Babies and children are conscious of far more than we once realized. Their every sense is engaged as they discover, file away, analyze, and act upon information about their world. Some people believe that babies are smarter, more thoughtful, more imaginative, more caring, and more conscious than adults. There’s been a revolution in our scientific understanding of this stage of life.
Alison Gopnik, a child development psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of California, has written a number of books on cognitive development. Among them is the influential book, The Philosophical Baby, The Scientist in the Crib.
Her work draws on psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical developments in child development research to understand how the human mind learns, how and why we love, our ability to innovate, as well as giving us a deeper appreciation for the role of parenthood.
In this 2011 TED Talk, What do babies think?, Alison suggests that we should think about babies being a different developmental stage of the same species, like caterpillars and butterflies, except that babies are the brilliant butterflies flitting around the garden and exploring, and we’re the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
Related Images:
