Alison Gopnik
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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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Alison Gopnik is a psychologist and philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. She's also the author of the newly released book The Philosophical Baby, which explores the inner world of young children. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Gopnik about why babies might be more conscious than adults, the benefits of having an imaginary friend and why play, not necessity, is the mother of invention.
LEHRER: What first drew you to study the baby mind? As you point out in The Philosophical Baby, there's a longstanding assumption that babies are mostly mindless little people, concerned solely with their physical needs.
GOPNIK: There were three currents that converged in my own life. I’m the oldest of six children and I had my own first baby when I was 23. So I’ve always been interested in babies, and I had lots of opportunities to watch them. If you look at babies casually, as most philosophers and psychologists did for 2500 years, you don’t see much. But if you look at them carefully, as generations of mothers did, and as the great psychologist Jean Piaget did, you begin to suspect that there is much more going on. The trouble is that caregivers didn’t have the scientific evidence to back up those intuitions, and even Piaget was constrained by the limited methods that were available 70 years ago. If you just observe and interview children you’ll still miss a lot.
Then I became a philosopher and got interested in some of the big deep classical philosophical problems, especially the problem of how we come to know about the world around us. And I began to wonder whether babies and children might hold some of the answers. Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology. New video-recording technology meant that for the first time we could take those natural observations of children and turn them into a real science. And it became clear that that science could start to answer some of those deep philosophical questions about the human mind.
LEHRER: You provocatively argue that, in some respects, babies might be more conscious than adults. Could you explain?
GOPNIK: The conventional wisdom has been that babies must be somehow less conscious than adults, if, in fact, they are conscious at all. Even developmental psychologists, including me, have tended to say that the amazing thinking that we see in babies is “just unconscious”. But there has been a lot of interesting work on the neural and cognitive bases of consciousness in the last few years, and that leads to a very different picture.
As adults when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness. In fact, attending carefully to one event may actually make us less conscious of the rest of the world. We even know something about how the brain does this: connections from the prefrontal part of the brain both enhance our perception of the attended event and inhibit our perception of other events. And there is a chemical basis for this, too. When we pay attention to an event certain brain chemicals called cholinergic transmitters make a small part of the brain more flexible and “plastic”, better at learning, and simultaneously other inhibitory transmitters actually make irrelevant parts of the brain less flexible.
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5 Comments
Add CommentIt's refreshing to read about someone who is making sense.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI remember when I was less than six months old. Many things that my mother confirmed were true about where we lived and things that happened. There was an adult mind inside a body that didn't work! Results- - - intense frustration! I knew what the words meant and how to say them but when they got to the muscle level my mouth couldn't make them. Plotting to spew my cereal that I didn't like. And on and on.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJim Sauter
The belief process is exactly that: the conversion of consciousness into the conviction that satisfactory emotional connections fix successful relationships as reality by inhibiting irrelevant or contradictory transmission to the brain or from associated areas of the brain.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities." I will never watch in the same way again watch a child immersed in imaginative play. Instead of just seeing them playing house or airplane, I will see that they are untangling their world and in fact perhaps untangling problems they don't even yet realize exist.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI also have vivid visual and conceptual memories going back to the crib before I could stand or talk. I can remember pulling myself up with my hands clutching the wooden bars of my crib and trying to stand up. I can still see my little hands struggling to pull me up. I can remember wondering why my legs were so rubbery and then falling back on my diapered bum. There was a decal on the crib of a dog, a boy and a girl chasing a ball and I wanted to do that just like them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was left alone a lot in the old farm house staring at the ceiling from my crib in a bedroom, because my mother was working serving meals to tourists in the next room. The farm was on a lake where tourists came to fish in Northern Ontario. In later years she said I was very quiet and she kept me a secret from them. The ceiling had metal sheeting with a square design pressed into it. The sheeting was to help prevent fire in the cladding and logs of the old log house. I can remember endlessly making mental designs by combining the three inch squares in different ways and wondering about how that worked when I was only a few months old. It was summer and I was born in late April.
There are various other milestone memories before I was three. I remember learning the meaning of tomorrow when I was about two and I had a kind of timeless vision about the nature of time that really impressed me. It was a visual experience and I can still see it in my minds eye.
Accurate early memories may be much more common than psychologists think. It would probably be helpful if some attempts were made to investigate and catalog them.