Alison Gopnik
Alison Gopnik
Alison Gopnikis an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth16 June 1955
CountryUnited States of America
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.
To support the people we care about is intrinsic, it is not instrumental. It's not something we do because we're hoping to get some other outcome.
The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.
Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.
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.
We don't measure the quality of our other relationships by how well the other person turns out, for instance whether my husband is a better person after 10 years than he was when I first met him.
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.
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.
I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.
The thing that is most important is having people who are involved and engaged with the kids and also are not stressed and can be involved with them. And that's actually not boring and banal. That actually takes a lot of work to make that happen, and it's not something that our society does very well at all.
Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.
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.
Many philosophers say it's impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that's not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It's just that they haven't explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about.
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.