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We’re starting to figure out why children’s brains are by far the most fantastic powerful
computer that we know of in the entire universe in a way that’s also uniquely human. I’m
Alison Gopnik. I’m a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley.
The truth is, more learning is going on between the ages of zero to five than is going on
in any other time in our lives. What we’re starting to realize is that everything single
thing they do, every single minute of the day is focused on learning about what’s
going on around them. Now, I think that the way they’re doing that is by taking probabilistic
statistics and inferring abstract causal structure to do that. I obviously can’t ask them whether
that’s what they’re doing. So somehow I have to turn an idea like that into, all
right, here’s a little machine and here’s little blocks we’ll put on the machine and
what do you think about it? The children though, just unconsciously are looking at the patterns
of statistics and probability in what’s going on around them. Like sometimes mommy
turns to me when I shout and sometimes she doesn’t and how does that fit other things
that she’s doing? Most of the child’s world is actually probabilistic. Even things
like whether or not the tower of blocks stays up. It’s also important to connect that
to how could we actually use this science to make the world different? And how could
we use it to make the world different for children throughout the state and throughout
the country and throughout the world? And there isn’t any difference between the way
that babies and young children learn and the way that babies and young children are cared
for. It’s increasingly become clear that by supporting that early learning that has
consequences that cascade on all the way through life. So giving children a good start, giving
that children that kind of support and background has effects on what their health is like when
they’re in their 20s or 30s, whether they go to prison or whether they go to graduate
school. Those kinds of differences are rooted in the things that happen very early on. So
one of the things that we can do as scientists is we can come in and say look, this isn’t
just motherhood. This is actually something that we can scientifically show is important
and we can give children and children’s issues a kind of gravitas, a kind of seriousness
that they might not have in the world in general.