Ive learned so much that Ive lost the ability to unlearn what I know. A child psychologistand grandmothersays such fears are overblown. I have so much trouble actually taking the world on its own terms and trying to derive how it works. 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. Read previous columns here. And those two things are very parallel. systems. And one of the things about her work, the thing that sets it apart for me is she uses children and studies children to understand all of us. In the state of that focused, goal-directed consciousness, those frontal areas are very involved and very engaged. But one of the great finds for me in the parenting book world has been Alison Gopniks work. But of course, its not something that any grown-up would say. Younger learners are better than older ones at learning unusual abstra. So to have a culture, one thing you need to do is to have a generation that comes in and can take advantage of all the other things that the previous generations have learned. Until then, I had always known exactly who I was: an exceptionally fortunate and happy woman, full of irrational. One of the things I really like about this is that it pushes towards a real respect for the childs brain. .css-i6hrxa-Italic{font-style:italic;}Psychologist Alison Gopnik explores new discoveries in the science of human nature. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and an affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. 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. 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? 1997. 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? Alison Gopnik, Ph.D., is at the center of highlighting our understanding of how babies and young children think and learn. One of the things that were doing right now is using some of these kind of video game environments to put A.I. I have more knowledge, and I have more experience, and I have more ability to exploit existing learnings. So this isnt just a conversation about kids or for parents. But a mind tuned to learn works differently from a mind trying to exploit what it already knows. Yeah, theres definitely something to that. Scientists actually are the few people who as adults get to have this protected time when they can just explore, play, figure out what the world is like.', 'Love doesn't have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. And the neuroscience suggests that, too. NextMed said most of its customers are satisfied. March 16, 2011 2:15 PM. And one of them in particular that I read recently is The Philosophical Baby, which blew my mind a little bit. And when you tune a mind to learn, it actually used to work really differently than a mind that already knows a lot. So we have more different people who are involved and engaged in taking care of children. Customer Service. And its especially not good at things like inhibition. 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. Even if youre not very good at it, someone once said that if somethings worth doing, its worth doing badly. So I think more and more, especially in the cultural context, that having a new generation that can look around at everything around it and say, let me try to make sense out of this, or let me understand this and let me think of all the new things that I could do, given this new environment, which is the thing that children, and I think not just infants and babies, but up through adolescence, that children are doing, that could be a real advantage. What are three childrens books you love and would recommend to the audience? And Im not getting paid to promote them or anything, I just like it. And then the central head brain is doing things like saying, OK, now its time to squirt. And thats not playing. 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. Thats really what you want when youre conscious. What you do with these systems is say, heres what your goal is. Heres a sobering thought: The older we get, the harder it is for us to learn, to question, to reimagine. Is this curious, rather than focusing your attention and consciousness on just one thing at a time. And thats not the right thing. But theyre not going to prison. 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. The amazing thing about kids is that they do things that are unexpected. So theres a question about why would it be. It comes in. The surrealists used to choose a Paris streetcar at random, ride to the end of the line and then walk around. 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? What do you think about the twin studies that people used to suggest parenting doesnt really matter? I didnt know that there was an airplane there. As always, if you want to help the show out, leave us a review wherever you are listening to it now. The Students. And its the cleanest writing interface, simplest of these programs I found. 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. One of the things thats really fascinating thats coming out in A.I. 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. (A full transcript of the episode can be found here.). All of the Maurice Sendak books, but especially Where the Wild Things Are is a fantastic, wonderful book. 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. And in fact, I think Ive lost a lot of my capacity for play. 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. So thats the first one, especially for the younger children. And it turned out that the problem was if you train the robot that way, then they learn how to do exactly the same thing that the human did. 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. What are the trade-offs to have that flexibility? 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. example. So one thing is being able to deal with a lot of new information. Do you still have that book? But I do think that counts as play for adults. It illuminates the thing that you want to find out about. 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. 1623 - 1627 DOI: 10.1126/science.1223416 Kindergarten Scientists Current Issue Observation of a critical charge mode in a strange metal By Hisao Kobayashi Yui Sakaguchi et al. The scientist in the crib: Minds, brains, and how children learn. 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. Two Days Mattered Most. So many of those books have this weird, dude, youre going to be a dad, bro, tone. UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik studies how toddlers and young people learn to apply that understanding to computing. And that means Ive also sometimes lost the ability to question things correctly. She is the author of The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and The Gardener and the Carpenter. After all, if we can learn how infants learn, that might teach us about how we learn and understand our world. 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. Thats actually working against the very function of this early period of exploration and learning. And why not, right? But on the other hand, there are very I mean, again, just take something really simple. The murder conviction of the disbarred lawyer capped a South Carolina low country saga that attracted intense global interest. If you look across animals, for example, very characteristically, its the young animals that are playing across an incredibly wide range of different kinds of animals. Rising costs and a shortage of workers are pushing the Southwest-style restaurant chain to do more with less. So part of it kind of goes in circles. Or send this episode to a friend, a family member, somebody you want to talk about it with. And, in fact, one of the things that I think people have been quite puzzled about in twin studies is this idea of the non-shared environment. So the A.I. our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. Well, from an evolutionary biology point of view, one of the things thats really striking is this relationship between what biologists call life history, how our developmental sequence unfolds, and things like how intelligent we are. The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. Because I have this goal, which is I want to be a much better meditator. 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. And yet, they seem to be really smart, and they have these big brains with lots of neurons. Everybody has imaginary friends. She is Jewish. And Peter Godfrey-Smiths wonderful book Ive just been reading Metazoa talks about the octopus. Shes part of the A.I. You tell the human, I just want you to do stuff with the things that are here. Contact Alison, search articles and Tweets, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place. One kind of consciousness this is an old metaphor is to think about attention as being like a spotlight. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at UC Berkeley. When I went to Vox Media, partially I did that because of their great CMS or publishing software Chorus. Its a form of actually doing things that, nevertheless, have this characteristic of not being immediately directed to a goal. So if you think from this broad evolutionary perspective about these creatures that are designed to explore, I think theres a whole lot of other things that go with that. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Society for Research . When you look at someone whos in the scanner, whos really absorbed in a great movie, neither of those parts are really active. Her research explores how young children come to know about the world around them. 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.