How Babies Think : The Science of Childhood

by Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Patricia K. Kuhl

How Babies Think

Genres: Parenting, Nonfiction, Psychology, Science, Childrens, Neuroscience, Family

320 pages, Hardcover

First published August 18, 1999

About the author

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University. Her honors include a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada University Research Fellowship, an Osher Visiting Scientist Fellowship at the Exploratorium, a Center for the Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship, and a Moore Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. She is an internationally recognized leader in the study of children’s learning and development and was the first to argue that children’s minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions. She was one of the founders of the study of "theory of mind", illuminating how children come to understand the minds of others, and she formulated the "theory theory", the idea that children’s learn in the same way that scientists do.

She is the author of over 100 articles and several books including "Words, thoughts and theories" (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff), MIT Press, 1997, "The Scientist in the Crib" (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl) William Morrow, 1999, and the just published "The Philosophical Baby; What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life" Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009. "The Scientist in the Crib" was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, was translated into 20 languages and was enthusiastically reviewed in Science, The New Yorker, the Washington Post and The New York Review of Books (among others). She has also written for Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, and Slate.

She has spoken extensively on children’s minds including keynote speeches to political organizations such as the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Development, children’s advocacy organizations including Parents as Teachers and Zero to Three, museums including The Exploratorium, The Chicago Children’s Museum, and the Bay Area Discovery Museum, and science organizations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The American Psychological Association, the Association of Psychological Science, and the American Philosophical Association. She has also appeared on Charlie Rose, Nova, and many NPR radio programs. She has three sons and lives in Berkeley, California.

Reviews

[Lynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting book. The authors review some interesting research on how infants learn in the first years of life. If it weren't for Chapter 5, I would have rated it higher. You can skip this chapter if you read the book. All this chapter does is repeat the same studies over and over (and over) again and make this really weird drawn out comparison of babies to computers and scientists that doesn't even make sense half the time.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

My overall impression of this book is a favorable one. The information was relevant, easily digested, and had snippets of humor interjected here and there. The resources used to compile this book were extensive and credible. The notes on the material were comprehensive.

The first chapter dealt mainly with the history of the study of children, dating back to early philosophers like Plato, Socrates, and Meno. The chapter made me quite nostalgic for my philosophy classes. I think I'm much better equipped as a 30-year old mother to debate such topics as the Other World problem and the External World problem than I was as an 18-year old college freshman. Also presented in the history of developmental theory are Locke, Piaget (who I did not know was a child genius), Freud, Skinner, and Vygotsky. It's quite interesting to see the progression of thinking about thinking (learning) condensed into such a small timeline. We really have come a long way!

Chapters two, three, and four all deal with what children know about people, things, and language. The general consensus at this time seems to be that children come with innate knowledge of some things, have the ability to learn others, and are surround by adults who seem to innately want to teach them. It seems like common sense, but for years it actually wasn't. These chapters briefly touched on various syndromes that seem to involve some sort of breakdown in the pre-programming that children seem to have.

The real gem in this section came from the discussion about language learning and development being influenced by region and environment. As children develop new ways of thinking, they develop new was to communicate these thought processes. For example, when a child learns the concept of failure, he/she also develops ways to communicate this, sometimes putting a word or a phrase into multipurpose use (like calling all animals with four feet "doggie"), which brings us to this passage...

American babies use [...] uh-oh to describe failures, while the babies in the Oxford villas used the more genteel oh dear (although one British baby did briefly but memorably say oh bugger).

Chapters five and six deal with the specific topics of children's minds and brains. A lot of this information was not new to me, and some of it was even recycled information from earlier in the book (though I will grant that it was tied in with new-to-the-book concepts). The information was very easy to understand, partially because it was explained well (though talking about how computers works makes my brain want to explode) and in part because the information provided was very superficial and lacked a lot of detail. Again, it was at the very least good for a chuckle...

For most grown-ups, for most of history, that learning [responsibility-free childhood learning] may have largely stopped when we reached maturity and turned to the more central evolutionary business of the four f's (feeding, feeling, fighting, and engaging in sexual reproduction).

Predictably, the last chapter was a call for more study as well as the reasons why more study is justified. Basically, it let the reader finish the book with a warm fuzzy.

I’m happy to have read this book, and it will keep its place on my bookshelf. It’s a good starter-book for someone interested in child development. There are certainly more detailed books available, but this is a good appetite-wetter.

[Cav · Rating 3 out of 5]

"We can learn as much by looking in the crib and the nursery as by looking in the petri dish or the telescope. In some ways we learn more—we learn what it means to be human..."

The Scientist In The Crib was a somewhat interesting look into the development and lives of babies as well as young children.

Author Alison Gopnik is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alison Gopnik:



The book opens with a decent preface. The author talks about how it was previously long thought that babies were little more than screaming automatons; carrying out fixed action patterns. This line of thinking persevered in medical orthodoxy for quite a while. Fortunately, we now know that this is not the case.

As anyone who's had kids can tell you; young children, and even babies see the world in complex ways. They develop preferences, proclivities, and even their own little personality traits from quite a young age. In this book, Gopnik examines what is known scientifically about this transformative period.

She drops this quote speaking to the scope and aim of the book:

"In this book we tell the story of the new science of children’s minds. This story should be important to everyone who is interested in the mind and the brain. It’s a central part of the new discipline called cognitive science. Cognitive science has united psychology, philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and neuroscience. New scientific insights often come from unexpected and even humble places, and some of the most important insights in cognitive science have come from the crib and the nursery. Understanding children has led us to understand ourselves in a new way."

Although I was excited to start this one after hearing it referenced numerous times in other books I've read, the writing just did not meet my expectations. While there is quite a lot of interesting material covered, the presentation of it was a bit lackluster... I felt that the book lacked cohesion and continuity. There is quite a lot of repetition and overlap in here.

Also, to the best of my knowledge, nothing in the book is really revolutionary or controversial. Although it is 15 years old, and maybe some of the talk about brain development was new back then.

Some of what is talked about here includes:
• Theory of mind
• Language. Japanese vs English. The "L's" and "R's"
• The "cuteness" of babies
• Brain development; neural pruning


********************

The Scientist In The Crib was still an interesting examination of how a young brain develops. I would recommend it.
3 stars.

[Ben Houge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so awesome! Everyone with a baby should read it, the sooner the better.

First amazing thing is the science. The book discusses three main problems that kids have to figure out: the Other Minds problem (that there are other, autonomous people in the world to interact with), the External World problem (how sensory information gets translated into a coherent representation of our physical environment), and the Language problem (how language is acquired). There are three main tools put forward that help children figure these things out: innate knowledge they are born with, a phenomenal capacity to learn, and adults who are hardwired to help them learn through the basic interactions of caregiving.

There's a pervasive metaphor throughout the book about how kids' brains are like computers. I guess some might find this analogy somewhat overstated, but I loved the way it totally resonated with the model of intelligence set forth in Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind.

This book was a joy to read not only because of the information it contains, but also because it's extremely well written, and the authors don't hesitate to drop in literary or artistic references, an epigraph from Wordsworth, allusions to Juan Gris or Vermeer or Jane Austin, an interpolation of Blake's "dark, Satanic mills." It's refreshing to read writing about science that assumes a certain level of intelligence and cultural literacy on the part of the reader.

In the past few years I've heard intermittent noise (mostly from design grad students, I think?) about the idea of "artresearch" (often stylized thusly as one word), and I've always objected to the notion that this is some new concept or frontier on the grounds that what serious, dedicated artists have always done is very much like the scientific method: have a hunch, try out an idea, evaluate the results, tweak it in the next piece... This book makes that link clear (and showing how it goes both ways, that scientists are also engaged in the same "ecstatic enterprise" as poets) and also ties it to the ways that babies are constantly conducting experiments on the world around them.

Maybe one caveat is that this book (the first edition, which is the one I read) is from 1999, and the newer edition (under the name "How Babies Think: The Science of Childhood") is from only two years later. I'd be curious to know what's happened in the interim, so now I'm very curious to read some more recent works by the authors. References to things like speech recognition and machine learning as faraway goals are were the age of the book shows the most.

There was one passage that moved me to tears (about how our brains are wired to those of our progeny in a link that persists beyond our deaths), and by the end of the book I had goosebumps contemplating the grand enterprise of culture as it is conveyed through the generations. This is the only book that I can think of recommending to new parents, but really I recommend it to everybody!

[Anastasia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was sorely disappointed by this book. I had heard a lot of people raving about; but when I think about it, I don't remember if the raves came from child-free people or from parents. I thought this would be an important book for me, as a parent, to read. My impression of it, however, was that it was written by college professors who wanted a light, fun, superficial, yet scientific, quick read, pseudo-textbook to use with their undergrads. The examples of children and children's behavior were either limited to experiments or were phrased in that vague, over-generalizing way often used by people who don't have children or who had them so long ago they can only remember the generalities.

Still, I guess it was revolutionary in 1999, when this book was published, to assert that babies, newborns even, could actually think! I found this assertion obvious in 2007, having had 21 months of getting to know my son and having read a fair number of parenting books. But maybe that's just me?

I did like the information on page 38 about two year olds' need to test conflict, not for the sheer sake of it, but to understand it. Chapter 5, comparing human minds to computers, was incredibly boring, and to me, absolutely demeaning. I am not a computer, my brain is not a computer. I don't believe using a human-created object such as a computer, is a valid way to look at or understand the human brain (or mind) and I find examples comparing thinking to using computer programs trite and insulting. Again, perhaps just me.

If you've read anything by William and Martha Sears, any homebirth-focused book, any modern child development book (except maybe Baby Wise), then there is no need for you to waste your time with the Scientist in the Crib.

[Kristjan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pealkirjast hoolimata ei ole siiski tegemist lastekasvatusõpikuga, vaid populaarteadusliku ülevaatega (laste)psühholoogiast, moraalist ja eetikast (ehk filosoofiast) ning kasvatusteadustest laiemalt. Kõiki neid distsipliine on kasutatud inimese arenemise kirjeldamiseks imikust täiskasvanuni.

Autor kasutab väga palju näiteid põnevatest uuringutest, mille nimekiri on välja toodud teose lõpus. Nii et kui mõni uuring tundub nii huvitav, et tahaks seda isegi lugeda, siis otsi see kohe välja. Raamatu lõpus olevat nimekirja pikkust nähes võid kindel olla, et kui uuringute autori(te) nime meeles ei ole, siis parem otsi uuringust rääkiv koht õigest peatükist uuesti välja. Veidi tüütu.

Lõpuks tulebki välja tõde, mida on viisistanud näiteks biitlid, aga mis on vanem kui meie: "All you need is love." Tõde, kujutlusvõime ja armastus on need inimlikud väärtused, mis aitavad meil areneda ja olla iseenda paremad minad. Muide, raamatust leiab häid soovitusi, kuidas mitte lasta kodust kaasa antud pahupooltel mõjutada oma elusaatust. Nii et eneseabiõpikuga on mingil määral siiski tegemist.

[Jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is nearly 15 years old, and it felt that way to me; having read other books on infant development lately, I found it a less informative repeat of other information I've read elsewhere. I did enjoy some of the studies referenced, like how infants interpret movement and common first words. Sometimes the authors seemed to be too self-referential, and entertaining themselves with their own anecdotes or theories (like the exhausting "scientist as child" chapter). While it was a reasonable overview, I'd probably recommend a book like "Einstein Never Used Flash Cards" over this one.

[Sahana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Content:

The book is a thesis about how infants and children solve the ancient philosophical problems of knowledge: Problem of External World, Problem of Other Minds, and Problem of Language. The authors make an argument that children have innate rational learning mechanisms that allow them to learn more about themselves and the world around them. The thesis is in the title -- babies are scientists. This book came out in 1999, and just 30 years prior, many male psychologists insisted that children were blank slates purely driven by emotions (of course caregivers AKA mothers knew better). Alternatively, Gopnik argues that children systematically explore, learn, and revise their concepts of the world around them ( in a rational, statistical manner). She also emphasizes that adults are important inputs in children's innate learning algorithm.

Critique on Writing:

The book's pacing felt off-- the chapters did not exactly tell a cohesive story (which is important for a pop science book). Additionally, there were a lot redundant/paraphrased ideas throughout the book that became tedious to go through at times (I imagine this to be true even if you have no prior knowledge of the content). Since I know Gopnik's research program, I was able to keep up and get through it. However, it can be easy to get lost in the sauce with all the examples and their implications.

On a separate note, the authors attempted to scatter "relatable" humor throughout the book which I found to be a bit distracting at times (and made interesting analogies to sex and romance too, *sighs psychologist*). I think my few grievances could be due to the fact that I already know much of the literature the book discusses; this could explain why I did not feel easily engaged. Still, I recommend this book, especially to those unfamiliar with cognitive development. It is an enlightening read on the importance of conducting cognitive science/psychology research with the youngest members of our society.

[Rachid Rd · Rating 3 out of 5]

First 3 chapters are good and still up to date, on what the baby knows and learns about minds, the world and language. Analogies and comparison with computers are great but now algorithms are working way better than it used to. Conclusion was too much lyrical I got bored

[Viola · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind has a great premise – that babies are a lot smarter and much more cognitively capable than previously thought. The three co-authors of this book explore and develop this main premise by first introducing the historical assumptions about babies and then contrasting that with research within the field of developmental psychology for infants, which started around the 1970s. The research, as they report, consistently paints a picture of very intelligent human beings deciphering the new world around them. And the authors do not hide their utter and complete awe of babies. Great premise. I buy it already. I don’t need to be convinced of it.

But, for a book that has “scientist” in its title and that begins by touting itself as a book about science, there is actually very little science presented. All conclusions of the research is presented in general terms with zero data, as if the conclusions were just accepted as fact with no variation, nuance, or controversy. That isn’t science. I’m not accusing the authors of making up the conclusions or of the facts not being backed up by the appropriate scholarly articles. Indeed, the notes and references sections are quite extensive. But in the text of the book, there is no presentation or discussion of the results of experiments.

For example, one of the results presented early on tells us that babies can distinguish their mother’s voice and prefer it. Well, is this universal? Is the result that 100% the babies tested turned towards their mother’s voice over a stranger? What was the sample size? Are there competing theories to explain the same behavior? Is preference solely determined by heads turning? When was this study done? What progress has been made since then? Is this a generally accepted fact in the field because it has been successfully replicated? And that’s just the start of my questions.

The book is organized into 7 chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the general premise of the book and introduces the three main problems of babies: (1) the problem of Other Minds, (2) the problem of the External World (i.e., Things), and (3) the problem of Language. Then the next three chapters elaborates on each of these topics in turn. That gives us a total of 4 chapters.

Next comes the worst chapter ever – Chapter 5. What in the world were the authors thinking in writing this awful chapter? And what kind of editor would allow it to remain? The chapter repeats the previous chapters and then goes into a bizarre comparison of scientists to babies. As in scientists are like babies. What?!? No! It’s absurd. It’s as if the authors are so enamored of babies that they want to force their adult square pegs into the babies round hole. It doesn’t work, no matter how much you try or desire it.

The last two chapters, thankfully, return to sanity. Chapter 6 offers a deeper understanding of the brain, how it works, and how it gets wired. Quite interesting. And Chapter 7 concludes by touching upon policy implications. Reasonable enough.

All in all, I can’t really say that I recommend this book. In addition to all the above problems, having been written in 1999, surely the information is dated and new research has cropped up. I’m glad that the authors are arguing in favor of the awesome cognitive abilities of babies. I agree with that. But I need a more scientific discussion, especially for a book that purports to be about science. I got more statistics out of a potty training book. Just a mere how-to book reported statistics like the average age of boys and girls being potty trained and average times of how long it took and the percentage of boys and girls potty trained by age 4.

[Tracy Lowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an excellent introduction to understanding child development. The authors take the time to remind readers that although babies are individuals. Babies have perceptions about the world—they are constantly absorbing information and analyzing and interpreting it to draw their own conclusions. The authors take the time to clearly explain the thought process and how they acquire knowledge. Plenty of case studies and anecdotal evidence make the science of infant brain development accessible and easy to understand.

The book follows a logical path starting with background information about the different views of infant development over the years. The first chapters then describe what children know about people, things and language. The final half of the book addresses what scientists have learned about children’s minds and brains before a concluding chapter that puts the book into context by addressing ways which this research has been applied and also by suggesting further directions.

I would recommend this book to both parents and professionals. Parents will find the book enlightening as a way of understanding what their baby knows about the world and how they are learning this. Professionals will find helpful theories, research and explanations which can underline their practice and further the field of infant development. This book is an excellent resource for both parents and professionals.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this explanation of how babies learn and the scientific experiments that people do to them to determine this. It covers how we learn language and that the other person is different from you and one other topic that I've forgotten. The majority of the book was fascinating and made babies so much more understandable. (There's a reason they mimic your gestures. There's a reason they can make all kinds of sounds.) The last chapter was a long-winded conclusion which just restated all of the previous interesting information. If you have no time, just read the last chapter and if you have more time, read the rest and skip the last chapter.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was essentially a review of my developmental psych class from college though a but more detailed and poetic. I felt as if I had to push myself to get through some of it, namely chapter five, as other readers have commented. Overall, I am glad I read it, but I am enthusiastically looking forward to getting back into some fiction.

[Alex Ponce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Desde que vi este libro, me pareció sumamente interesante, principalmente por su título, El científico en la cuna: Lo que el aprendizaje temprano nos dice acerca de la mente. Este libro aborda un tema que siempre ha captado mi atención: el estudio de la mente y su funcionamiento. La obra se centra especialmente en los bebés, explorando lo que podemos aprender de ellos y lo que ellos ya saben desde edades muy tempranas. Desde el principio sentí que sería un texto del cual podría obtener mucho conocimiento.

En el capítulo 1, los autores plantean preguntas fundamentales sobre cómo llegamos a comprender el mundo y cómo los bebés desarrollan su intuición. Este desarrollo ocurre a través de la observación, la exploración y la forma en que el cerebro procesa estas experiencias. Me pareció fascinante cómo explican que los bebés no solo observan su entorno, sino que también extraen patrones y generan hipótesis, prácticamente como pequeños científicos en acción.

El capítulo 2 profundiza en cómo los bebés aprenden de las personas mayores que los rodean. Aquí se analiza el conocimiento innato que los recién nacidos traen consigo y cómo lo utilizan como base para adquirir nuevos aprendizajes. Me impactó especialmente la descripción del papel de la imitación en el desarrollo temprano: los bebés no solo copian acciones, sino que también forman preferencias e intuiciones a partir de este proceso. Los estudios citados en este capítulo muestran cómo el condicionamiento en la infancia influye profundamente en su desarrollo.

En el capítulo 3, se exploran las maneras en que los niños comprenden y aprenden de las cosas que los rodean. Me resultó muy interesante cómo procesan imágenes en tres dimensiones y cómo utilizan estas representaciones para explorar su entorno. También me llamó mucho la atención el análisis sobre las diferencias en la percepción y aprendizaje en niños con condiciones específicas como el autismo o el síndrome de Williams. Estos casos aportan perspectivas fascinantes sobre el funcionamiento del cerebro en distintas circunstancias.

El capítulo 4 se centra en el lenguaje, abordando temas como la gramática y las diferencias culturales en el aprendizaje lingüístico. Aunque me pareció interesante al principio, sentí que mi interés comenzó a disminuir a medida que avanzaba. Los ejemplos relacionados con programas de televisión o series no lograron captar mi atención como lo hicieron los capítulos anteriores. Sin embargo, reconozco que las ideas planteadas en esta sección son valiosas para entender cómo los niños desarrollan habilidades lingüísticas.

En los últimos capítulos, mi interés decayó un poco más, pero debo admitir que el libro, en su conjunto, es un excelente recurso para quienes buscan una introducción al funcionamiento del cerebro en los primeros años de vida. Lo recomiendo a cualquier persona interesada en la neurociencia o el desarrollo infantil, ya que ofrece una base sólida para comprender cómo funciona la mente humana desde sus etapas más tempranas.

[Stuart Macalpine · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book about the way children's understanding of the world develops in the first few years and indeed months of life. Some fascinating insights, for example that very young babies identify objects primarily by their trajectory and even if they change shape or form behind a screen and a tractor comes out as a rabbit, they will continue to assume it is the same object that is travelling at the same speed and on the same trajectory as when it went in, and the fact that this changes as babies begin to categorise objects differently. Also very interesting about babies' proficiency with object classification versus action classification depending on the grammatical structure of the language they learn early on.

I found the presence of a rather strong ethnocentrism in the asides and anecdotes distracting.

[Ibid. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good. Has some rather unfunny little quips throughout, mostly related to being in academia, for the sake of making the scientific information more interesting for a common audience. But looking past that—this book was very insightful. A lot of the information you'd probably already be familiar with if you took a human growth and development class in college, but there were some phenomena I wasn't actually familiar with. Could have elaborated more on the effect of trauma and abuse during early development other than the Genie case, but I suppose that's another book for another time; this is only a primer to the field.

Overall, if youd like a clue to what childhood developmental psych is about—this is good!

[Grégoire Préchac · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un sujet très intéressant mais un très mauvais format. Choisir volontairement de retirer tous les aspects techniques pour être "plus accessible" rend la chose très peu appréciable en ce qu'on se retrouve très souvent dans l'attente de la distinction entre la théorie et ce que l'on sait et qu'elle ne vient jamais. Pourquoi ne pas faire de tableaux ? de schémas ? de références directes ?

[Manoj Chandrashekar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a parenting book, but a book every parent must read. :)

[Christine Kenney · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this up at the suggestion it could allay future parental fears that we were not providing an enriching, hyper-structured experience for our infant. There were about 10 pages devoted to this topic in the final chapter (chasing an alarming chapter about developmental learning windows and neural connections atrophying if not sufficiently stimulated).

It could have been the version I was reading, but the remainder of the book read like it was written by a 3 author committee that couldn't quite align on who their target audience was (machine learning researchers looking for biological analogs? parents? evolutionary biologists?) and valued conflict avoidance too much to identify and agree to rewrite the weaker sections.

[Tina Melamed · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will follow these women to the ends of the earth. The book definitely is for a popular audience which isn’t my favorite way to hear about research, but I’ve read all the studies they talked about and that made this more enjoyable.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

"For human beings, nurture is our nature. The capacity for culture is part of our biology, and the drive to learn is our most important and central instinct. The new developmental research suggests that our unique evolutionary trick, our central adaptation, our greatest weapon in the struggle for survival, is precisely our dazzling ability to learn when we are babies and to teach when we are grown-ups."

"There is also a deeper sense in which we have less control than responsibility. The whole point of the enterprise, after all, is to end up creating an autonomous agent, a person who can leave us, who can choose to make grave mistakes and decide to be thoroughly miserable. It’s like falling utterly, madly, deeply in love and yet knowing that in twenty years the object of your affections will leave you for other lovers and, in fact, that your job is to make your beloved leave you for other lovers. The very best outcome is that our children will end up as decent, independent adults who will regard us with bemused and tolerant affection."

"Babies are designed to learn about the real world that surrounds them, and they learn by playing with the things in that world, most of all by playing with the people who love them. The scientific research says that we should do just what we do when we are with our babies—talk, play, make funny faces, pay attention.
In particular, when we take on the adult obligation of caring for children, we don’t give up the Romantic project, we participate in it. We participate simply by watching children. Think of some completely ordinary, boring, everyday walk, the couple of blocks to the local 7-Eleven store. Taking that same walk with a two-year-old is like going to get a quart of milk with William Blake. The mundane street becomes a sort of circus. There are gates, gates that open one way and not another and that will swing back and forth if you push them just the right way. There are small walls you can walk on, very carefully. There are sewer lids that have fascinatingly regular patterns, and scraps of brightly colored pizza-delivery flyers. There are intriguing strangers to examine carefully from behind a protective parental leg. There is a veritable zoo of creatures, from tiny pill bugs and earthworms to the enormous excitement, or terror, of a real barking dog. The trip to the 7-Eleven becomes a hundred times more interesting, even though, of course, it does take ten times as long. Watching children awakens our own continuing capacities for wonder and knowledge."

"One of the great puzzles of psychology is the phenomenon of infantile amnesia, the fact that, as adults, we can’t remember things that happened to us much before we were three years old. It’s especially puzzling because, as we’ve seen, two- and three-year-olds and even infants seem to remember past events quite well, as good as or even better than adults’. Recall that even the one-year-olds in Andy’s imitation study could remember for a week that the experimenter had touched his forehead to the box.
For adults this kind of continuous autobiographical memory depends on certain ideas about the mind. What makes our memories special is not just the fact that we know that certain things happened in the past, but that we know they happened to us. When we remember our past, we recapture not just what happened but what we thought and felt about what happened, how those events seemed to us. But, of course, that depends on being able to understand what it means to have thoughts. It depends on understanding how minds work.
When we are three, we don’t seem to be able to understand the difference between our past thoughts and our present thoughts, though we do understand the difference between past events and present events. And we don’t seem to recollect our past thoughts when they conflict with current ones. This may explain why we can’t construct a continuous autobiographical story out of what happens to us."

"When very young babies first try to influence the external world, they may not differentiate between physical and psychological causality, and this may lead to the apparently magical and irrational quality of many of their actions. They make the mistake of using psychological means to try to influence the physical world. Smiling and cooing can get a reaction from Mom even though you’re not physically attached to her. It’s as if they think maybe they’ll have the same effect on the mobile.
In fact, much of what we think of as magical, irrational thinking in adult life may really reflect the same sort of confusion between physical and psychological causality. Shamans and magicians say special words, wave their hands in particular ways, and take care in choosing particular garments in order to influence events in their world. This may seem odd and irrational, but when you think about it, all of us do this when we’re trying to influence other people (well, two out of three of us for the garments). If you can use words to get someone into a white-hot rage or into bed with you, why not try to use words to give someone a disease or make her pregnant? “Magical procedures” of this type, whether in children or in adults, are, in fact, ineffective, but believing in them may not really be irrational—just mistaken. They may be based on a confusion about where psychological causality leaves off and ordinary physical causality begins."

"Two-year-olds have just begun to realize that people have different desires. Our broccoli experiment shows that children only begin to understand differences in desires when they are about eighteen months old. Fourteen-month-olds seem to think that their desires and ours will be the same. 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."


"Giving birth is.. like a cross between running a marathon and having the most enormous, shattering, irresistible orgasm of your life." (This can't possibly be right.)

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Minds, brains and how children learn. More about stages and steps babies take to learn. Not too much instruction or advice beyond, let them play. They will stimulate themselves plenty and all babies eventually hit certain stages, minor variations happen depending on how we stimulate them.

[Akhil Jain · Rating 3 out of 5]

My fav quotes (not a review):
• "Babies who are figuring out what people think play imitation games; babies who are figuring out how we see objects play hide-and-seek; babies who are figuring out the sounds of language babble."
• "We call it the theory theory. (The theory is that children have theories of the world.)"
• "The theories translate the input—the evidence scientists gather—in-to a more abstract representation of reality. Just"
• "Just as children ignore or reinterpret the facts that don’t fit their representations, scientists, at least initially, often ignore or reinterpret facts that don’t fit their theories. Nor is this necessarily a bad thing. We wouldn’t want to rewrite the laws of physics every time an undergraduate screws up in his lab section and gets a weird result. In fact, one advantage of having a theory, for scientists as well as children, is that it lets you know what you should pay attention"
• "Children are mostly concerned about explaining evidence, not deciding if it’s reliable."
• "brain’s energy consumption reaches full adult levels at around two years of age. By three the little child’s brain is actually twice as active as an adult brain. This bristling activity remains at twice the level of an adult until the child reaches the age of nine or ten. It begins to decline around then but reaches adult levels only at about eighteen."
• "British prime minister once intoned that the press wanted “power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” Perhaps it’s fitting that the prerogative of the mother is the opposite of the prerogative of the harlot: we parents have responsibility without power."
• "We wish someone would tell us what to do, but on the other hand, we don’t want anybody telling us what to do."
• "The most important positive advice is that parents, and grown-ups in general, need to be allowed the time and energy to exercise their natural ability to help babies learn."
• "hundred years ago there were not only relatively few American mothers working outside the home, there were almost equally few American fathers working outside the home. This is because the vast majority of Americans were farmers, and farm families, men, women, and children, work and live, learn and teach in the same place."
• "When we look attentively, carefully, and thoughtfully at the things around us, they invariably turn out to be more interesting, more orderly, more complex, more strange, and more wonderful than we would ever have imagined. That’s what happened when Kepler looked carefully at the stars, when Darwin looked at finches, when Marie Curie looked at pitchblende ore."
• "To use our earlier example of the picture of the house, many Americans think the prototypical house has a chimney because that’s been true of most of the houses they’ve seen. Once they form this prototype,"
• "English-speaking mothers tended to name objects a lot, while Korean-speaking mothers were more likely to talk about actions."
• The grave look is directed at you because you and your reaction, rather than the lamp cord itself, are the really interesting thing. If the child is a budding psychologist, we parents are the laboratory rats.

[Joe Flynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucid and illuminating despite its relative age as a science book. 4.5 stars.

The general hypothesis is that babies learn quite like scientists do, or rather scientists remember how to think like babies! It plays out well, we see how babies encounter and overcome serious conceptual hurdles, the problem of other minds, that the world exists outside of subjective experience, and not just that sounds are words but that words have meanings. Doing this by making observations, predictions, theory building, and crucially adjusting or reprogramming these based on new data via a positive feedback circuit.

We also have solid theory building, notably the idea that we evolved a drive that takes pleasure from explanations of the world, from working things out. Paired with the 'pain' of confusion. This giving us a long term evolutionary advantage.

I say science book but I must add there is plenty of excellent and well written philosophy here too, it is explained that one of the authors studied philosophy at Oxford before persuing developmental psychology, it shows.

The strongest sections (see the sections on language) seemed authored by Alison Gopnik. I see she also wrote 'the philosopher in the crib' not surprising and I'm sure also great! She writes well for the New Yorker too.

This is not a guide for raising children though it has helped me understand them more. Adding priceless depth to the little things each day. There are ingenious experiments that dispell common myths and break new ground. The sections on language even helped me with my French studies! The text is speckled with some astounding facts about babies brains! Truly fascinating.

The popular analogy of the brain as computer is used well here. In fact I was recommended this book by an AI researcher, the sections on AI remain prescient and well thought out even 20 years later. Brilliant to see both the progress (in some narrow fields) and the lack of it due to the hard issues babies solve so quickly! Interested to see the authors thoughts here now.

There are funny and touching anecdotes, plus an impassioned section on what matters in child development, though this also touches on the time the book is from - dating it to the Clinton administration. I'm sure new data and findings have pushed the field forwards greater heights, with some of it probably from the authors. Small but unavoidable issue. I would have took half a star off for this but I am compelled to add it back on for an excellent take down of post modernism.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairly interesting read. Really should help understanding the why behind certain actions and mannerisms Jensen exhibits throughout the first 3-4 years of life. Lots of it is skimmable but the dozen or so things to remember are worth the read.

Last chapter has a lot of cool points about the development of the neural network in all humans. The young mind is able to grasp and sponge so much more than even the teen and especially the adult.

Instagrammed the major points. A good summary of them from another reviewer:

Some of the highlights:

-It turns out their brains are firing up twice as intensively than our poor adult brain. Hence, the constant amazement.

-Kids will learn foreign language without forced constraints or patterns of their mother tongue, if they do it until around the age 7. They will not have an accent if they learn it by puberty.

-One year olds and alike are completely influenced by parents' choices - when we say that something is tasty (even if it reeks), kid trusts us, and vice versa. Beware, this paradise ends soon.

-The terrible twos are not exclusively terrible - they are beginning to understand that other people are different from them and tend to like different things. So they elope on a mission to see what things exactly and how much. And "no" doesn't mean anything to them for some time.

-First time I've heard about Williams syndrome, the opposite of Autism in some respects.

-"Motherese", or the semi-moronic language which parents use to talk to their kids is actually a useful thing (slow, repetitive, full of emotion), damn it.

-Oh, and playing Mozart to your toddler doesn't do shit.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind" by Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl explores infant and child development, challenging the notion that children are passive learners. Instead, it posits that babies are active, sophisticated "scientists," engaging in observation, hypothesis formation, experimentation, prediction, and revision.

Key insights from the book include:

- **Babies as Scientists**: Infants learn about the world like scientists through exploration and experiments.
- **Innate Drive to Learn**: Humans have a fundamental, evolutionary drive to learn, especially evident in early childhood.
- **Sophisticated Cognitive Abilities**: Babies are born with impressive cognitive skills, including object permanence and understanding of causality.
- **Role of Imitation**: Imitation is crucial for social learning and skill acquisition.
- **Motherese**: Exaggerated speech enhances language learning by emphasizing key sounds and words.
- **Statistical Learning**: Babies analyze language patterns to understand grammar and meanings.
Social Experimentation: Children actively explore social interactions to understand others' minds and beliefs.
- **Play as Experimentation**: Play is a systematic way for children to test theories about the world.
- **Dynamic Brain Development**: The infant brain is highly adaptable, shaped by experiences and interactions.
- **Insights into Adult Cognition**: Studying child development sheds light on fundamental human cognitive processes.

The book reveals that early learning provides crucial insights into child and adult cognition.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is often very hard for me to read a book on a subject which I am currently studying or otherwise working in as a fun read or as a side book for entertainment. It's difficult to enjoy a topic or find new things to seek out independently regarding the field in which one works when it is a part of one's everyday life and strife (but don't get me wrong...I love what I do). However, this book was an exception to this rule. Given to me as a suggested read by a fellow colleague, I found that this book was not only highly enlightening about infant development but also a breeze to read. This was NOTHING like the dense material I am used to reading in my graduate and undergraduate studies but rather easy and written for the lay person audience in describing the complex nature of brain development while still discussing important research. The flow of this book was simply incredible and made the topic of brain development, a typically un-reader-friendly topic, very digestible. I would highly recommend for anyone who wants to learn about early development, whether educated professional, curious learner, or parent to pick up this book and take in the beauty and knowledge that the authors have to offer.

[Kevin Doran · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book while my wife was pregnant with our first child. This book contains comprehensive and useful insights from decades of studying the brain and mind of babies. It does a good job of explaining the experiments ran, and making sense of the results.

I was hoping this would contain more useful information for how to aid the development of my baby. It does have some of that, but there are less tips in this area than I would have liked. It does have very interesting information about how brains develop.

My main take away is that evolution has made parental instincts perfect for aiding the development of baby's brain. Even 'coo coo'ing at babies is useful because it allows the babies to see the mouth movements that produce that sound and reproduce them. Also, if a baby doesn't hear certain sounds within the first few years it becomes very difficult to learn languages with those sounds. For example, Mandarin and Japanese contain sounds not used in English, so if a young child hears those sounds early on it will be easier for them to learn those languages.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Scientist in the Crib is a breezy and accessible overview of the (then) known science concerning the development of the mind in early childhood. The authors' central claim is that babies are much more intelligent than adults assume them to be, and that many infant behaviors are actually the baby's way of experimenting and developing 'theories' about the world. Chapters are divided by topic, such as children's interactions with other people and language acquisition. Presumably in their effort to avoid writing a book that would intimidate non-scientists, the authors have kept the text essentially devoid of numerical data. While they explain experimental setup well enough, more detail regarding the results of the various experiments they describe would have been appreciated. I agree with other reviewers that the fifth chapter should have been cut; the authors' analogy between babies and computers is somewhat interesting, but the chapter retreads too much material from earlier in the book. The book feels the most dated when it discusses Autism Spectrum Disorder in children, which it describes as a "tragedy" for parents. The only practical advice for parents is found in the final chapter of the book, so the prospective reader should only read this volume cover-to-cover if they are interested in early childhood development for its own sake.

[Hyokun Yun · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides a very gentle and casual introduction to developmental psychology. As I was completely ignorant of the field, it was very interesting for me to learn how developmental psychologists set up experiments for babies, and what they have found about early learning. Authors' main thesis that babies iteratively update their understanding of the world through observations and interactions with people, and that such a learning process is very similar to the research process of scientists, are quite amusing. Authors were not so ambitious, however, and the book does not extend much beyond this thesis, which was a little bit disappointing to me; this book just contains about 200 pages, and only handful of experimental results are discussed. They also insert jokes and their anecdotes time to time, which were mildly distracting, but understandable for a casual book.