We keep discovering that the things that we thought were the right things to do are not the right things to do. And I should, to some extent, discount something new that somebody tells me. And then once youve done that kind of exploration of the space of possibilities, then as an adult now in that environment, you can decide which of those things you want to have happen. And then youve got this other creature thats really designed to exploit, as computer scientists say, to go out, find resources, make plans, make things happen, including finding resources for that wild, crazy explorer that you have in your nursery. So, going for a walk with a two-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake. And each one of them is going to come out to be really different from anything you would expect beforehand, which is something that I think anybody who has had more than one child is very conscious of. So my five-year-old grandson, who hasnt been in our house for a year, first said, I love you, grandmom, and then said, you know, grandmom, do you still have that book that you have at your house with the little boy who has this white suit, and he goes to the island with the monsters on it, and then he comes back again? And that means that now, the next generation is going to have yet another new thing to try to deal with and to understand. We describe a surprising developmental pattern we found in studies involving three different kinds of problems and age ranges. Alison GOPNIK, Professor (Full) | Cited by 16,321 | of University of California, Berkeley, CA (UCB) | Read 196 publications | Contact Alison GOPNIK Everything around you becomes illuminated. Gopnik, 1982, for further discussion). Early reasoning about desires: evidence from 14-and 18-month-olds. So if youre looking for a real lightweight, easy place to do some writing, Calmly Writer. I saw this other person do something a little different. The philosophical baby: What children's minds tell us about truth, love & the meaning of life. And I think that thats exactly what you were saying, exactly what thats for, is that it gives the adolescents a chance to consider new kinds of social possibilities, and to take the information that they got from the people around them and say, OK, given that thats true, whats something new that we could do? And that brain, the brain of the person whos absorbed in the movie, looks more like the childs brain. Speakers include a One of my greatest pleasures is to be what the French call a "flneur"someone. Its so rich. Its especially not good at doing things like having one part of the brain restrict what another part of the brain is going to do. Her writings on psychology and cognitive science have appeared in the most prestigious scientific journals and her work also includes four books and over 100 journal articles. Well, I think heres the wrong message to take, first of all, which I think is often the message that gets taken from this kind of information, especially in our time and our place and among people in our culture. values to be aligned with the values of humans? Thats what lets humans keep altering their values and goals, and most of the time, for good. The adults' imagination will limit by theirshow more content Everybody has imaginary friends. She's also the author of the newly. And he said, the book is so much better than the movie. But it also turns out that octos actually have divided brains. Unlike my son and I dont want to brag here unlike my son, I can make it from his bedroom to the kitchen without any stops along the way. In the 1970s, a couple of programs in North Carolina experimented with high-quality childcare centers for kids. There's an old view of the mind that goes something like this: The world is flooding in, and we're sitting back, just trying to process it all. Its not very good at doing anything that is the sort of things that you need to act well. But I think its important to say when youre thinking about things like meditation, or youre thinking about alternative states of consciousness in general, that theres lots of different alternative states of consciousness. Theres Been a Revolution in How China Is Governed, How Right-Wing Media Ate the Republican Party, A Revelatory Tour of Martin Luther King Jr.s Forgotten Teachings, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-alison-gopnik.html, Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Kathleen King. Even if youre not very good at it, someone once said that if somethings worth doing, its worth doing badly. And it turns out that if you have a system like that, it will be very good at doing the things that it was optimized for, but not very good at being resilient, not very good at changing when things are different, right? Because I think theres cultural pressure to not play, but I think that your research and some of the others suggest maybe weve made a terrible mistake on that by not honoring play more. So look at a person whos next to you and figure out what it is that theyre doing. When Younger Learners Can Be Better (or at Least More Open-Minded) Than Older Ones - Alison Gopnik, Thomas L. Griffiths, Christopher G. Lucas, 2015 So instead of asking what children can learn from us, perhaps we need to reverse the question: What can we learn from them? And I think thats kind of the best analogy I can think of for the state that the children are in. But your job is to figure out your own values. So, the very way that you experience the world, your consciousness, is really different if your agenda is going to be, get the next thing done, figure out how to do it, figure out what the next thing to do after that is, versus extract as much information as I possibly can from the world. The amazing thing about kids is that they do things that are unexpected. Anyone can read what you share. And in empirical work that weve done, weve shown that when you look at kids imitating, its really fascinating because even three-year-olds will imitate the details of what someone else is doing, but theyll integrate, OK, I saw you do this. So this isnt just a conversation about kids or for parents. And I was thinking, its absolutely not what I do when Im not working. Alison Gopnik. And to go back to the parenting point, socially putting people in a state where they feel as if theyve got a lot of resources, and theyre not under immediate pressure to produce a particular outcome, that seems to be something that helps people to be in this helps even adults to be in this more playful exploratory state. join Steve Paulson of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Alison Gopnik of the University of California, Berkeley, Carl Safina of Stony On January 17th, join Steve Paulson of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Alison Gopnik of the . A message of Gopniks work and one I take seriously is we need to spend more time and effort as adults trying to think more like kids. Support Science Journalism. And I think for adults, a lot of the function, which has always been kind of mysterious like, why would reading about something that hasnt happened help you to understand things that have happened, or why would it be good in general I think for adults a lot of that kind of activity is the equivalent of play. Well, I have to say actually being involved in the A.I. But if you do the same walk with a two-year-old, you realize, wait a minute. agents and children literally in the same environment. Discover world-changing science. The Understanding Latency webinar series is happening on March 6th-8th. You get this different combination of genetics and environment and temperament. Do you think theres something to that? So, a lot of the theories of consciousness start out from what I think of as professorial consciousness. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. For the US developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, this experiment reveals some of the deep flaws in modern parenting. And there seem to actually be two pathways. Psychologist Alison Gopnik, a world-renowned expert in child development and author of several popular books including The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and The Gardener and the Carpenter, has won the 2021 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. is whats come to be called the alignment problem, is how can you get the A.I. And you say, OK, so now I want to design you to do this particular thing well. Now, again, thats different than the conscious agent, right, that has to make its way through the world on its own. And one of the things that we discovered was that if you look at your understanding of the physical world, the preschoolers are the most flexible, and then they get less flexible at school age and then less so with adolescence. And its kind of striking that the very best state of the art systems that we have that are great at playing Go and playing chess and maybe even driving in some circumstances, are terrible at doing the kinds of things that every two-year-old can do. So what is it that theyve got, what mechanisms do they have that could help us with some of these kinds of problems? I find Word and Pages and Google Docs to be just horrible to write in. Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com. Low and consistent latency is the key to great online experiences. Is it just going to be the case that there are certain collaborations of our physical forms and molecular structures and so on that give our intelligence different categories? You can listen to our whole conversation by following The Ezra Klein Show on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. Theyre like a different kind of creature than the adult. Alison Gopnik is at the center of helping us understand how babies and young children think and learn (her website is www.alisongopnik.com ). Its just a category error. Its that combination of a small, safe world, and its actually having that small, safe world that lets you explore much wilder, crazier stranger set of worlds than any grown-up ever gets to. But I think its more than just the fact that you have what the Zen masters call beginners mind, right, that you start out not knowing as much. But setting up a new place, a new technique, a new relationship to the world, thats something that seems to help to put you in this childlike state. So, let me ask you a variation on whats our final question. And thats not playing. And you look at parental environment, and thats responsible for some of it. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Under Scrutiny for Met Gala Participation, Opinion: Common Sense Points to a Lab Leak, Opinion: No Country for Alzheimers Patients, Opinion: A Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy Victory. In the same week, another friend of mine had an abortion after becoming pregnant under circumstances that simply wouldn't make sense for . Ive been really struck working with people in robotics, for example. Im Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.. So theres this lovely concept that I like of the numinous. By Alison Gopnik. Chapter Three The Trouble with Geniuses, part 1 by Malcolm Gladwell. Theyd need to have someone who would tell them, heres what our human values are, and heres enough possibilities so that you could decide what your values are and then hope that those values actually turn out to be the right ones. Read previous columns here. In her book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, she explains the fascinating intricacy of how children learn, and who they learn from. News Corp is a global, diversified media and information services company focused on creating and distributing authoritative and engaging content and other products and services. On the other hand, the two-year-olds dont get bored knowing how to put things in boxes. Theres even a nice study by Marjorie Taylor who studied a lot of this imaginative play that when you talk to people who are adult writers, for example, they tell you that they remember their imaginary friends from when they were kids. And we change what we do as a result. You could just find it at calmywriter.com. And then youve got this later period where the connections that are used a lot that are working well, they get maintained, they get strengthened, they get to be more efficient. As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work. One of the arguments you make throughout the book is that children play a population level role, right? My colleague, Dacher Keltner, has studied awe. I think we can actually point to things like the physical makeup of a childs brain and an adult brain that makes them differently adapted for exploring and exploiting. She's been attempting to conceive for a very long time and at a considerable financial and emotional toll. So one piece that we think is really important is this exploration, this ability to go out and find out things about the world, do experiments, be curious. thats saying, oh, good, your Go score just went up, so do what youre doing there. Syntax; Advanced Search Alison Gopnik, Ph.D., is at the center of highlighting our understanding of how babies and young children think and learn. She takes childhood seriously as a phase in human development. And if you think about play, the definition of play is that its the thing that you do when youre not working. And then it turns out that that house is full of spirits and ghosts and traditions and things that youve learned from the past. So there are these children who are just leading this very ordinary British middle class life in the 30s. And that kind of goal-directed, focused, consciousness, which goes very much with the sense of a self so theres a me thats trying to finish up the paper or answer the emails or do all the things that I have to do thats really been the focus of a lot of theories of consciousness, is if that kind of consciousness was what consciousness was all about. And I dont do that as much as I would like to or as much as I did 20 years ago, which makes me think a little about how the society has changed. Psychologist Alison Gopnik explores new discoveries in the science of human nature. Mind & Matter, now once per month (Click on the title for text, or on the date for link to The Wall Street Journal *) . Alex Murdaugh Receives Life Sentence: What Happens Now? A theory of causal learning in children: causal maps and Bayes nets. Just play with them. And the most important thing is, is this going to teach me something? Gopnik runs the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab at UC Berkeley. Tell me a little bit about those collaborations and the angle youre taking on this. Im sure youve seen this with your two-year-old with this phenomenon of some plane, plane, plane. Or you have the A.I. But another thing that goes with it is the activity of play. What does taking more seriously what these states of consciousness are like say about how you should act as a parent and uncle and aunt, a grandparent? So I keep thinking, oh, yeah, now what we really need to do is add Mary Poppins to the Marvel universe, and that would be a much better version. Its a conversation about humans for humans. Already a member? Yeah, theres definitely something to that. But it turns out that if you look 30 years later, you have these sleeper effects where these children who played are not necessarily getting better grades three years later. Yeah, I think theres a lot of evidence for that. Sometimes if theyre mice, theyre play fighting. So those are two really, really different kinds of consciousness. working group there. So I think the other thing is that being with children can give adults a sense of this broader way of being in the world. How so? The wrong message is, oh, OK, theyre doing all this learning, so we better start teaching them really, really early. But I do think something thats important is that the very mundane investment that we make as caregivers, keeping the kids alive, figuring out what it is that they want or need at any moment, those things that are often very time consuming and require a lot of work, its that context of being secure and having resources and not having to worry about the immediate circumstances that youre in. Alison Gopnik: There's been a lot of fascinating research over the last 10-15 years on the role of childhood in evolution and about how children learn, from grownups in particular. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450. from Oxford University. : MIT Press. And when you tune a mind to learn, it actually used to work really differently than a mind that already knows a lot. And he said, thats it, thats the one with the wild things with the monsters. Batteries are the single most expensive element of an EV. And of course, once we develop a culture, that just gets to be more true because each generation is going to change its environment in various ways that affect its culture. And it turns out that even to do just these really, really simple things that we would really like to have artificial systems do, its really hard. Because over and over again, something that is so simple, say, for young children that we just take it for granted, like the fact that when you go into a new maze, you explore it, that turns out to be really hard to figure out how to do with an A.I. So one thing that goes with that is this broad-based consciousness. But its sort of like they keep them in their Rolodex. And the reason is that when you actually read the Mary Poppins books, especially the later ones, like Mary Poppins in the Park and Mary Poppins Opens the Door, Mary Poppins is a much stranger, weirder, darker figure than Julie Andrews is. RT @garyrosenWSJ: Fascinating piece by @AlisonGopnik: "Even toddlers spontaneously treat dogs like peoplefiguring out what they want and helping them to get it." Alison Gopnik Freelance Writer, Freelance Berkeley Health, U.S. As seen in: The Guardian, The New York Times, HuffPost, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News (Australia), Color Research & Application, NPR, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Yorker and more