Anyone can read what you share. My colleague, Dacher Keltner, has studied awe. And instead, other parts of the brain are more active. She studies the cognitive science of learning and development. Chapter Three The Trouble with Geniuses, part 1 by Malcolm Gladwell. But if you think that actually having all that variability is not a bad thing, its a good thing its what you want its what childhood and parenting is all about then having that kind of variation that you cant really explain either by genetics or by what the parents do, thats exactly what being a parent, being a caregiver is all about, is for. But you sort of say that children are the R&D wing of our species and that as generations turn over, we change in ways and adapt to things in ways that the normal genetic pathway of evolution wouldnt necessarily predict. Could you talk a bit about that, what this sort of period of plasticity is doing at scale? It can change really easily, essentially. And there seem to actually be two pathways. Just watch the breath. And awe is kind of an example of this. 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 that means Ive also sometimes lost the ability to question things correctly. What Does Alison Gopnik Teach Us About How Kids Think? Youre watching language and culture and social rules being absorbed and learned and changed, importantly changed. She takes childhood seriously as a phase in human development. But nope, now you lost that game, so figure out something else to do. Already a member? So one thing is to get them to explore, but another thing is to get them to do this kind of social learning. 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. It comes in. And the idea is that those two different developmental and evolutionary agendas come with really different kinds of cognition, really different kinds of computation, really different kinds of brains, and I think with very different kinds of experiences of the world. But if you think that part of the function of childhood is to introduce that kind of variability into the world and that being a good caregiver has the effect of allowing children to come out in all these different ways, then the basic methodology of the twin studies is to assume that if parenting has an effect, its going to have an effect by the child being more like the parent and by, say, the three children that are the children of the same parent being more like each other than, say, the twins who are adopted by different parents. And he looked up at the clock tower, and he said, theres a clock at the top there. They keep in touch with their imaginary friends. And if you think about play, the definition of play is that its the thing that you do when youre not working. When he visited the U.S., someone in the audience was sure to ask, But Prof. Piaget, how can we get them to do it faster?. Essentially what Mary Poppins is about is this very strange, surreal set of adventures that the children are having with this figure, who, as I said to Augie, is much more like Iron Man or Batman or Doctor Strange than Julie Andrews, right? 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. And then it turns out that that house is full of spirits and ghosts and traditions and things that youve learned from the past. Dr. Gopnik Gopnik Lab And were pretty well designed to think its good to care for children in the first place. So thats the first one, especially for the younger children. Alison Gopnik. So theres this lovely concept that I like of the numinous. So for instance, if you look at rats and you look at the rats who get to do play fighting versus rats who dont, its not that the rats who play can do things that the rats cant play can, like every specific fighting technique the rats will have. And we better make sure that were doing the right things, and were buying the right apps, and were reading the right books, and were doing the right things to shape that kind of learning in the way that we, as adults, think that it should be shaped. Children's Understanding of Representational Change and Its - JSTOR So theres a really nice picture about what happens in professorial consciousness. What do you think about the twin studies that people used to suggest parenting doesnt really matter? Syntax; Advanced Search We are delighted that you'd like to resume your subscription. But another thing that goes with it is the activity of play. systems can do is really striking. 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. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Society for Research . 2 vocus 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. Ive learned so much that Ive lost the ability to unlearn what I know. 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? So when you start out, youve got much less of that kind of frontal control, more of, I guess, in some ways, almost more like the octos where parts of your brain are doing their own thing. And an idea that I think a lot of us have now is that part of that is because youve really got these two different creatures. So the Campanile is the big clock tower at Berkeley. 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. A lovely example that one of my computer science postdocs gave the other day was that her three-year-old was walking on the campus and saw the Campanile at Berkeley. Now, were obviously not like that. She introduces the topic of causal understanding. So those are two really, really different kinds of consciousness. Both parents and policy makers increasingly push preschools to be more like schools. In this Aeon Original animation, Alison Gopnik, a writer and a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, examines how these. 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. Or send this episode to a friend, a family member, somebody you want to talk about it with. Whats lost in that? Younger learners are better than older ones at learning unusual abstra. values to be aligned with the values of humans? March 2, 2023 11:13 am ET. 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? And you look at parental environment, and thats responsible for some of it. She is the firstborn of six siblings who include Blake Gopnik, the Newsweek art critic, and Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker.She was formerly married to journalist George Lewinski and has three sons: Alexei, Nicholas, and Andres Gopnik-Lewinski. So youve got one creature thats really designed to explore, to learn, to change. Patel Show author details P.G. And . Well, I have to say actually being involved in the A.I. And then he said, I guess they want to make sure that the children and the students dont break the clock. And we can compare what it is that the kids and the A.I.s do in that same environment. And theyre going to the greengrocer and the fishmonger. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, and a member of the Berkeley AI Research Group. She's also the author of the newly. But of course, one of the things thats so fascinating about humans is we keep changing our objective functions. And the phenomenology of that is very much like this kind of lantern, that everything at once is illuminated. And we can think about what is it. And its worsened by an intellectual and economic culture that prizes efficiency and dismisses play. The surrealists used to choose a Paris streetcar at random, ride to the end of the line and then walk around. I always wonder if theres almost a kind of comfort being taken at how hard it is to do two-year-old style things. Alison Gopnik Selected Papers The Science Paper Or click on Scientific thinking in young children in Empirical Papers list below Theoretical and review papers: Probabilistic models, Bayes nets, the theory theory, explore-exploit, . It was called "parenting." As long as there have. And what I would argue is theres all these other kinds of states of experience and not just me, other philosophers as well. Our minds are basically passive and reactive, always a step behind. 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. So one thing is being able to deal with a lot of new information. 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 its interesting that, as I say, the hard-headed engineers, who are trying to do things like design robots, are increasingly realizing that play is something thats going to actually be able to get you systems that do better in going through the world. So its another way of having this explore state of being in the world. But now, whether youre a philosopher or not, or an academic or a journalist or just somebody who spends a lot of time on their computer or a student, we now have a modernity that is constantly training something more like spotlight consciousness, probably more so than would have been true at other times in human history. If you're unfamiliar with Gopnik's work, you can find a quick summary of it in her Ted Talk " What Do Babies Think ?" In A.I., you sort of have a choice often between just doing the thing thats the obvious thing that youve been trained to do or just doing something thats kind of random and noisy. Psychologist Alison Gopnik explores new discoveries in the science of human nature. . A Very Human Answer to One of AIs Deepest Dilemmas, Children, Creativity, and the Real Key to Intelligence, Causal learning, counterfactual reasoning and pretend play: a cross-cultural comparison of Peruvian, mixed- and low-socioeconomic status U.S. children | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Love Lets Us Learn: Psychological Science Makes the Case for Policies That Help Children, The New Riddle of the Sphinx: Life History and Psychological Science, Emotional by Leonard Mlodinow review - the new thinking about feelings, What Children Lose When Their Brains Develop Too Fast, Why nation states struggle with social care. 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. So, let me ask you a variation on whats our final question. March 16, 2011 2:15 PM. Whereas if I dont know a lot, then almost by definition, I have to be open to more knowledge. And I think the period of childhood and adolescence in particular gives you a chance to be that kind of cutting edge of change. Theyre not just doing the obvious thing, but theyre not just behaving completely randomly. But one of the great finds for me in the parenting book world has been Alison Gopniks work. All three of those books really capture whats special about childhood. And its interesting that if you look at what might look like a really different literature, look at studies about the effects of preschool on later development in children. 2Pixar(Bao) Theres a clock way, way up high at the top of that tower. You look at any kid, right? But I think they spend much more of their time in that state. So the question is, if we really wanted to have A.I.s that were really autonomous and maybe we dont want to have A.I.s that are really autonomous. 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. Theyve really changed how I look at myself, how I look at all of us. Thats more like their natural state than adults are. Now its not a form of experience and consciousness so much, but its a form of activity. A theory of causal learning in children: causal maps and Bayes nets. According to this alter And you dont see the things that are on the other side. What a Poetic Mind Can Teach Us About How to Live, Our Brains Werent Designed for This Kind of Food, Inside the Minds of Spiders, Octopuses and Artificial Intelligence, This Book Changed My Relationship to Pain. And as you probably know if you look at something like ImageNet, you can show, say, a deep learning system a whole lot of pictures of cats and dogs on the web, and eventually youll get it so that it can, most of the time, say this is the cat, and this is the dog. One of them is the one thats sort of heres the goal-directed pathway, what they sometimes call the task dependent activity. And gradually, it gets to be clear that there are ghosts of the history of this house. The scientist in the crib: Minds, brains, and how children learn. Well, we know something about the sort of functions that this child-like brain serves. 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. Ive had to spend a lot more time thinking about pickle trucks now. Tell me a little bit about those collaborations and the angle youre taking on this. We All Start Out As Scientists, But Some of Us Forget print. This byline is for a different person with the same name. Were talking here about the way a child becomes an adult, how do they learn, how do they play in a way that keeps them from going to jail later. Theyre going out and figuring things out in the world. 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? So if you think about what its like to be a caregiver, it involves passing on your values. And I think that for A.I., the challenge is, how could we get a system thats capable of doing something thats really new, which is what you want if you want robustness and resilience, and isnt just random, but is new, but appropriately new. [MUSIC PLAYING]. The scientist in the crib: Minds, brains, and how children learn. Its been incredibly fun at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Group. Our assessments, publications and research spread knowledge, spark enquiry and aid understanding around the world. Thats the part of our brain thats sort of the executive office of the brain, where long-term planning, inhibition, focus, all those things seem to be done by this part of the brain. Artificial Intelligence Helps in Learning How Children Learn And that means that now, the next generation is going to have yet another new thing to try to deal with and to understand. And its having a previous generation thats willing to do both those things. I saw this other person do something a little different. UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik studies how toddlers and young people learn to apply that understanding to computing. Part of the problem and this is a general explore or exploit problem. Another thing that people point out about play is play is fun. 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? The theory theory. The movie is just completely captivating. Empirical Papers Language, Theory of Mind, Perception, and Consciousness Reviews and Commentaries Now heres a specific thing that Im puzzled about that I think weve learned from looking at the A.I. But the numinous sort of turns up the dial on awe. What are the trade-offs to have that flexibility? Its partially this ability to exist within the imaginarium and have a little bit more of a porous border between what exists and what could than you have when youre 50. $ + tax Yet, as Alison Gopnik notes in her deeply researched book The Gardener and the Carpenter, the word parenting became common only in the 1970s, rising in popularity as traditional sources of. Previously she was articles editor for the magazine . Because I know I think about it all the time. Why Barnes & Noble Is Copying Local Bookstores It Once Threatened, What Floridas Dying Oranges Tell Us About How Commodity Markets Work, Watch: Heavy Snowfall Shuts Down Parts of California, U.K., EU Agree to New Northern Ireland Trade Deal. But if you do the same walk with a two-year-old, you realize, wait a minute. If one defined intelligence as the ability to learn and to learn fast and to learn flexibly, a two-year-old is a lot more intelligent right now than I am. Im going to keep it up with these little occasional recommendations after the show. Im curious how much weight you put on the idea that that might just be the wrong comparison.
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