Philosophical Babies

From CBC’s The Current:

The Philosophical Baby

Two hundred years ago, William Wordsworth wrote, The child is the father of the Man. The great romantic poet had a deep-seated belief that children were gifted with more innate, earthborn wisdom than adults. And ask any parent today … when you stare into the wide, unblinking eyes of a baby, you can’t help but wonder what they’re thinking.

But until recently, psychologists and philosophers tended to agree that babies’ minds are defined by impulse and id … little blank slates that absorb reason and logic as their neural connections are forged over time.

Alison Gopnik has a very different understanding of the infant brain. She’s a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, and the author of a new book called The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life. She joined us today from Seattle, Washington.

Kid Bluesky

According to Alison Gopnik, kids are naturals for the research and development department. With that in mind we set out to find what insights we could glean from kids when it comes to solving some of the world’s biggest problems. Our brainstorming group involved students from The Grove Community School in Toronto and St. Mary’s Elementary school in St. John’s.

We started by asking them what lessons adults should learn from the playground, before moving on to such weighty questions as how to stop war and keep adults from fighting.

Putting these ideas together with some of the thoughts on Hurrying Baby, it seems that there is certainly much more that we can learn about learning from infants than we thought only a few years ago. I know that in my own experience watching my daughter learning about her world, that the idea of the lamp (broad illumination) vs that of the spotlight (adult attention) is very much the case. Babies attend to everything, and so they should, they have to in order to survive I would think. In addition to scientists, I would suggest that another group of adults who are similar to babies would be those in a Flow state.

When you are “flowing”, you pay attention to so much more than what you would if you are concentrating on something that is merely a task. I experienced this most recently this weekend. My brother and I were visiting the Inner Harbor area of Victoria the first time. He was there for a conference, and that is all he was originally interested in. I was there on vacation and my photo senses where on full alert. We were walking down the hall of the hotel and I pointed out an old dresser that was very nicely framed at the end of the hall. My brother said that he didn’t even notice it. On the last day, we visited the Royal BC Museum and my brother finally got the chance to be in a “flow state”. Exploring the museum, he was noticing things all over the place, just as I was. I don’t know for sure, but I would think that was as close to being a baby as we can get without jumping into the Delorian.

If you have the time, visit the page and have a listen.