The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life

by Alison Gopnik

The puzzling fact about human beings is that our capacity for change, both in our own lives and through history, is the most distinctive and unchanging thing about us.

We begin with the capacity to learn more effectively and more flexibly about our environment than any other species. This knowledge lets us imagine new environments, even radically new environments, and act to change the existing ones. Then we can learn about the unexpected features of the new environment that we have created, and so change that environment once again and so on. What neuroscientists call plasticity—the ability to change in the light of experience—is the key to human nature at every level from brains to minds to societies.

What is childhood? It’s a distinctive developmental period in which young human beings are uniquely dependent on adults. Childhood literally couldn’t exist without caregivers. Why do we go through a period of childhood at all? Human beings have a much more extended period of immaturity and dependence, a much longer childhood, than other species, and this period of immaturity has become longer as human history has gone on (as we parents of twenty-somethings may recognize with a sigh). Why make babies so helpless for so long, and why make adults invest so much time and energy in caring for them? This protracted period of immaturity is intimately tied up with the human capacity for change. Our human capacities for imagination and learning have great advantages; they allow us to adapt to more different environments than any other species and to change our own environments in a way that no other animal can. But they also have one great disadvantage—learning takes time. You don’t want to be stuck exploring all the new possible ways to hunt deer when you haven’t eaten for two days, or learning all the accumulated cultural wisdom about saber-toothed tigers when one is chasing you. It would be a good idea for me to spend a week exploring all the capabilities of my new computer, as my teenage son would, but with the saber-toothed tigers of grant deadlines and classes breathing down my neck, I’ll just go on relying on the old routines. An animal that depends on the accumulated knowle...

This basic division of labor between children and adults is reflected in their minds, their brains, their everyday activities, and even their conscious experience. Babies’ brains seem to have special qualities that make them especially well suited for imagination and learning. Babies’ brains are actually more highly connected than adult brains; more neural pathways are available to babies than adults. As we grow older and experience more, our brains “prune out” the weaker, less used pathways and strengthen the ones that are used more often. If you looked at a map of the baby’s brain it would look like old Paris, with lots of winding, interconnected little streets. In the adult brain those little streets have been replaced by fewer but more efficient neural boulevards, capable of much more traffic. Young brains are also much more plastic and flexible—they change much more easily. But they are much less efficient; they don’t work as quickly or effectively.