Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. In a lecture at TED Talks he presented what is going on in a baby's mind. Watch the video and you will be surprised…
The translation into English was done by Dimitra Papageorgiou • Curated by Constantine Anetakis
What's going on in this baby's mind? If you had asked this thirty years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have told you that this baby is irrational, incoherent, self-centered — that it would not be able to perceive another person's perspective or understand cause and effect. result. In the last 20 years, developmental science has turned this picture upside down. So, in a way, we believe that this baby's thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.
Let me give you an example. One thing that this baby might be thinking, that might be going on in his mind, is trying to understand what's going on in the other baby's mind. After all, one of the hardest things for all of us is understanding other people's thoughts and feelings. And perhaps the hardest thing of all is to understand that what others think and feel is not exactly the same as what we think and feel. Anyone who follows politics can testify to how difficult this is for some people. We wanted to know if babies and toddlers can pick up on this really important thing about others. How could we ask them? Babies can't talk, and if you ask a three-year-old to tell you what he's thinking, what you'll hear is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about horses and birthdays and stuff like that. So how do we actually ask them the question?
Turns out the secret was broccoli. What we did—me and Betty Rapacoli, who was a student of mine—was give the babies two bowl of food: a bowl of raw broccoli and a bowl of delicious fish crackers. All babies, even in Berkeley, prefer crackers to raw broccoli. (Laughter) Then what Betty did was try a small amount from each bowl. She either pretended to like it or she didn't. So half the time she pretended she liked crackers and didn't like broccoli – like the baby and any sane person. But the other half, he'd taste some broccoli and go, “Mmmm, broccoli. I tried the broccoli. Mmmmm.” Then he would taste the crackers and say, “Yo, bliax, crackers. I tried the crackers. Bliax.” He acted like what he wanted was the opposite of what the babies wanted. We did this with 15 and 18 month old babies. Then she held out her hand and said, "Can you give me some?"
The question is: What will the baby give her, what he likes, or what she liked? The remarkable thing was that 18-month-old babies, barely walking and talking, would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers, but give her the broccoli if that was what she liked. On the other hand, the 15-month-olds stared at her for a long time if she pretended to like broccoli, as if they couldn't understand. After looking at her for a long time, they gave her the crackers, which they thought everyone should like. So there are two noteworthy observations about this. The first is that 18-month-old babies have already discovered this important fact about human nature, that we don't always want the same things. And besides, they felt they had to do things to help other people get what they wanted.
Even more striking, however, is the fact that 15-month-olds did not, suggesting that 18-month-olds have learned this profound and important element of human nature in the 3 months since they were 15 months old. So children know and learn more than we could ever imagine. And it's just one of hundreds of studies over the past 20 years that have actually shown it.
But the question you have to do is: Why do the kids learn so much? And how is it possible to learn so much in such a short time? I mean, if you see the babies in vain, they look almost useless. In many cases, it is worse and useless, because we need to have both time and energy to keep them alive. But if we turn to the evolution for an answer to the question, "Why do we consume so much time to take care of useless babies," there seems to be a final answer. If we look at many different species of animals, not only primates, but also other mammals, birds, and even marsupials such as kangaroos and fascicles, there seems to be a relationship between childhood of a species and the size of his brain compared to his body and how smart and flexible he is.
Typical of this idea are the birds up there. On one side is the crown of New Caledonia. Corunos and other corvids, ravens, ravens, etc., are extremely intelligent birds. They are as intelligent as chimpanzees in some respects. We see a bird on the cover of Science, which has learned how to uses a tool to find food. On the other hand, we have our friend the domestic hen. Hens, ducks, geese and turkeys are basically dumber than logs. They are very, very good at pecking at grain, and not good at anything else. It appears that New Caledonian tern babies, as chicks, depend on their mother to drop maggots into their small gaping mouths for a period of two years, which is a very long time in a bird's life. Hens, on the other hand, mature within two months. So it's childhood that curlers end up on the cover of Science while hens end up in the pot.
There is something about this extended childhood that seems to be associated with knowledge and learning. What kind of explanation can we give for this? Some animals, like chickens, seem to be built to do only one thing well. They are therefore intended for seed pecking in an environment. Other creatures, such as kurunas, are not good at any one thing in particular, but are extremely good at learning the laws of different environments.
Of course we humans are at the extreme end of the distribution, just like the corunes. We have larger brains, relative to our bodies, than any other animal by far. We are smarter, more flexible, can learn more, survive in more diverse environments, and have migrated to cover the world and even space. Our babies and children depend on us longer than the babies of other species. My son is 23. (Laughter) At least until they're 23, we keep putting the little worms in those little gaping mouths.
OK, but why do we make this correlation? One version is that this learning strategy is extremely powerful for getting by in the world, but it has a major drawback. This big disadvantage is that until you learn all this, you will be helpless. You don't want to have the mastodon zipping around and you thinking, “A slingshot or maybe a spear would work. Which would be better?' You want to know all of this before the mastodon shows up. And the way evolution seems to have solved this problem is the division of labor. The central idea is that we have an early period where we are completely protected. We don't have to do anything, just learn. Then, as adults, we can take all these things we learned as babies and children and put them to work doing things out there in the world.
One way to look at it is that babies and toddlers are the research and development department of the human species. they're the sheltered carefree guys who just need to learn and have good ideas, and we're the production and marketing. We need to take all those ideas we learned when we were kids and put them to use. Another way of thinking is that instead of treating babies and children as flawed adults, we should think of them as a different developmental stage of the same species — much like caterpillars and butterflies — except that those are the intelligent butterflies that they fly into the garden and explore, while we are the caterpillars squishing their narrow adult path.
If this is true, if these babies are made to learn—and evolutionary history has said that children are to learn—that they exist for that—we might expect them to have very powerful learning mechanisms. Indeed, the baby brain appears to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet. But real computers are getting much better. Recently, there has been a revolution in the understanding of machine learning. It all comes from the ideas of this man, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was an 18th century statistician and mathematician. In essence, what Bayes did was provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize and describe the way scientists investigate the world. What scientists do is have a hypothesis that they think might be a starting point. Then they test it based on evidence. The evidence makes them change the case. Then they try the new hypothesis. And so on. What Bayes showed was a mathematical way that this could be done. This math is at the core of the best machine learning programs we have now. Ten years ago, I suggested that babies might do the same thing.
So if you want to know what's going on behind those beautiful brown eyes, I think it goes something like this. This is Reverend Bayes' notebook. So I think these babies are doing complex calculations in terms of probabilities that they are revising to understand how the world works. This may seem even harder to present. Besides, even adults you ask about statistics, they look extremely lame. How do kids do statistics?
To test this we used a machine called a Blicket Detector. It's a box that lights up and plays music when you place certain things on it instead of others. Using this simple machine, my lab and other labs have done dozens of studies showing how good babies are at learning about the world. Let me mention just one that my student Tumar Kushner and I did. If I showed you this detector, you'd probably at first think that to make it work you need to put a brick on top of it. Actually this detector works in a somewhat strange way. If you moved a brick over it, which you wouldn't think of at first, the detector would go off two out of three times. Whereas if you did the obvious, put a brick on top of the detector, it would only trigger two out of six times. Thus the improbable hypothesis has stronger evidence. It seems that shaking is a more effective strategy, on the other hand. So we did just that; we gave a four-year-old this evidence pattern, and we just asked him to activate it. It is certain that the four-year-olds used the element of shaking the object over the detector.
There are two things that are interesting about this. The first is, remember again, these are four-year-olds. They have just learned how to count. But subconsciously, they do these complicated calculations that will give them the conditional measure of probabilities. The other interesting element is how they use evidence to get an idea, to arrive at a hypothesis about the world, which at first seems almost impossible. In similar studies we recently did in my lab, we showed that four-year-olds are better at finding improbable hypotheses than adults when given exactly the same test. In these circumstances, children use statistics to learn about the world, but scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to see if children experiment too. When children do experiments we say that they are "into everything" or otherwise that they are "playing".
There have been several interesting studies recently that have shown that this game is actually a kind of experimental research program. Here we have one from Christine Le Gard's workshop. Christine used the Bleecker Detector. He showed the kids how yellows activated it, while reds didn't, and then he showed them an anomaly. What you will see is how this little boy will go through five cases in the space of two minutes.
[Video] Boy: Is It So? As on the other side.Alison Gowick: His first case has just been flouted.
(Laughs)
Boy: It lit, but the other, nothing.
AK: Now uses his experimental notebook.
Boy: What makes this light up? (Laughs) I don't know.
AG: Every scientist will recognize this expression of despair.
(Laughs)
Boy: Oh, that's because it must be like this, and that's what it should be like.
AC: Second Case.
Boy: Why? Oh.
(Laughs)
AK: This is his next idea. She told the researcher to do this, to try to put one in the position of the other. That does not work either.
Boy: Oh, because the light is only here, not here. Oh, the bottom of this box has electricity here, while it has no electricity.
AK: This is the fourth hypothesis.
Boy: Turn it on. So you have to put four. You put four on it to make it light up and two on it to make it light up.
AK: Yes and his fifth case.
This is a very adorable and understandable little boy, but what Christine discovered is quite common. If you look at the way children play, when you ask them to explain something, what they do is a series of experiments. This is quite common in four-year-olds.
So what is it like to be such a creature? What's it like to be one of those smart butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes? If we turn to psychologists and philosophers, many of them have said that babies and young children have little, if any, awareness. I believe the exact opposite is true. I believe that babies and children are more aware than us adults. Here's what we know about her mode της επίγνωσης στους ενήλικες: Η προσοχή και η επίγνωση των adult it is like the projector. What happens with adults is that we decide that something is relevant or important and that we should pay attention to it. Our awareness of the object we are attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else is somehow darkened. We know a few things about how the brain does this.
What happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the executive part of our brain, sends a signal that makes a small part of our brain much more flexible, more malleable, better at learning, and shuts down the activity in the rest of the brain. . Thus we have a focused, purpose-directed attention. If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different. I think babies and toddlers seem to have more of a beacon of awareness than a searchlight. Babies and toddlers can't focus on one thing. But they are very good at assimilating lots of information from lots of different sources at once. If you look inside their brain, you'll see that it's flooded with these neurotransmitters that are very good at inducing learning and flexibility, and the inhibitory parts haven't been activated yet. So when we say that babies and young children do not know how to pay attention, what we mean is that they do not know how not to pay attention. They cannot get rid of all the interesting things that would tell them something and focus on what is important. This is the kind of attention, the kind of awareness, that we might expect from these butterflies that were designed to learn.
If we want to think of a way to get a taste of this childlike awareness as adults, I think the best thing to do is to think of situations where we've found ourselves in new situations that we haven't faced before—when we fall in love with a new person, or when we're in a new city for the first time. What happens, then, is not that our awareness contracts, but expands, so that those three days in Paris seem more full of awareness and experience than all the months we are walking and talking zombies back home. By the way, that o browns, that great coffee you drink on the ground floor, mimics the effect of baby neurotransmitters. So what's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love, in Paris, for the first time, after you've had three double espressos. (Laughs) It's great to be like that, but it tends to wake you up crying at 3 in the morning.
(Laughs)
It's good to be an adult. I don't want to say too much about how wonderful babies are. It's nice to be an adult. We can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And it makes sense that we try so hard to get babies to think like adults. But if what we want is to be like those butterflies, to have an open mind and appetite for learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe sometimes we have to make adults start thinking like children.
(Clap)
