What going on in this baby’s mind? If you’d asked this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have said that this was irrational, illogical, egocentric — that he couldn’t take the perspective another person or understand cause and effect. In the last 20 years, science has completely overturned that picture. So in some ways, think that this baby’s thinking is like the thinking of the most scientists.
Let me give you just one example of this. One thing that this baby could thinking about, that could be going on in his mind, is trying to figure out what’s going on the mind of that other baby. After all, one of the things that’s hardest for of us to do is to figure out what other people thinking and feeling. And maybe the hardest thing of is to figure out that what other people think and isn’t actually exactly like what we think and feel. Anyone who’s followed politics can testify to hard that is for some people to get. We wanted to if babies and young children could understand this really thing about other people. Now the question is: How could we ask them? Babies, all, can’t talk, and if you ask a three year-old to tell you he thinks, what you’ll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays 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 — Betty Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I — was actually to give the two bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of babies, even in Berkley, like the crackers and don’t like raw broccoli. (Laughter) But then what Betty did was take a little taste of food from each bowl. And she act as if she liked it or she didn’t. So half the time, she as if she liked the crackers and didn’t like the broccoli — like a baby and any other sane person. But half time, what she would do is take a little bit the broccoli and go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm.” then she would take a little bit of the crackers, and she’d go, “Eww, yuck, crackers. I the crackers. Eww, yuck.” So she’d act as if what she wanted was just opposite of what the babies wanted. We did this with 15 18 month-old babies. And then she would simply put her out and say, “Can you give me some?”
So question is: What would the baby give her, what they or what she liked? And the remarkable thing was 18 month-old babies, just barely walking and talking, would her the crackers if she liked the crackers, but would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli. the other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at her a long time if she acted as if she liked the broccoli, they couldn’t figure this out. But then after they stared for long time, they would just give her the crackers, what thought everybody must like. So there are two really remarkable things about this. The first one is that little 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really profound fact about 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 what they wanted.
Even more remarkably though, the fact 15 month-olds didn’t do this suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, fact about human nature in the three months from when were 15 months old. So children both know more and more than we ever would have thought. And this just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the 20 years that’s actually demonstrated it.
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The question you might ask though is: do children learn so much? And how is it possible for to learn so much in such a short time? I mean, after all, if you at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. And actually in ways, they’re worse than useless, because we have to put so time and energy into just keeping them alive. But if we turn evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why spend so much time taking care of useless babies, it out that there’s actually an answer. If we look many, many different species of animals, not just us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there’s a between how long a childhood a species has and how big their brains compared to their bodies and how smart and flexible they are.
And of the posterbirds for this idea are the birds up there. On side is a New Caledonian crow. And crows and other corvidae, ravens, and so forth, are incredibly smart birds. They’re as smart as chimpanzees in some respects. And is a bird on the cover of science who’s learned how use a tool to get food. On the other hand, we our friend the domestic chicken. And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically dumb as dumps. So they’re very, very good at for grain, and they’re not much good at doing anything else. it turns out that the babies, the New Caledonian babies, are fledglings. They depend on their moms to worms in their little open mouths for as long as years, which is a really long time in the life a bird. Whereas the chickens are actually mature within couple of months. So childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the of Science and the chickens end up in the soup pot.
There’s something about that long that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning. Well what kind explanation could we have for this? Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well. they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment. creatures, like the crows, aren’t very good at doing in particular, but they’re extremely good at learning about laws of environments.
And of course, we human beings are way out on the of the distribution like the crows. We have bigger brains relative to our bodies far than any other animal. We’re smarter, we’re more flexible, we learn more, we survive in more different environments, we migrated to cover the and even go to outer space. And our babies children are dependent on us for much longer than 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 one big disadvantage that, until you actually do all that learning, you’re going to be helpless. So don’t want to have the mastodon charging at you and be to yourself, “A slingshot or maybe a spear might work. Which would actually better?” You want to know all that before the mastodons show up. And the way the evolutions seems to have that problem is with a kind of division of labor. So the idea is that have this early period when we’re completely protected. We don’t have do anything. All we have to do is learn. And then as adults, can take all those things that we learned when we were 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 protected blue sky guys who just to go out and learn and have good ideas, and we’re and marketing. We have to take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually them to use. Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies children as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different stage of the same species — kind of like caterpillars and butterflies — except that they’re actually the butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we’re the caterpillars who are 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 are for learning, that’s what they’re for — we expect that they would have 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 machine learning recently. And it all depends on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, 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 the world. So what scientists do is they have a hypothesis that they think might be likely start with. They go out and test it against the evidence. The evidence makes them change hypothesis. Then they test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth. And what showed was a mathematical way that you could do that. that mathematics is at the core of the best 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 know what’s going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, think it actually looks something like this. This is Reverend Bayes’s notebook. So I those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional that they’re revising to figure out how the world works. All right, now that seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate. after all, if you ask even grownups about statistics, look extremely stupid. How could it be that children are doing statistics?
So test this we used a machine that we have called the Detector. This is a box that lights up and plays music when put some things on it and not others. And using this very 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 we did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed you this detector, you would be likely to to begin with that the way to make the detector go would be to put a block on 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 you wouldn’t think of to begin with, the detector will actually activate out of three times. Whereas, if you do the likely thing, put the block the detector, it will only activate two out of six times. So the unlikely hypothesis 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 make go. And sure enough, the four year-olds used the to wave the object on top of the detector.
Now there are two things that really 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 calculations 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 to begin with. And in studies we’ve just been in my lab, similar studies, we’ve show that four year-olds are actually better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis adults are when we give them exactly the same task. So in these circumstances, children are using statistics to find out about the world, but all, scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to see 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 kind of experimental research program. Here’s from Cristine Legare’s lab. What Cristine did was use Blicket Detectors. And what she did was show children that yellow ones it go and red ones didn’t, and then she showed an anomaly. And what you’ll see is that this boy will go through five hypotheses in the space of minutes.
(Video) Boy: How about this? Same as the side.
Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his first hypothesis has been falsified.
(Laughter)
Boy: This one lighted up, and this nothing.
AG: Okay, he’s got his experimental notebook out.
Boy: What’s 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 his next idea. He told the experimenter to do this, to try putting it 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 in here, but doesn’t have electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s a fourth hypothesis.
Boy: It’s lighting up. So you put four. So you put four on this to make it light up and two on this to make it light up.
AG: Okay,there’s his fifth hypothesis.
Now that is a — that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what discovered is this is actually quite typical. If you look at the way children play, when ask them to explain something, what they really do do a series of experiments. This is actually pretty 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 brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes? Well, you go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a of them have said that babies and young children were 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 how adult consciousness works. And adults’ attention and consciousness look kind of a spotlight. So what happens for adults is we decide something’s relevant or important, we should pay attention to it. consciousness of that thing that we’re attending to becomes 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 of our brains, sends a signal that makes a little part our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts activity in all the rest of our brains. So we have a focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. If we look at babies and young children, see something very different. I think babies and young children seem to have more a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. babies and young children are very bad at narrowing to just one thing. But they’re very good at taking lots of information from lots of different sources at once. if you actually look in their brains, you see they’re flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven’t come on yet. when we say that babies and young children are at paying attention, what we really mean is that they’re at not paying attention. So they’re bad at getting of all the interesting things that could tell them 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 about a way of getting taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think best thing is think about cases where we’re put in a situation that we’ve never been in before — when fall in love with someone new, or when we’re in a new for the first time. And what happens then is not our 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 home. And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful you’ve been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect of those neurotransmitters. So what’s it like to be a baby? It’s like being in love in for the first time after you’ve had three double-espressos. (Laughter) That’s a way to be, but it does tend to leave you waking up at three o’clock in the morning.
(Laughter)
Now it’s good be a grownup. I don’t want to say too about how wonderful babies are. It’s good to be grownup. We can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And it sense that we put 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, maybe at least some the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking like children.
(Applause)