Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA03912 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 6 Jun 2000 14:29:54 +0100 Subject: Fwd: The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 09:27:05 -0400 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas est veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "memetics list" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>, <skeptic@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Message-ID: <20000606132723.AAA9718@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn
by Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl
Reviewed by Sibylle Hechtel
William Morrow, 1999
Posted May 26, 2000 Issue 79
Review
I wish I could have read The Scientist in the Crib when my son was born.
Authors Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl discuss not
only what babies do, but also how and why they do what they do. The three
scientists investigate why babies flirt, what they hear when we speak to
them, and why they prefer looking at stripes. They even try to study what
babies think.
Gopnik, at the University of California at Berkeley, and Meltzoff and
Kuhl, both at the University of Washington, write for everyone interested
in the mind and brain. Their humorous treatment of controversies in
science helps them succeed remarkably well at their goal "to let
nonscientists understand developmental science."
They offer readers stories such as that of the Russian scientists Lev
Vygotsky and his student Alexander Luria. In the 1930s, these researchers
attempted to study the effect of literacy on cognition and perception.
Vygotsky sent Luria to eastern Russia to determine whether illiterate
Tatars experienced perceptual illusions.
"Luria, wildly excited by his results," the authors write, "couldn't wait
... . . and telegraphed Vygotsky, 'Tatars have no illusions.'" He was
immediately arrested; there was only one subject about which Tatars could
have no illusions in Stalinist Russia. Later Luria "became a military
brain surgeon at the front - it was safer. Vygotsky avoided the purges
only by dying young. . . . A year after his death, Stalin . . .
[outlawed] developmental psychology."
In discussing more recent revolutionary events in cognitive science, the
authors explain how both sociological and technological factors have
influenced the field. "So long as men dominated academia, developmental
psychology was inevitably marginalized," they write. ". . . Until 1973
there were no women at all in the Berkeley psychology department. . . .
The advent of women academics in the university helped to make studying
babies and children seem respectable."
According to Gopnik and her coauthors, two technological advances
revolutionized this field: the video recorder, as a tool to observe
babies' nonverbal behavior, and the digital computer, to give it
theoretical justification. I would add a third: the pill. It allowed
women to finish their education before having children, and to limit
family size. This gave women with academic careers time to observe each
child.
The authors claim that the greatest conceptual breakthrough in thirty
years is the idea that the brain is a kind of computer. Of course,
scientists of every era have compared the brain to the most advanced
technology of their day - a loom, a telephone switchboard, and now a
computer. Nevertheless, the authors see the most recent comparison as the
basis of the new field of cognitive science and posit that in the last
thirty years we have learned more about what babies know than in the
preceding 2,500 years.
The change in ideology is crucial: A scientist who views babies as small
computers, as opposed to "slightly animate vegetables - carrots that
could cry," expects more. With this shift in ideology, scientists can
give the baby a precise, defined input that stimulates their senses
(sight, hearing, and touch) and measures the output (reaction).
Looking at the brain as a biological computer, the authors suggest that
"if cognitive psychologists are clever enough about giving babies the
right kind of input, and about interpreting their output, we should be
able to work out their program, too."
Scientists, for example, asked two questions: "Do babies think two things
are the same or different?" and "Do they prefer one or the other?" To
find out, researchers showed babies two objects, a picture of a face and
a picture of a checkerboard, for example. An observer who could not see
what the baby saw, recorded the infant's eye movements to see which
picture the baby observed longer. Using these and similar techniques,
scientists demonstrated that babies prefer human faces over other sights.
Similar experiments indicated that babies prefer human voices over other
sounds.
How much babies know surprised researchers. Twenty-five years ago,
psychologists claimed that newborns have no developed cortex and only the
simplest automatic responses. Even the eminent child psychologist Jean
Piaget thought newborn babies have only reflexes.
Today, scientists think that babies' representations of the world are
surprisingly complex. These representations permit babies to make
predictions about the future. If there are discrepancies between their
prediction and what happens, babies appear to be able to modify their
rules and create new representations.
Young babies imitate adults, a trait that leads them to behaviors not
genetically determined. Through imitation, children learn how to behave
in their social world. Babies also imitate other children; in fact, older
siblings are sometimes more important than parents in this regard. The
authors claim that imitation is an innate mechanism for learning from
adults, a method of learning not available to most other animals.
In a recent review in Science, however, primate researchers suggest that
a chimpanzee's behavior may also be shaped by influences in the
environment in which it is raised. They mention 39 behaviors that differ
between separate groups. Perhaps the study of primate behavior, like that
of babies' minds, awaits development of the appropriate ideology as well
as the appropriate technology.
In the penultimate chapter, the authors discuss the brain development of
children. A baby is born with most of the neurons it will ever have. The
brain grows primarily because the number of connections between neurons,
the number of synapses, increases. Synaptic activity can be estimated by
measuring the amount of glucose the brain uses. Such measurements
indicate that children's brains are much more active than those of
adults. Synaptic activity reaches adult levels by about age two. Activity
is twice the adult level at age three and remains high until age nine to
ten. It starts to decline to adult levels by about age eighteen.
I'd like to see current data here from neurobiologists. Our
preconceptions about neuronal loss with age, and the lack of neurogenesis
in adults, have been overturned in the past few years. Scientists once
thought that no neurogenesis took place in the adult brain, but now
believe that neurons proliferate throughout life.
The Scientist in the Crib doesn't give parents a blueprint for how to
raise their children, but it can help them make informed decisions. The
authors explain that "There is a largely dishonorable history of 'expert
advice' to mothers." This history included "male 'experts' ordering women
around on the basis of a science that was supposed to be incomprehensible
to them. . . . One benefit of knowing the science is a kind of protective
skepticism. . . . Knowing about science immunizes us from pseudoscience."
Reading this book can empower parents. The authors combine an appropriate
blend of theory and fact with amusing anecdotes and lively, engaging
stories to convey their points. They describe a paradigm shift - from
viewing babies as "crying carrots" to viewing them as biological
computers and something worth studying.
A woman wrote to the list server for the National Association of Science
Writers that she was attending another baby shower and wanted to give
something other than a rattle or baby outfit: "Could we suggest a good
book for prospective parents." I immediately wrote back, recommending The
Scientist in the Crib. Another woman also suggested this book. So if you
don't buy it for yourself, you can buy it as a baby-shower gift and sneak
in a few pages of reading before giving it away.
Sibylle Hechtel is a freelance writer whose articles' topics include
science and rock climbing.
Excerpt
"We think there are very strong similarities between some particular
types of early learning - learning about objects and about the mind, in
particular - and scientific theory change. In fact, we think they are not
just similar but identical. We don't just think that the baby computers
have the same general structure as the adult-scientist computers. . . .
We think that children and scientists actually use some of the same
machinery. Scientists are big children. Scientists are such successful
learners because they use cognitive abilities that evolution designed for
the use of children."
You may purchase this book (304 pp., hardcover) directly from:
Publisher ($24.00) Amazon.com (list $24.00, Amazon price $16.80, you save
30%)
© Elsevier Science Limited 2000
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