What is going in this baby’s mind? If you’d asked people this 30 ago, most people, including psychologists, would have said that baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric — that he couldn’t take the of another person or understand cause and effect. In the last 20 years, developmental has completely overturned that picture. So in some ways, think that this baby’s thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.
Let me give just one example of this. One thing that this baby could be thinking about, that could be going in his 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 do is to figure out what other people are thinking feeling. And maybe the hardest thing of all is figure out that what other people think and feel isn’t actually exactly what we think and feel. Anyone who’s followed politics can testify to how that is for some people to get. We wanted to know if and young children 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 ask a three year-old to you what he thinks, what you’ll get is a beautiful stream 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 the secret was broccoli. What we did — Betty 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. Now all the babies, even in Berkley, like the crackers and don’t the raw broccoli. (Laughter) But then what Betty did was to take a taste of food from each bowl. And she would act as if she liked it or didn’t. So half the time, she acted as if liked the crackers and didn’t like the broccoli — 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 the broccoli. Mmmmm.” then she would take a little bit of the crackers, she’d go, “Eww, yuck, crackers. I tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck.” So she’d act if what she wanted was just the opposite of what the babies wanted. We did this with 15 18 month-old babies. And then she would simply put hand 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 give her the crackers if she the crackers, but they would give her the broccoli she liked the broccoli. On the other hand, 15 month-olds would stare her for a long time if she acted as if she the broccoli, like they couldn’t figure this out. But then after they stared for a time, they would just give her the crackers, what they everybody must like. So there are two really remarkable things about this. The first is that these 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 felt that they actually do things to help other people get what they wanted.
Even remarkably though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn’t do this that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound about human nature in the three months from when they 15 months old. So children both know more and more than we 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 though is: Why do learn so much? And how is it possible for to learn so much in such a short time? mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, they pretty useless. And actually in many ways, they’re worse than useless, we have to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive. if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of we spend 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, just us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there’s a relationship how long a childhood a species has and how their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart flexible they are.
And sort of the posterbirds for idea are the birds up there. On one side is a Caledonian crow. And crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly birds. They’re as smart as chimpanzees in some respects. And this is bird on the cover of science who’s learned how use a tool 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 at 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 drop worms in their little open mouths for as long as two years, which a really long time in the life of a bird. Whereas chickens are actually mature 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 soup pot.
There’s something that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge learning. Well what kind of explanation could we have for this? some animals, like the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well. they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in environment. Other creatures, like the crows, aren’t very good at doing in particular, but they’re extremely good at learning about laws different environments.
And of course, we human beings are out on the end of the distribution like the crows. We have 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 the world and go to outer space. And our babies and children are dependent us for much longer than the babies of any other species. My is 23. (Laughter) And at least until they’re 23, we’re still those worms 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, strategy for getting on in the world, but it has one big disadvantage. And that big disadvantage is that, until you actually do all that learning, you’re 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 know that before the mastodons actually show up. And the way the evolutions seems to have solved problem is with a kind of division of labor. the idea is that we have this early period when we’re protected. We don’t have to do anything. All we have to is learn. And then as adults, we can take all those things that we learned we were babies and children and actually put them to to do things out there in the world.
So one way of thinking 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 have to go and learn and have good ideas, and we’re production and marketing. We have to take those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually put to use. Another way of thinking about it is instead of of babies and children as being like defective grownups, should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same — kind of like caterpillars and butterflies — except that they’re actually the brilliant butterflies are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we’re the caterpillars who are inching 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 that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms. And fact, the baby’s brain seems to be the most learning computer on the planet. But real computers are actually getting to be lot better. And there’s been a revolution in our understanding of machine recently. And it all depends on the ideas of this guy, the Thomas Bayes, who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century. And essentially what Bayes was to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, way that scientists find out about the world. So scientists do is they have a hypothesis that they think be likely to start with. They go out and test against the evidence. The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. Then they test new hypothesis and so on and so forth. And what Bayes showed was a way that you could do that. And that mathematics at the core of the best machine learning programs we have now. And some 10 years ago, I that babies might be doing the same thing.
So if 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. Because all, if you ask even grownups about statistics, they look extremely stupid. How it be that children are doing statistics?
So to this we used a machine that we have called the Detector. This is a box that lights up and plays when you put some things on it and not others. And using this very machine, my lab and others have done dozens of studies just how good babies are at learning about the world. Let me mention just one that did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed this detector, you would be likely to think to begin with that the to make the detector go would be to put a block top of the detector. But actually, this detector works in 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, the detector 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 hypothesis actually has stronger evidence. It looks as if the waving is more effective strategy than the other strategy. So we did just this; gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we asked them to make it go. And sure enough, four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object top of the detector.
Now there are two things that are really interesting about this. The one is, again, remember, these are four year-olds. They’re just learning how count. But unconsciously, they’re doing these quite complicated calculations will give them a conditional probability measure. And the other interesting is that they’re using that evidence to get to idea, get to a hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely to with. And in studies we’ve just been doing in lab, similar studies, we’ve show that four year-olds are actually at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly the same task. in these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find about the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, we wanted to see if children are doing experiments. When do experiments we call it “getting into everything” or “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 use our Blicket Detectors. And what she did was show children that ones made 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 hypotheses in the space of two minutes.
(Video) Boy: How this? Same as the other side.
Alison Gopnik: Okay, his first hypothesis has just been falsified.
(Laughter)
Boy: one lighted up, and this one nothing.
AG: Okay, he’s his experimental notebook out.
Boy: What’s making this light up. (Laughter) I don’t know.
AG: Every scientist recognize that expression of despair.
(Laughter)
Boy: Oh, it’s this needs to be like this, and this needs be like this.
AG: Okay, hypothesis two.
Boy: That’s why. Oh.
(Laughter)
AG: this is his next idea. He told the experimenter do this, to try putting it out onto the location. Not working either.
Boy: Oh, because the light goes only to here, here. Oh, the bottom of this box has electricity here, but this doesn’t have electricity.
AG: Okay, that’s a hypothesis.
Boy: It’s lighting up. So when you put four. you put four on this one to make it light up and two on this to make it light up.
AG: Okay,there’s his fifth hypothesis.
Now that is particularly — that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is this actually quite typical. If you look at the way children play, when ask them to explain something, what they really do is a series of experiments. This is actually pretty typical four year-olds.
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Well, what’s it like to be this kind creature? What’s it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who test five hypotheses in two minutes? Well, if you go to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them have that babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all. And I just the opposite is true. I think babies and are actually more conscious than we are as adults. here’s what we know about how adult consciousness works. And adults’ attention and look kind of like a spotlight. So what happens for adults is we that something’s relevant or important, we should pay attention it. Our consciousness of that thing that we’re attending becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else sort goes dark. And we even know something about the way the brain does this.
So what happens we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive of our brains, sends a signal that makes a little of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better learning, and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains. we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. we look at babies and young children, we see very different. I think babies and young children seem 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 of information from lots of different sources at once. And if 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 on yet. So when we say that babies and young are bad at paying attention, what we really 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 the thing that’s important. That’s kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn.
Well we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think cases where we’re put in a new situation that we’ve never been before — when we fall in love with someone new, when we’re in a new city for the first time. what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts, it expands, so those three days in Paris seem to be more of consciousness and experience than all the months of a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home. And by the way, coffee, that wonderful coffee you’ve been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect those baby neurotransmitters. So what’s it like to be baby? It’s like being in love in Paris for the first after you’ve had three double-espressos. (Laughter) That’s a 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 about how wonderful 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 have open-mindedness, learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time should be getting the adults to start thinking more children.
(Applause)