New Study of the Baby Brain
Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California has written a book offering new insight into the minds of babies. Gopnik makes claims that are likely to surprise many people, including, “Any child will put the most productive scientist to shame.”
She recently sat down for an interview with Time magazine where she talked about her book, The Philosophical Baby. According to Gopnik babies “…babies take in much more information from different sources than adults do and work very hard to make sense of that information. It’s one reason we think babies sleep so much – they’re doing much harder work than grown-ups are.”
Well that is certainly an interesting explanation for the amount of sleeping babies need. Some people would say that they thought it was all about the growth process. Gopnik’s book also reveals that babies innately have a sense of what is right and what is wrong. She uses as an example the fact that a 14-month old will crawl over to pick up a pen the parent drops. She reveals that babies are sensitive to emotions, which certainly any parent would agree with. When you smile they will smile back, and if you feel sad, most babies seem to be able to pick up on that.
The psychologist said she plans to work with neuroscientists to understand more about why children are able to learn so rapidly. Understanding how learning fits with emotional development is also important she says. “Those two things have tended to be separate – there are people who study emotion and there are people who study knowledge. Increasingly, we’re realizing that those things go hand in hand for babies,” .
Parents need not feel pressured to shell out big bucks for educational toys. In her opinion, there is no evidence they really work. Of course, some parents will be quick to disagree with that. The bottom line in my opinion is to do what you think will work for your child.
Following a recent study which claimed that fetuses have memory, it is clear that a whole new frontier in intelligence is being explored. In the opinion of Gopnik, learning letters and numbers are not as important for babies as just picking up new things the way adults do. She offered some old but timeless advice that has come from her psychological studies of children, “pay attention to your kids and love them.” You certainly can’t argue with the science behind that one.
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Shannon @ Lullaby Baby Carriers says...
While I can’t disagree that babies’ must certainly be busy and possibly capable of more than we know, I find Gopnik’s example about babies knowing right from wrong to be a bit of a leap. Perhaps the baby picks up the pen that the parent drops because it made a noise, it’s interesting, and it’s within reach? Call me crazy, but I think simple curiosity is more likely than righting a wrong.