(ESL) What Babies Think #2 (TRANSCRIPTS & CAPTIONS)
TRANSCRIPT
What Babies Think #2
1. Well, what's it like to be this kind of creature? What's it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes?
2. Well, if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them have said that babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all. And I think just the opposite is true.
3. I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults.
4. Now here's what we know about how adult consciousness works. And adults' attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight.
5. So what happens for adults is we decide that something's relevant or important, we should pay attention to it.
6. Our consciousness of that thing that we're attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. And we even know something about the way the brain does this.
7. So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different.
8. I think babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. So babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing.
9. But they're very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once. And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven't come on yet.
10. So when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention.
11. So they're bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell them something and just looking at the thing that's important. That's the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn.
12. Well if we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think about cases where we're put in a new situation that we've never been in before -- when we fall in love with someone new, or when we're in a new city for the first time.
13. So what's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double-espressos. (Laughter)
14. That's a fantastic way to be, but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o'clock in the morning. (Laughter)
15. Now it's good to be a grownup. I don't want to say too much about how wonderful babies are. It's good to be a grownup. We can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves.
16. And it makes sense that we put a lot of effort into making babies think like adults do.
17. But if what we want is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more like children. (Applause)