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Alison Gopnik on the Functions of Childhood - T&P

Psychologist, UC Berkeley professor and author Alison Gopnik explains what young children and scientists have in common, how a child's mind works, and why the New Caledonian raven is the most intelligent bird in the world.

What goes on in a child's head? If you had asked this question 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have answered that the child's mind is irrational, illogical, that the child is self-centered, cannot see things through another person's eyes, or understand cause and effect relationships. Over the past 20 years, developmental psychology has completely turned this picture upside down.

So, in a sense, we think that this child's thoughts are like those of great scientists. One of the topics that a child may think about is something like this: “What is going on in the head of another child?”. After all, one of the most difficult tasks for all of us is to understand what other people think and feel. And perhaps the most difficult task is to realize that the feelings and thoughts of other people can differ to some extent from our own. Anyone who is interested in politics can attest to how difficult it can be for other people to understand. We wanted to know if babies and young children can understand this deep thought about other people. And the question is: how to ask them about it? Babies don't talk, and if you ask a three-year-old to tell you what he's thinking, you get a wonderful stream of consciousness about ponies and birthdays and all that. So how do we ask this question?

Broccoli has become a lifesaver for us. We gave the little children two plates of food: one with raw broccoli, the other with delicious fish-shaped cookies. All the kids, even at Berkeley, love cookies and don't like raw broccoli. So, one of my students, Betty Rapaccioli, tasted the food from each plate, and then showed whether she liked this food or not. Half the time, she acted like she liked the cookies and didn't like the broccoli, just like a child or any other normal person would have done in her place. But the other half of the time she tasted broccoli and said, "Mmm, broccoli, I ate broccoli, mmm." And then she took some cookies and said: "Oh, fu, cookies, I ate cookies, fu." That is, she behaved directly opposite to the expectations of the child.

Instead of looking at children as subadults, we should think of them as another stage in the development of the same species—something like caterpillars and butterflies.

We performed this test on children aged 1 year and 3 months to 1.5 years. And then she held out her hand and asked: "Give me something." So, the question is: what did the children give her? What they liked, or what she liked? Curiously, 18-month-olds, barely able to walk or talk, gave her cookies if she liked cookies and broccoli if she liked broccoli. On the other hand, children of 1 year and 3 months watched for a long time that she shows how much she likes broccoli, but could not understand it. And after they looked at it for a long time, they gave her the cookie because they thought everyone liked it.

Two wonderful thoughts follow from this. First, one and a half year old children already have a deep understanding that people do not always like the same things. Moreover, they feel that they must help the person and give him what he wants. And even more remarkable is that children of 1 year and 3 months do not know this. Therefore, it can be assumed that one and a half year old children understood this deep, important idea about human nature in just three months. Thus, children know and learn more than we ever thought. And this is one of hundreds of similar studies conducted over the past 20 years.

Why do children learn so much, and how is it possible to learn so much in such a short time? After all, if you look at the child superficially, then he seems to be a rather useless creature. In many cases, this is true: because we have to invest a lot of time and effort in them - just so that they live. But if we turn to evolution for an answer to the question of why we spend so much time caring for useless children, it turns out that she has an answer. There is a relationship between how long an animal's childhood lasts for a particular species, and the size of its brain in relation to its body, how smart the animal is and how well it can adapt.

Crows, rooks, and other families of corvids are incredibly intelligent birds. In a sense, they are as smart as chimpanzees. The raven even appeared on the cover of Science magazine because he learned how to use a tool to get food. And chickens, like ducks, geese and turkeys, are usually stupid as corks. They are very good at pecking food - and nothing more. At some point, it was discovered that the chicks of the New Caledonian raven remain chicks for a very long time. Their mothers feed them by putting worms in their open beaks for two years, which is quite a long period by bird standards. While chickens grow up in a couple of months. It turns out that childhood is the answer to the question why a raven ends up on the cover of a scientific journal, and a chicken ends up in soup.

Books by Alison Gopnik

• The Philosophical Baby

• The Scientist in the Crib

• Causal Learning

The duration of childhood is certainly something to do with knowledge and learning. But how would we explain it? Some animals, such as chickens, are perfect for a single action. That is, they do an excellent job of pecking grain in a certain environment. Others, like crows, do not excel in anything, but they learn extremely well the laws of other different situations. Of course, we humans have evolved far from crows. Our brain in relation to our body is much larger than that of other animals. We are smarter, we adapt better, we can learn more, we survive in different situations, our species has spread throughout the globe, and we have even gone beyond it - into space. And our children depend on us much longer than the young of other animal species.

There is a theory that this early learning policy is an extremely powerful strategy for getting ahead in our world. But she has one big drawback, which is that until you learn everything, you are helpless. You wouldn't want to be in a situation where a mastodon is aiming at you, and you are arguing: "Should I use a slingshot or a spear?" It is better to know such things before the mastodon appears at all. And the way evolution solved this problem is the division of labor.

The fact is that we have a period of childhood, a period of protection. We don't need to know anything. All we need is to learn. And then, in adulthood, we can apply everything that we learned in childhood to the big world. If we look at the world from this point of view, then it turns out that babies and young children are like an institution for the research and development of mankind. These are protected lucky ones who have the opportunity to simply learn and come up with something new, and we are production and marketing. We take what we learned in childhood and bring it to life. On the other hand, instead of looking at children as subadults, we should think of them as another stage in the development of the same species—something like caterpillars and butterflies. Only children are beautiful butterflies fluttering through the garden and exploring it, and we are caterpillars crawling along the long, narrow path of our adult life. If this is true, if children are designed to learn—and evolution proves that's what they're designed to do—it should be assumed that they have powerful mechanisms for receiving and processing new information.

A child's brain appears to be the most powerful computer on earth. The Reverend Thomas Bayea, an 18th-century statistician and mathematician, proposed a mathematical model based on the theory of probability to describe how scientists make discoveries. First of all, scientists put forward their assumption - a hypothesis. They test it, finding evidence in its favor. The evidence forces them to change the hypothesis. Then they test the new hypothesis, and so on. Bayes showed this way mathematically. And math is the backbone of the best learning programs we have. And about 10 years ago, I suggested that children can act according to the same pattern.

I think children do these complex calculations with conditional probability, repeating them over and over again to understand how the world works. To test this hypothesis, we used a so-called "light detector". This is a box that glows and plays music when certain items are placed on it. Using this simple mechanism, our lab has done many studies showing how well children do in learning.

I will only talk about one experiment that we conducted with my student Tumar Kushner. If I showed you this detector, you would think that for it to work, you need to put a block on it. But in fact, everything is not so simple. If you wave a block over the detector, the detector will activate two out of three times. Whereas if you do the sensible thing to put a block on top of the detector, it only activates two out of six times. Thus, the less reasonable hypothesis is supported by more evidence. Waving a block is more effective than just putting it down.

Here's what we did. We set an example for four-year-olds and asked them to repeat. And, of course, four-year-olds used this knowledge to apply the right strategy and wave the block over the detector. In this regard, I have two conclusions: the first is that these children are only 4 years old, as you remember. They are just learning to count. But subconsciously they do these complex calculations that give them conditional probability data. And another very interesting thing is that through evidence, children make a hypothesis about the structure of the world, which seems incredible to us. Other tests in our lab show that children come to less obvious hypotheses better than adults who are given the same task.

What does it mean to be such a being? What is it like to be a beautiful butterfly, testing five hypotheses in two minutes? If you go back to the same psychologists and philosophers, many of them said that babies and young children are hardly, if at all, conscious. I think the exact opposite is true. I think that children and babies are much more conscious than us adults.

The attention and consciousness of an adult resembles a searchlight. If something happens that we think is relevant or significant, we turn our full attention to it. Our consciousness concentrates on one thing and highlights it especially brightly, leaving the rest in the dark. And we even know how the brain does it. So, when we pay attention to something, our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for the execution of the processes, sends a signal that makes a small part of our brain more flexible, plastic, aimed at learning, and turns off the activity of the rest of the brain. Our attention is very focused, directed to one goal.

The attention and consciousness of an adult resembles a searchlight. Our consciousness concentrates on one thing and highlights it especially brightly, leaving the rest in the dark.

If we look at babies and young children, we see something completely different. I think the minds of babies and young children are like a beacon, not a searchlight. Babies and young children are very bad at concentrating on one thing. But they perceive a lot of information from various sources at the same time very well. And if you really look at their brain, you can see that it is filled with these neurotransmitters that turn on learning and plasticity, but the blockages are not set yet. That is, when we say that children do not know how to concentrate, we really mean that they do not know how not to concentrate. They do not know how to be distracted from many interesting things that could tell them something, it is important for them even just to look at them. This is the kind of concentration, consciousness, that we expect from butterflies that are designed for learning.

So, if we want to get a little closer to understanding how the mind of a child works, the best way, I think, is to think about times when we found ourselves in a situation that we have never been in - falling in love with someone new, falling into to a city where they have never been before. And what is happening? Our consciousness does not narrow, but expands, and those three days in Paris seem more filled with impressions than the months of ordinary life, where we walk, talk, attend faculty meetings in our city.

So what does it mean to be a child? It's like falling in love in Paris for the first time after three double espressos. This is great, but it makes you wake up crying at three in the morning. It's good to be an adult, right? I don't want to talk too much about how wonderful kids are. It's good to be an adult too. We can tie our own shoelaces and cross the street without help. And it is very reasonable of us that we put a lot of effort into teaching children to think like adults. But, if we want to be like those butterflies, be open to new experiences, knowledge, innovation, have a good imagination, be creative, maybe, at least sometimes, we adults should learn to think like children.

Why do small children cry?

Very often parents simply do not know why their child is crying. It would seem that the baby slept well, he is wearing comfortable clothes, he should not be hot or cold ... What worries him?

Or does he have a bad temper? Is he spoiled for attention? How then, maybe, it is worth simply ignoring this crying? Cries and stops...

But studies have shown that children who are approached by their parents every time they hear crying grow up more calm. And those whose crying is ignored become capricious, spoiled, constantly demands attention, which they did not receive at an early age.

Sometimes adults at all costs try to explain a child's crying by some good reason - the tummy is swelling, teeth are being cut, and the like. but there are not so many children whose intestines suffer from gases, and not all babies have teething painfully.

If everything is taken into account and analyzed, it turns out that about a third of children cry just like that, for no apparent, it would seem, reason. But there is a reason. It's just that we adults don't take it into account.

Anyone knows that if a person has experienced trauma, psychological and physical, he is experiencing. For an adult, to relieve tension, it is enough to speak out. And what about a child who does not speak yet? He can't express his emotions in any way other than crying.

In this case, crying is nothing but a way to protect the nervous system from stress! And if a child cries for no reason, then most likely he wants to get rid of stress.

Babies cry because they need to!

And what do adults do in this case, trying to calm the child? They deprive him of the opportunity to relieve stress. And stress by itself does not go anywhere. Emotions that have no way out accumulate and place a heavy burden on the body.

Babies who are not allowed to cry, distracted by toys, pictures, pacifiers, develop more slowly than those who have the opportunity to cry. Such a baby is less inquisitive, does not actively study the surrounding objects, just lies in the crib and watches what is happening with a look that does not express anything.

So, should a crying baby be soothed or not? First, you need to make sure that he is crying for no apparent reason. Of course, it is difficult to learn to understand, to feel a child.

Some pediatricians believe that crying will bring relief to the child if it receives attention and support. You need to take the baby in your arms and ... listen to how he cries.

And what does a baby get from such "passive" attention? First, your complicity. secondly, an important life lesson: if you left him alone now, he would understand that he is loved only when he is cheerful, and when he feels bad, no one needs him.

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