And we change what we do as a result. Its willing to both pass on tradition and tolerate, in fact, even encourage, change, thats willing to say, heres my values. Well, I was going to say, when you were saying that you dont play, you read science fiction, right? A child psychologistand grandmothersays such fears are overblown. What should having more respect for the childs mind change not for how we care for children, but how we care for ourselves or what kinds of things we open ourselves into? That could do the kinds of things that two-year-olds can do. Paul Krugman Breaks It Down. And its the cleanest writing interface, simplest of these programs I found. So theres a really nice picture about what happens in professorial consciousness. 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. xvi + 268. What are three childrens books you love and would recommend to the audience? 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. Until then, I had always known exactly who I was: an exceptionally fortunate and happy woman, full of irrational. Yeah, so I was thinking a lot about this, and I actually had converged on two childrens books. And one of them in particular that I read recently is The Philosophical Baby, which blew my mind a little bit. Gopnik is the daughter of linguist Myrna Gopnik. 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. So we actually did some really interesting experiments where we were looking at how these kinds of flexibility develop over the space of development. What do you think about the twin studies that people used to suggest parenting doesnt really matter? Cognitive scientist, psychologist, philosopher, author of Scientist in the Crib, Philosophical Baby, The Gardener & The Carpenter, WSJ Mind And Matter columnist. Im sure youve seen this with your two-year-old with this phenomenon of some plane, plane, plane. 2Pixar(Bao) The amazing thing about kids is that they do things that are unexpected. I think that theres a paradox about, for example, going out and saying, I am going to meditate and stop trying to get goals. 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. Thats really what you want when youre conscious. The following articles are merged in Scholar. But a mind tuned to learn works differently from a mind trying to exploit what it already knows. Sign in | Create an account. 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. And of course, youve got the best play thing there could be, which is if youve got a two-year-old or a three-year-old or a four-year-old, they kind of force you to be in that state, whether you start out wanting to be or not. Its just a category error. Listen to article (2 minutes) Psychologist Alison Gopnik explores new discoveries in the science of human nature. But if you look at their subtlety at their ability to deal with context, at their ability to decide when should I do this versus that, how should I deal with the whole ensemble that Im in, thats where play has its great advantages. Is that right? Previously she was articles editor for the magazine . By Alison Gopnik | The Wall Street Journal Humans have always looked up to the heavens and been fascinated and inspired by celestial events. Well, if you think about human beings, were being faced with unexpected environments all the time. 2021. And I think that in other states of consciousness, especially the state of consciousness youre in when youre a child but I think there are things that adults do that put them in that state as well you have something thats much more like a lantern. So even if you take something as simple as that you would like to have your systems actually youd like to have the computer in your car actually be able to identify this is a pedestrian or a car, it turns out that even those simple things involve abilities that we see in very young children that are actually quite hard to program into a computer. 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. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught since 1988. . And the same thing is true with Mary Poppins. It kind of disappears from your consciousness. 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. And then he said, I guess they want to make sure that the children and the students dont break the clock. Early reasoning about desires: evidence from 14-and 18-month-olds. And again, theres tradeoffs because, of course, we get to be good at doing things, and then we want to do the things that were good at. But I think even as adults, we can have this kind of split brain phenomenon, where a bit of our experience is like being a child again and vice versa. So what play is really about is about this ability to change, to be resilient in the face of lots of different environments, in the face of lots of different possibilities. That ones a cat. So what kind of function could that serve? The Many Minds of the Octopus (15 Apr 2021). Cambridge, Mass. But if you think that what being a parent does is not make children more like themselves and more like you, but actually make them more different from each other and different from you, then when you do a twin study, youre not going to see that. You sort of might think about, well, are there other ways that evolution could have solved this explore, exploit trade-off, this problem about how do you get a creature that can do things, but can also learn things really widely? And what I like about all three of these books, in their different ways, is that I think they capture this thing thats so distinctive about childhood, the fact that on the one hand, youre in this safe place. 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. So what is it that theyve got, what mechanisms do they have that could help us with some of these kinds of problems? And the same way with The Children of Green Knowe. Youre going to visit your grandmother in her house in the country. Part of the problem and this is a general explore or exploit problem. And he said, thats it, thats the one with the wild things with the monsters. This, three blocks, its just amazing. So look at a person whos next to you and figure out what it is that theyre doing. But, again, the sort of baseline is that humans have this really, really long period of immaturity. And I think for grown-ups, thats really the equivalent of the kind of especially the kind of pretend play and imaginative play that you see in children. Now, again, thats different than the conscious agent, right, that has to make its way through the world on its own. So that the ability to have an impulse in the back of your brain and the front of your brain can come in and shut that out. And then the ones that arent are pruned, as neuroscientists say. She is the author of The Gardener . But then theyre taking that information and integrating it with all the other information they have, say, from their own exploration and putting that together to try to design a new way of being, to try and do something thats different from all the things that anyone has done before. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and an affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. ALISON GOPNIK: Well, from an evolutionary biology point of view, one of the things that's really striking is this relationship between what biologists call life history, how our developmental. You could just find it at calmywriter.com. Alison GOPNIK. Two Days Mattered Most. And then it turns out that that house is full of spirits and ghosts and traditions and things that youve learned from the past. I think its off, but I think its often in a way thats actually kind of interesting. And it turns out that even if you just do the math, its really impossible to get a system that optimizes both of those things at the same time, that is exploring and exploiting simultaneously because theyre really deeply in tension with one another. What are the trade-offs to have that flexibility? And I should, to some extent, discount something new that somebody tells me. And we do it partially through children. Is this curious, rather than focusing your attention and consciousness on just one thing at a time. Look at them from different angles, look at them from the top, look at them from the bottom, look at your hands this way, look at your hands that way. So, basically, you put a child in a rich environment where theres lots of opportunities for play. Speakers include a She introduces the topic of causal understanding. By Alison Gopnik. 50% off + free delivery on any order with DoorDash promo code, 60% off running shoes and apparel at Nike without a promo code, Score up to 50% off Nintendo Switch video games with GameStop coupon code, The Tax Play That Saves Some Couples Big Bucks, How Gas From Texas Becomes Cooking Fuel in France, Amazon Pausing Construction of Washington, D.C.-Area Second Headquarters. And we even can show neurologically that, for instance, what happens in that state is when I attend to something, when I pay attention to something, what happens is the thing that Im paying attention to becomes much brighter and more vivid. Theres dogs and theres gates and theres pizza fliers and theres plants and trees and theres airplanes. So one of them is that the young brain seems to start out making many, many new connections. Babies' brains,. Five years later, my grandson Augie was born. She takes childhood seriously as a phase in human development. The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Rog Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld. Its not just going to be a goal function, its going to be a conversation. Advertisement. The scientist in the crib: Minds, brains, and how children learn. And no one quite knows where all that variability is coming from. So you see this really deep tension, which I think were facing all the time between how much are we considering different possibilities and how much are we acting efficiently and swiftly. And that sort of consciousness is, say, youre sitting in your chair. So one thing is to get them to explore, but another thing is to get them to do this kind of social learning. You go out and maximize that goal. So, explore first and then exploit. Their health is better. Distribution and use of this material are governed by I mean, obviously, Im a writer, but I like writing software. And the way that computer scientists have figured out to try to solve this problem very characteristically is give the system a chance to explore first, give it a chance to figure out all the information, and then once its got the information, it can go out and it can exploit later on. Gopnik explains that as we get older, we lose our cognitive flexibility and our penchant for explorationsomething that we need to be mindful of, lest we let rigidity take over. Read previous columns here. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016 P.G. And what happens with development is that that part of the brain, that executive part gets more and more control over the rest of the brain as you get older. Thank you to Alison Gopnik for being here. Read previous columns here. In The Gardener and the Carpenter, the pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrongit's not just based on bad science, it's bad for kids and parents, too. And it takes actual, dedicated effort to not do things that feel like work to me. Its been incredibly fun at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Group. When he was 4, he was talking to his grandfather, who said, "I really wish. And there seem to actually be two pathways. The Understanding Latency webinar series is happening on March 6th-8th. And we had a marvelous time reading Mary Poppins. You have the paper to write. Its a terrible literature. Could you talk a bit about that, what this sort of period of plasticity is doing at scale? What does look different in the two brains? 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. So what they did was have humans who were, say, manipulating a bunch of putting things on a desk in a virtual environment. Thats actually working against the very function of this early period of exploration and learning. Psychologist Alison Gopnik explores new discoveries in the science of human nature. And I think that evolution has used that strategy in designing human development in particular because we have this really long childhood. And the most important thing is, is this going to teach me something? 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. In a sense, its a really creative solution. But slowing profits in other sectors and rising interest rates are warning signs. And then the other thing is that I think being with children in that way is a great way for adults to get a sense of what it would be like to have that broader focus. So the acronym we have for our project is MESS, which stands for Model-Building Exploratory Social Learning Systems. We talk about why Gopnik thinks children should be considered an entirely different form of Homo sapiens, the crucial difference between spotlight consciousness and lantern consciousness, why going for a walk with a 2-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake, what A.I. Alison Gopnik. And if you think about play, the definition of play is that its the thing that you do when youre not working. But I think even human adults, that might be an interesting kind of model for some of what its like to be a human adult in particular. Reconstructing constructivism: causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms, and the theory theory. She spent decades. 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. I like this because its a book about a grandmother and her grandson. And you say, OK, so now I want to design you to do this particular thing well. NextMed said most of its customers are satisfied. If I want to make my mind a little bit more childlike, aside from trying to appreciate the William Blake-like nature of children, are there things of the childs life that I should be trying to bring into mind? But your job is to figure out your own values. [MUSIC PLAYING]. They can sit for longer than anybody else can. My example is Augie, my grandson. This byline is for a different person with the same name. But it turns out that if instead of that, what you do is you have the human just play with the things on the desk. And yet, theres all this strangeness, this weirdness, the surreal things just about those everyday experiences. And we can think about what is it. : MIT Press. So, let me ask you a variation on whats our final question. But heres the catch, and the catch is that innovation-imitation trade-off that I mentioned. Some of the things that were looking at, for instance, is with children, when theyre learning to identify objects in the world, one thing they do is they pick them up and then they move around. Even if youre not very good at it, someone once said that if somethings worth doing, its worth doing badly. Thank you for listening. What counted as being the good thing, the value 10 years ago might be really different from the thing that we think is important or valuable now. PhilPapers PhilPeople PhilArchive PhilEvents PhilJobs. The robots are much more resilient.