Babies Are for Learning

In her September 2011 TedTalk presentation, "What Do Babies Think?," Alison Gopnik makes this observation about babies:

"Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species.  So they're the protected blue sky guys who just have to go out and learn and have good ideas, and we're production and marketing.  We have to take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually put them to use.  Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species — kind of like caterpillars and butterflies — except that they're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.

If this is true, if these babies are designed to learn — and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning, that's what they're for — we might expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms.  And in fact, the baby's brain seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet."

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