The Scientist In The Crib: Minds, Brains, And How Children Learn

Systematic studies indicate that two-year-olds begin to show genuine empathy toward other people for the first time. Even younger babies will become upset in response to the distress of others (we all know the disturbing way the baby will suddenly begin to howl when a marital argument starts). But only two-year-olds provide comfort. They don’t just

So in the first few months of life, babies already seem to have solved a number of deep philosophical conundrums. They know how to use edges and patterns of movement to segregate the world into separate objects. They know something about how those objects characteristically move. They know that those objects are part of a three-dimensional space. A

The interesting thing is that even quite tiny children, just beginning to say their first words, already seem to be influenced by what the people around them are talking about. And, of course, the parents are exercising this influence completely unconsciously, just by talking to their babies.

The terrible twos seem to involve a systematic exploration of that idea, almost a kind of experimental research program. Toddlers are systematically testing the dimensions on which their desires and the desires of others may be in conflict. The grave look is directed at you because you and your reaction, rather than the lamp cord itself, are the re

Our own view is that children’s whole conception of people, objects, and words changes radically in the first three years of life. And it changes because of what children find out about the world. We already said that babies start out with complex, abstract, coherent representations of the world and rules for manipulating them. They use those repre

The theories also go beyond the evidence they are based on. That means they allow scientists to make new predictions about things they’ve never seen before, just as the children’s representations allow them to make new predictions. Those predictions allow scientists, and children, to act on the world in more effective ways. Just as babies play with

Vygotsky noticed, for example, how adults, quite unconsciously, adjusted their behavior to give children just the information they needed to solve the problems that were most important to them. Children used adults to discover the particularities of their culture and society.

We look for the underlying, hidden causes of events. We try to figure out the nature of things. It’s not just that we human beings can do this; we need to do it. We seem to have a kind of explanatory drive, like our drive for food or sex. When we’re presented with a puzzle, a mystery, a hint of a pattern, something that doesn’t quite make sense, we

The philosopher Otto Neurath compared knowledge to a boat we rebuild as we sail in it. To keep afloat during his thirty years of wandering, Ulysses had to constantly repair and rebuild the boat he lived in. Each new storm or calm meant an alteration in the design. By the end of the journey hardly anything remained of the original vessel. That is an