Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn’t lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways. – Alison Gopnik
We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously and effortlessly. – Alison Gopnik
The science can tell you that the thousands of pseudo-scientific parenting books out there – not to mention the ‘Baby Einstein’ DVDs and the flash cards and the brain-boosting toys – won’t do a thing to make your baby smarter. That’s largely because babies are already as smart as they can be; smarter than we are in some ways. – Alison Gopnik
The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There’s a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one. – Alison Gopnik
I’m the oldest of six children and I had my own first baby when I was 23. So I’ve always been interested in babies, and I had lots of opportunities to watch them. – Alison Gopnik
Historically, absolute IQ scores have risen substantially as we’ve changed our environment so that more people go to school longer. – Alison Gopnik
If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn’t look like there’s very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It’s easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are. – Alison Gopnik
Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities. – Alison Gopnik
I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children. – Alison Gopnik
Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. – Alison Gopnik
Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: ‘How should this society work? How should relationships among people work?’ The exploration is: ‘Who am I, what am I doing?’ – Alison Gopnik
As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness. – Alison Gopnik
Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways. – Alison Gopnik
One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way. – Alison Gopnik
Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn’t necessarily richer or poorer. – Alison Gopnik
Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It’s actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention. – Alison Gopnik
In most places and times in human history, babies have had not just one person but lots of people around who were really paying attention to them around, dedicated to them, cared to them, were related to them. I think the big shift in our culture is the isolation in which many children are growing up. – Alison Gopnik
What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers. – Alison Gopnik
The real excitement is collaborating with computer scientists and neuroscientists and starting to understand in detail how children learn so much so quickly. – Alison Gopnik
When nobody read, dyslexia wasn’t a problem. When most people had to hunt, a minor genetic variation in your ability to focus attention was hardly a problem, and may even have been an advantage. When most people have to make it through high school, the same variation can become a genuinely life-altering disease. – Alison Gopnik
What we want in students is creativity and a willingness to fail. I always say to students, ‘If you’ve never at some point stayed up all night talking to your new boyfriend about the meaning of life instead of preparing for the test, then you’re not really an intellectual.’ – Alison Gopnik
One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood. – Alison Gopnik
I’m afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them. – Alison Gopnik
Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. – Alison Gopnik
Our babies are like penguins; penguin babies can’t exist unless more than one person is taking care of them. They just can’t keep going. – Alison Gopnik
If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame. – Alison Gopnik
If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old. – Alison Gopnik
Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific – this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions. – Alison Gopnik
For better or worse, we live in possible worlds as much as actual ones. We are cursed by that characteristically human guilt and regret about what might have been in the past. But that may be the cost for our ability to hope and plan for what might be in the future. – Alison Gopnik
The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment. – Alison Gopnik
