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The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind
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- About the Author
- Read an Excerpt
- What People are Saying
- Table of Contents
ISBN-13: 9780688177881
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date: 12-26-2000
Pages: 304
Product Dimensions: 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.68(d)
Alison Gopnik, Ph.D. is a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and a leading cognitive scientist. She is past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and is the author of more than seventy papers on philosophy, psychology, and children's early learning. She has also written for The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement. Mother of three, she lives with her family in Berkeley, California. Andrew N. Meltzoff, Ph.D. revolutionized the field of child psychology with his discoveries about how much infants know, learn, and remember. He is a professor of psychology and the University of Washington, and his research has been featured in Time, The New York Times, and museum exhibits worldwide. He and his wife, Dr. Kuhl, live with their daughter in Seattle, Washington. Patricia K. Kuhl, Ph.D. is the world's leading authority on speech development and is a professor of speech and hearing at the University of Washington. She was one of six scientists invited to present their research at the White House Conference on Early Learning and the Brain in 1997. Her recent findings on language acquisition and why parents speak "motherese" to their children made national headlines. She and her husband, Dr. Meltzoff, live in Seattle.
Ancient Questions and a Young Science Walk upstairs, open the door gently, and look in the crib. What do you see? Most of us see a picture of innocence and helplessness, a clean slate. But, in fact, what we see in the crib is the greatest mind that has ever existed, the most powerful learning machine in the universe. The tiny fingers and mouth are exploration devices that probe the alien world around them with more precision than any Mars rover. The crumpled ears take a buzz of incomprehensible noise and flawlessly turn it into meaningful language. The wide eyes that sometimes seem to peer into your very soul actually do just that, deciphering your deepest feelings. The downy head surrounds a brain that is forming millions of new connections every day. That, at least, is what thirty years of scientific research have told us. This book is about that research. What are these deeply familiar yet surprisingly strange creatures we call children really like? Of course, human beings have always wondered, pondered, and even agonized about their children. But most of the time, the questions people ask are practical. Some are immediate, questions about how to get them to eat more or cry less. Some are long-term, questions about how to turn them into the right kind of grown-ups. These are important questions, crucial for the survival of any civilization (not to mention any parent), but we won't have very much to say about them. This book won't tell you how to make babies easier or smarter or nicer, or how to get them to go to sleep or to Harvard. There are lots of books that do that, or anyway say they do, right between the cooking andhouse-repairs sections in your local bookstore. Our questions are both harder and easier than the practical questions. We want to understand children, not renovate them. While the purported answers to the practical questions fill volumes, all of us who have lived with babies and young children, or even just looked at them, have found ourselves asking deeper questions. We decided to become developmental psychologists and study children because there aren't any Martians. These brilliant beings with the little bodies and big heads are the closest we can get to a truly alien intelligence (even if we may occasionally suspect that they are bent on making us their slaves). Babies are fascinating, mysterious, and just plain weird. Watch awhile. A three-month-old catches sight of the stripes on a shopping bag and follows it carefully as her father carries it around the room, staring with intense cross-eyed concentration. A one-year-old visiting the zoo points at the elephant and says triumphantly and with great certainty, "Doggie!" A "terrible two-year-old" turns toward the expressly forbidden switch of the computer and slowly, deliberately, watching his mother every moment, erases the day's work. As we change diapers and wipe noses, all of us, no matter how preoccupied, find ourselves exclaiming, "What's going on in that little head of hers? Where on earth did he get that from?" Developmental psychologists have had the luxury of asking those questions systematically and even getting answers to them. We're actually starting to understand what's going on in that little head of hers and where on earth he got that from. Studying babies is full of fascination in its own right. But developmental research also helps answer a more general, deep, and ancient question, not just about babies but about us. We human beings, no more than a few pounds of protein and water, have come to understand the origins of the universe, the nature of life, and even a few things about ourselves. No other animal, and not even the most sophisticated computer, knows as much. And yet every one of us started out as the helpless creature in the crib. Only a few tiny flickers of information from the outside world reach that creature -- a few photons hitting its retinas, some sound waves vibrating at its eardrums -- and yet we end up knowing how the world works. How do we do it? How did we get here from there? The new research about babies holds answers to those questions, too. It turns out that the capacities that allow us to learn about the world and ourselves have their origins in infancy. We are born with the ability to discover the secrets of the universe and of our own minds, and with the drive to explore and experiment until we do. Science isn't just the specialized province of a chilly elite; instead, it's continuous with the kind of learning every one of us does when we're very small. Trying to understand human nature is part of human nature. Developmental scientists are themselves engaged in the same enterprise and use the same cognitive tools as the babies they study. The scientist peering into the crib, looking for answers to some of the deepest questions about how minds and the world and language work, sees the scientist peering out of the crib, who, it turns out, is doing much the same thing. No wonder they both smile. The Ancient Questions How can we know so much when our senses are so limited? This problem -- the problem of knowledge -- is one of the oldest and most profound problems of philosophy. The branch of philosophy called epistemology is devoted to it. Three versions of the problem are especially important and puzzling to grown-ups and children alike. We'll call them the Other Minds problem, the External World problem, and the Language problem. The new developmental psychology helps answer all three. Take a perfectly ordinary event. Every Sunday night, we sit around the dinner table. We serve up healthy leek and potato soup (which must be eaten before you get dessert), pass the salt and pepper, butter the bread, push our chairs back from the big wooden table. We laugh, fight, and tease one another. One of the big brothers invariably makes a rude joke at the expense of the little brother, who is hurt and demands an apology. No experience could be more banal, more domestic, more comfortable and familiar. Except that, actually, we don't experience any of this at all...Read an Excerpt
“This book is at once a masterful synthesis of the latest findings about the minds of children and a provacative argument that young children resemble practicing scientists. Few books about human development speak so eloquently to both scholars and parents.”
This book is a valuable addition to parents' libraries. It clearly delineates the way small infants and children learn. After reading it, parents can be enthralled as they watch their new babies imitate, learn the 'rules' of communication, and of speech learning. What an interesting book by three eminent 'baby-watchers'!What People are Saying About This
Howard Gardner
Table of Contents
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Preface and Acknowledgments
vii
Chapter 1
Ancient Questions and a Young Science
1
The Ancient Questions
4
Baby 0.0
6
The Other Socratic Method
10
The Great Chain of Knowing
11
Piaget and Vygotsky
14
The New View: The Computational Baby
20
Chapter 2
What Children Learn About People
23
What Newborns Know
25
The Really Eternal Triangle
32
Peace and Conflict Studies
35
Changing Your Point of View
40
The Conversational Attic
42
Learning About "About"
44
The Three-Year-Old Opera: Love and Deception
47
Knowing You Didn't Know: Education and Memory
51
How Do They Do It?
52
Mind-Blindness
53
Becoming a Psychologist
55
When Little Brother Is Watching
57
Chapter 3
What Children Learn About Things
60
What Newborns Know
64
The Irresistible Allure of Stripes
64
The Importance of Movement
65
Seeing the World Through 3-D Glasses
67
The Tree in the Quad and the Keys in the Washcloth
70
Making Things Happen
73
Kinds of Things
79
How Do They Do It?
83
World-Blindness
84
The Explanatory Drive
85
Grown-ups as Teachers
88
Chapter 4
What Children Learn About Language
92
The Sound Code
94
Making Meanings
97
The Grammar We Don't Learn in School
99
What Newborns Know
102
Taking Care of the Sounds: Becoming a Language-Specific Listener
106
The Tower of Babble
110
The First Words
112
Putting It Together
117
How Do They Do It?
120
Word-Blindness: Dyslexia and Dysphasia
120
Learning Sounds
122
Learning How to Mean
125
"Motherese"
128
Chapter 5
What Scientists Have Learned About Children's Minds
133
Evolution's Programs
134
The Star Trek Archaeologists
139
Foundations
143
Learning
147
The Developmental View: Sailing in Ulysses' Boat
149
Big Babies
153
The Scientist as Child: The Theory Theory
155
Explanation as Orgasm
162
Other People
164
Nurture as Nature
165
The Klingons and the Vulcans
170
Sailing Together
172
Chapter 6
What Scientists Have Learned About Children's Brains
174
The Adult Brain
175
How Brains Get Built
180
Wiring the Brain: Talk to Me
183
Synaptic Pruning: When a Loss Is a Gain
186
Are There Critical Periods?
189
The Social Brain
194
The Brain in the Boat
195
Chapter 7
Trailing Clouds of Glory
198
What Is to Be Done?
198
The Clouds
206
Notes
213
References
227
Index
265