.
So one way of thinking about it 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 take all those ideas that we when we were children and actually put them to use. Another way of thinking about 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 that they’re the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden exploring, and we’re the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, path.
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If this is true, if these babies are designed learn — and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning, that’s what they’re — we might expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms. And in fact, the baby’s brain to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet. But computers are actually getting to be a lot better. there’s been a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently. And it all on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was a statistician mathematician in the 18th century. And essentially what Bayes did to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, the way 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 it against the evidence. The evidence makes them that hypothesis. Then they test that new hypothesis and on and so forth. And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way you could do that. And that mathematics is at the core of the best machine learning that we have now. And some 10 years ago, I suggested that babies might doing the same thing.
So if you want to know what’s going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, think it actually looks something like this. This is Reverend Bayes’s notebook. So think those babies are actually making complicated calculations with probabilities that they’re revising to figure out how the works. All right, now that might seem like an even taller order to demonstrate. Because after all, if you ask even grownups about statistics, look extremely stupid. How could it be that children doing statistics?
So to test this we used a machine we have called the Blicket Detector. This is a box that lights up and plays music you put some things on it and not others. using this very simple machine, my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how babies are at learning about the world. Let me mention just one that we did with Tumar Kushner, student. If I showed you this detector, you would be likely to think to begin with the way to make the detector go would be to put block on top of the detector. But actually, this detector works in a bit a 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 two out of three times. Whereas, if you do the likely thing, put block on the detector, it will only activate two out of times. So the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence. It as if the waving is a more effective strategy the other strategy. So we did just this; we four year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we just asked them to it go. And sure enough, the four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on top the detector.
Now there are two things that are really interesting 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 conditional 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 unlikely to begin with. And in studies we’ve just been doing in my lab, studies, we’ve show that four year-olds are actually better at finding out unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly the same task. in these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find out the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and we to see if children are doing experiments. When children do we call it “getting into everything” or else “playing.”
And there’s been a bunch of interesting studies recently that have 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. And what she was show children that yellow ones made it go and ones didn’t, and then she showed them an anomaly. And what you’ll see is that 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 been falsified.
(Laughter)
Boy: This one lighted up, and this one nothing.
AG: Okay, he’s got his notebook out.
Boy: What’s making this light up. (Laughter) I don’t know.
AG: Every will recognize that expression of despair.
(Laughter)
Boy: Oh, it’s because this to be 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 experimenter to do this, to try putting it out the other location. Not working either.
Boy: Oh, because the light goes only to here, 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 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 Cristine discovered this 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 typical of four year-olds.
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Well, what’s it like be this kind of creature? What’s it like to be one of these butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes? Well, if you go to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them have said that babies and children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all. And I think just the opposite is true. I babies and children are 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 happens adults is we decide that something’s relevant or important, we should pay attention to it. consciousness of that thing that we’re attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything sort of goes dark. And we even know something about the way the brain this.
So what happens when we pay attention is that the cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, sends a signal makes a little part of our brain much more flexible, 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 look at and young children, we see something very different. I babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of than a spotlight of consciousness. So babies and young children are very bad at down to just one thing. But they’re very good at taking in lots of information from lots different sources at once. And if you actually look in brains, you see that they’re flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven’t come on yet. So when we say that babies and young children bad at paying attention, what we really mean is they’re bad at not paying attention. So they’re bad at rid of all the interesting things that could tell them something and just looking at thing that’s important. That’s the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, we might expect from those butterflies who are designed learn.
Well if we want to think about a way of getting a of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think about where we’re put in a new situation that we’ve never been in — when we fall in love with someone new, when we’re in a new city for the first time. And what happens then is not that our contracts, it expands, so that those three days in seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being walking, talking, faculty 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 it like to be a baby? It’s being in love in Paris for the first time after you’ve had three double-espressos. (Laughter) That’s a fantastic to be, but it does tend to leave you waking up at three o’clock in the morning.
(Laughter)
Now it’s good to be a grownup. I don’t to say too much about how wonderful babies are. It’s good to be a grownup. We do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And it makes that 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 the time we should be getting the adults to thinking more like children.
(Applause)