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 couldn’t take the perspective of another person or understand cause effect. In the last 20 years, developmental science has overturned that picture. So in some ways, we think this baby’s thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.
Let me you just one example of this. One thing that this baby could be thinking about, that be going on in his mind, is trying to out what’s going on in the mind of that baby. After all, one of the things that’s hardest for all of to do is to figure out what other people are thinking feeling. And maybe the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what 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 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 we ask them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, and if you ask a year-old to tell you what he thinks, what you’ll get is a beautiful of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that. So how do 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 students, and I — 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 crackers 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 would act as if liked it or she didn’t. So half the time, she acted as if she liked crackers and didn’t like the broccoli — just like a baby and any other sane person. But the time, what she would do is take a bit of the broccoli and go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted broccoli. Mmmmm.” And then she would take a little of the crackers, and she’d go, “Eww, yuck, crackers. tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck.” So she’d act as 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 would the baby give her, what they or what she liked? And the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies, just barely and talking, would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers, but would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli. On other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at her for a time if she acted as if she liked the broccoli, like they couldn’t figure this out. then after they stared for a long time, they would just give her crackers, what they thought everybody must like. So there are really remarkable things about this. The first one is that little 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really fact about human nature, that we don’t always want the thing. And what’s more, they felt that they should do things to help other people get what they wanted.
Even more remarkably though, the that 15 month-olds didn’t do this suggests that these 18 month-olds learned this deep, profound fact about human nature in the three months when they were 15 months old. So children both more and learn more than we ever would have thought. 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 learn much? And how is it possible for them to learn much in such a short time? I mean, after all, if look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. And actually in many ways, they’re worse than useless, we have to put so much time and energy into keeping them alive. But if we turn to evolution for an answer this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking care of babies, it turns out that there’s actually an answer. If look across many, many different species of animals, not us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there’s a relationship between 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 are birds up there. On one side is a New Caledonian crow. And and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly birds. They’re as smart as chimpanzees in some respects. And is a bird on the cover of science who’s learned to use a tool to get food. On the hand, we have our friend 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, they’re not much good at doing anything else. Well it turns out that babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. They 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 actually mature within a couple of months. So childhood the reason why the crows end up on the of Science and the chickens end up in the pot.
There’s something about that long childhood that seems be connected to knowledge and learning. Well what kind of explanation could have for this? Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well. So they seem to be suited to pecking grain in one environment. Other creatures, the crows, aren’t very good at doing anything in particular, but they’re extremely good at learning laws of different environments.
And of course, we human are way out on the end of the distribution like 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 environments, we migrated to cover the world and even to outer space. And our babies and children are dependent us for much longer than the babies of any other species. My son is 23. (Laughter) And least until they’re 23, we’re still popping those worms into those little open mouths.
All right, why we see this correlation? Well an idea is that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting on the world, but it has one big disadvantage. And that big disadvantage is that, until you actually do all learning, you’re going to be helpless. So you don’t want to have the charging at you and be saying to yourself, “A slingshot or maybe a might work. Which would actually be better?” You want know all that before the mastodons actually show up. And way the evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with a kind of division 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 we learned when we babies and children and actually put them to work do things out there in the world.
So one of thinking about it is that babies and young children are like the research and development division of human species. So they’re the protected blue sky guys who just have go out and learn and have good ideas, and we’re production and marketing. We to take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually them to use. Another way of thinking about it is of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups, we should about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species — kind like caterpillars and butterflies — except that they’re actually the brilliant butterflies are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we’re the who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
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If this is true, if these babies are designed learn — and this evolutionary story would say children for learning, that’s what they’re for — we might that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms. And fact, the baby’s brain 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 of machine learning recently. And it all depends on the ideas of 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, way that scientists find out about the world. So what do 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 that you could do that. And that mathematics is at the core of the machine learning 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 it actually looks something like this. This is Reverend Bayes’s notebook. So I think those babies are 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 order to actually demonstrate. Because after all, if you even grownups about statistics, they look extremely stupid. How could it be that children are doing statistics?
So test this we used a machine that we have called the Blicket Detector. This is a box that up and plays music when you put some things on it and others. And using this very simple machine, my lab and others have done dozens studies showing just how good babies are at learning about the world. Let mention just one that we did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed you this detector, would be likely to think to begin with that way to make the detector go would be to put a block on top of the detector. actually, this detector works in a bit of a strange way. Because if you wave a over the top of the detector, something you wouldn’t ever think of to begin with, detector will actually activate two out of three times. Whereas, you do the likely thing, put the block on the detector, it will activate two out of six times. So the unlikely actually has stronger evidence. It looks as if the waving is more effective strategy than the other strategy. So we just this; we gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we just asked them to it go. And sure enough, the four year-olds used the to wave the object on top of the detector.
Now there two things that are really interesting about this. The first one is, again, remember, are four year-olds. They’re just learning how to count. unconsciously, they’re doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure. the other interesting thing is that they’re using that to get to an idea, get to a hypothesis about the world, seems very unlikely to begin with. And in studies we’ve just been in my lab, similar studies, we’ve show that four year-olds are better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we them exactly the same task. So in these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find out about world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to if children are doing experiments. When children do experiments call it “getting into everything” or else “playing.”
And there’s been a of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around is really a kind of experimental program. Here’s one from Cristine Legare’s lab. What Cristine did was our Blicket Detectors. And what she did was show children that ones made it go and red ones didn’t, and then she showed an anomaly. And what you’ll see is that this little boy will go through five in the space of two minutes.
(Video) Boy: How this? Same as the other side.
Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his first has just been falsified.
(Laughter)
Boy: This one lighted up, and this one nothing.
AG: Okay, he’s got experimental notebook out.
Boy: What’s making this light up. (Laughter) don’t know.
AG: Every scientist will recognize that expression 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, to putting it out 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 here, but this doesn’t have electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s fourth hypothesis.
Boy: It’s lighting up. So when you four. So you put four on this one to it light up and two on this one to make it up.
AG: Okay,there’s his fifth hypothesis.
Now that is a particularly — that a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical. you look at the way children play, when you ask them to explain something, they really do is do a series of experiments. is actually pretty typical of four year-olds.
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Well, what’s it like to this kind of creature? What’s it like to be one of brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes? Well, if you back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of have said that babies and young children were barely conscious if were conscious at all. And I think just the opposite is true. think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are adults. Now here’s what we know about how adult consciousness works. adults’ attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight. what happens for adults is we decide that something’s relevant important, we should pay attention to it. Our consciousness of thing that we’re attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, everything else sort of goes dark. And we even something about the way the brain does this.
So what happens we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, a signal that makes a little part of our brain more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts down activity in all the of our brains. So we have a very focused, purpose-driven of attention. If we look at babies and young children, we something very different. I think babies and young children to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight consciousness. So babies and young children are very bad narrowing down to just one thing. But they’re very at taking in lots of 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 inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven’t come on yet. So when we say that and young children are bad at paying attention, what really mean is that they’re bad at not paying attention. they’re bad at getting 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 of consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is about cases where we’re put in a new situation that we’ve never in before — when we fall in love with someone new, or when we’re in new city for the first time. And what happens is not that our consciousness contracts, it expands, so that those three days Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending back home. And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you’ve been drinking downstairs, actually the effect of those baby neurotransmitters. So what’s it to be a baby? It’s like being in love Paris for the first time after you’ve had three double-espressos. (Laughter) That’s fantastic way to be, but it does tend to leave waking up crying at three o’clock in the morning.
(Laughter)
Now it’s good 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 our shoelaces and the street by ourselves. And it makes sense that we put lot of effort into making babies think like adults do. But what we want is to be like those butterflies, to open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least of the time we should be getting the adults start thinking more like children.
(Applause)