What is going on in this baby’s mind? If you’d people 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 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 thinking of the brilliant scientists.
Let me give you just one example this. One thing that this baby could be thinking about, could be going on in his mind, is trying to figure out what’s going on in the mind that other baby. After all, one of the things that’s hardest for all of to do is to figure out what other people thinking and feeling. And maybe the hardest thing of all to figure out that what other people think and feel isn’t actually exactly like what we and feel. Anyone who’s followed politics can testify to how that is for some people to get. We wanted to know if babies and children could understand this really profound thing about other people. the question is: How could we ask them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, if you ask a three year-old to tell you what thinks, what you’ll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies birthdays and things like that. So how do we ask them the question?
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Well it turns out that secret was broccoli. What we did — Betty Rapacholi, who was of my students, and I — was actually to give the babies bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of 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 she didn’t. So half the time, she acted as if she liked crackers and didn’t like the broccoli — just like baby and any other sane person. But half the time, what she would do is a little bit of the broccoli and go, “Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm.” And then 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 the opposite of what babies wanted. We did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies. And then she would simply put her out and say, “Can you give me some?”
So the is: What would the baby give her, what they liked or she liked? And the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies, just barely walking talking, would give her the crackers if she liked crackers, but they would give her the broccoli if she liked broccoli. On the other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at for a long time if she acted as if liked the broccoli, like they couldn’t figure this out. But then after they for a long time, they would just give her crackers, what they thought everybody must like. So there are two really remarkable things about this. first one is that these little 18 month-old babies have already this really profound fact about human nature, that we don’t want the same thing. And what’s more, they felt that they should actually do things help other people get what they wanted.
Even more remarkably though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn’t do suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact about human nature the three months from when they were 15 months old. So children both know more and learn than we ever would have thought. And this is just of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that’s actually demonstrated it.
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question you might ask though is: Why do children learn so much? how is it possible for them to learn so much in a short time? I mean, after all, if you look babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. And actually in many ways, they’re worse than useless, because have to put so much time and energy into keeping 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 out that there’s actually an answer. If we look across many, many different species of animals, not just primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even marsupials kangaroos 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 they are.
And sort of the posterbirds for this are the birds up there. On one side is New Caledonian crow. And crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and 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 tool to food. On the other hand, we have our friend the domestic chicken. And chickens ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb dumps. So they’re very, very good at pecking for grain, they’re not much good at doing anything else. Well it out that the babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. They on their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as as two years, which is a really long time in the of a bird. Whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple of months. childhood is the reason why the crows end up on cover of Science and the chickens end up in the soup pot.
There’s about that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning. Well kind of explanation could we have for this? Well some animals, the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited to doing one thing very well. So they seem to be beautifully suited to grain in one environment. Other creatures, like the crows, aren’t good at doing anything in particular, but they’re extremely good at about laws of different 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 than any animal. We’re smarter, we’re more flexible, we can learn more, survive in more different environments, we migrated to cover world and even go to outer space. And our babies children are dependent on us for much longer than the babies any other species. My son is 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 an is that 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 is that, until you actually all that learning, you’re going to be helpless. So you don’t want to have the mastodon charging you and be saying to yourself, “A slingshot or maybe a spear work. Which would actually be better?” You want to all that before the mastodons actually show up. And the way evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with a kind of division of labor. So the idea 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 were babies and children and 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 blue sky guys who just to go out and learn and have good ideas, we’re production and marketing. We have to take all those ideas we learned when we were children and actually put to use. Another way of thinking about it is of thinking of babies and children as being like grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental stage the same species — kind of like caterpillars and butterflies — except they’re actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the and exploring, and we’re the caterpillars who are inching our narrow, grownup, adult path.
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If this is true, if babies are designed to learn — and this evolutionary story would children are for learning, that’s what they’re for — we might expect they would have really powerful learning mechanisms. And in fact, the baby’s seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet. But real computers are actually getting be a lot better. And there’s been a revolution in our of 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 what Bayes did was to provide mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, the way scientists find out about the world. So what scientists do they have a hypothesis that they think might be likely to start with. They go and test it against the evidence. The evidence makes them change hypothesis. Then they test that new hypothesis and so on and forth. And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could 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 be doing the same thing.
So if you want to what’s going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I think actually looks something like this. This is Reverend Bayes’s notebook. I think those babies are actually making complicated calculations conditional probabilities that they’re revising to figure out how the world works. right, now that might seem like an even taller order actually demonstrate. Because after all, if you ask even grownups about statistics, they extremely stupid. How could it be that children are statistics?
So to test this we used a machine that we have the Blicket Detector. This is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some things it and not others. And using this very simple machine, lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at about the world. Let me mention just one that we with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed you this detector, you would be likely think to begin with that the way to make the detector go would be to a 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 of the detector, something you wouldn’t ever think of to begin with, the 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 hypothesis has stronger evidence. It looks as if the waving is a effective strategy than the other strategy. So we did just this; we gave four year-olds this pattern evidence, and we just asked them to make it go. And sure enough, four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on of the detector.
Now there are two things that are interesting about this. The first one is, again, remember, these are year-olds. They’re just learning how to count. But unconsciously, they’re doing quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure. And other interesting thing is that they’re using that evidence to get an idea, get to a hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely to begin with. And studies we’ve just been doing in my lab, similar studies, we’ve show four year-olds are actually better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis 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 wanted to see if children are experiments. When children do experiments we call it “getting everything” or else “playing.”
And there’s been a bunch of interesting studies recently have shown this playing around is really a kind of experimental research program. Here’s one from Legare’s lab. What Cristine did was use our Blicket Detectors. 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 will go through five hypotheses the space of two minutes.
(Video) Boy: How about this? as the other side.
Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his hypothesis has just 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 needs to 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 the experimenter to do this, to try putting it out onto the other location. Not either.
Boy: Oh, because the light goes only to here, not here. Oh, the bottom of this box electricity in here, but this doesn’t have electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s a fourth hypothesis.
Boy: It’s up. So when you put four. So you put four on this one to make light up and two on this one to make it light up.
AG: Okay,there’s his fifth hypothesis.
Now is a particularly — that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, what Cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical. If you look at the way play, when you ask them to explain something, what they do is do a series of experiments. This is pretty typical of four year-olds.
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Well, what’s it like to be kind of creature? What’s it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses two minutes? Well, if 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 think just the opposite true. I think babies and children are actually more than we are as adults. Now here’s what we know about how consciousness works. And adults’ attention and consciousness look kind like a spotlight. So what happens for adults is we decide that something’s relevant important, we should pay attention to it. Our consciousness of that that we’re attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, everything else sort of goes dark. And we even know something about the way the does this.
So what happens when we pay attention is 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 all the rest of our brains. So we have a very focused, purpose-driven of attention. If we look at babies and young children, see something very different. I think babies and young children to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a of consciousness. So babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to one thing. But they’re very good at taking in lots 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 at 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 we mean is that they’re bad at not paying attention. they’re bad at getting rid of all the interesting things could tell them something and just looking at the that’s important. That’s the kind of attention, the kind consciousness, that we might expect from those butterflies who designed to learn.
Well if we want to think about a way of getting a taste that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think about cases where we’re 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 then is not that our consciousness contracts, it expands, so that those three days Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home. 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 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 crying three o’clock in the morning.
(Laughter)
Now it’s good to a grownup. I don’t want to say too much about how wonderful are. It’s good to be a grownup. We can do like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And it makes sense that we a lot of effort into making babies think like adults do. But if what we is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time we be getting the adults to start thinking more like children.
(Applause)