August 16, 2012 • 39 mins
What goes on inside the minds of babes? Quite a lot, as it turns out. In this episode, Julie and Robert peer inside the infant brain to learn about their enhanced state of consciousness. Plus find out what baby brains have to do with alien abductions.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie.
We were just looking at an Onion article, weren't we were? Yeah.
It was from classic from seven. Uh, babies are stupid, Yeah,
(00:27):
which which was a phenomenally funny piece of the time
because you know, you read all this stuff about, oh,
babies are really you know, there's a lot going on
with the with the mind of an infant, and this
sort of turned that on its head by saying, you know,
actually babies are really stupid, because it's easy to to
sort of think think that on the surface because they
are they are helpless. Uh, they don't really don't really
(00:49):
understand how things work. They can't talk. They can't talk.
They're just crapping themselves like crazy, drooling and and and
just having intense emotional reactions to things, be at a
peekaboo game, Uh, some shiny object or um, uh, you know,
just or something even mildly unpleasant just set them off.
(01:10):
But turns out that they are learning machines. Yes, the
larval human is pretty amazing. They Yeah, they're absolutely amazing
in the same way that like a larval insight like it.
It doesn't look like much, but its whole thing is
eat and grow, eat and grow. Similar thing with the
with the larval human. It's it's it's whole mission is
to learn and grow, learn and grow and eat and
(01:31):
poop a lot. But learn, grow and think that. I think, yeah,
and this is very different for our species. Um. There
are some really good uh articles out there about this
extended childhood that we have, Like why in the world
does it take it so long to acquire language to
grow up to fend for ourselves? Yeah, because there are
(01:52):
their prey and most prey animals out there, such as
you know, deer, antelope, what have you. They're born and
they have to be on their feet and uh and
and running in pretty short order in order to survive.
There's no sticking around the nest necessarily or you know,
they just they have to turn into the adults very fast. Um. Likewise,
(02:14):
the kitten that my wife found is currently in a
box in our house. Bean, but like, uh, like pretty
pretty quickly, like we first got him. You know, he's
all you know, awkward and falling down and all and
and but and he's still awkward and falling down, but
you can already see him doing the things that cats
(02:35):
have to do. He's already running through the exercises of
hunting and pouncing and and you know, it's like all
the programming is there. And as soon as his body
catches up in just you know, a matter of you know,
months or weeks, he's gonna be good to go. He'll
be up and running. He doesn't need to be put
in a sling for ten months, right and carry it
all right. He also doesn't need to learn all that much, right,
(02:57):
So compared to other species, we humans, we have a
lunch a much longer period of immaturity, and psychologist Alice
and Gothnik actually says that there's a reason for that,
that long periods of immaturity are correlated to higher degree
of flexibility, intelligence, and learning. So, in other words, it's
neo cortex that we got, you know, thousands of thousands
of years ago that that that helps us so much
(03:18):
in our communication. Really takes a lot of effort, a
lot of resources to sort of feed that before we
can become uh, totally cognizance in a way that we
think of ourselves as adults. Right, And we see the
scenario in the classic crow versus chicken um argument, right,
because the chicken is is pretty stupid. There's not a
(03:39):
lot going on with the chicken, and they're up and
running pretty soon. They're up and running pretty soon, pretty fast.
You know, chick doesn't say a chicken very long. Pretty
soon it's a stupid chicken. Not so the crow. The
crow is pretty brilliant. I mean, the crow is a mean.
There have been all these fabulous studies about crow intelligence.
We could, we could and probably should do a whole
episode on crowl intelligence because their tool user they can
(04:00):
be trained to put coins, to collect coins and put
them into machines. Um. They're they're, they're they're just incredible,
incredible birds. But they also have a longer period of development. Well,
and as Alison up Nick says, one one of those
creatures ends up on the cover of Science and one
ends up in your soup pot. So there's there's a
(04:22):
reason for that. Right. Again, crows do have a longer
period of immaturity. Uh. But one of the things that
I think is really interesting is again this idea of
building up the neo cortex is communication centers in the
brain and um, we have touched on this a bit
in terms of babies, in their ability to mimic even
(04:44):
um they're crying. We talked about this German accent, yeah,
German accent or a French accent days after they're born,
such as their ability to to really absorb information about
how language works. And I thought that it was really
interesting to start this talk off with UM with language
(05:05):
sort of like the crux of our being, and I
wanted I've heard it described as the the operating system
for the human brain. Yeah, I mean, we're the We're
the hardware that you need windows on their right to
run it. Well, languages are windows. Yeah. Elizabeth Balky, she's
a cognitive psychologist. She has actually said like, this is
the reason why why we can do what we can do.
(05:25):
We have this competentive, comgnitorial approach to life because of language.
We can um, you know, enter into these scenarios where
let's say you're you're year old and you're trying to
figure out three dimensional areas. Um. But then you begin
to name things, and then you start to be able
to put this again, languages at the bedrock of this ability.
(05:49):
You begin to put these concepts with words, and you're
just lapping on more and more knowledge. Without this ability,
this language, then, which makes us uniquely human in terms
of its complexity, we wouldn't be the people we are today,
even just sitting here talking about this. Right, Like you
think of like what words do for us? Um, Like
(06:10):
you think of a word like genocide, one word that
that summons an intense amount of information about something that's
very complicated. Um Like, if I'm just if I don't
have a word for genocide, then they're trying to think
about it, like would occupy the entire mind, you know,
and you still wouldn't be able to grasp it. You
(06:30):
can sort of wrap it up in that term. And
then something like ballet is pretty complicated as well, but
I can wrap it up under the term ballet, and
then I can simultaneously hold both the word ballet and
genocide in my mind and collide those ideas, which you
can't do unless you have words for them. Right, And
this is an amazing thing that we can do. And
(06:51):
it turns out that, um, that the seeds for that
are present at birth. But before I want to talk
a little bit more about language, I did want to
mention Sean pj At this one in the century. He
wrote a book called Origins of Intelligence and Children, which
in and of itself is sort of like a revelation,
because what intelligence and children at that time period. Yeah,
(07:11):
just the idea that they're just bumbling buffoons that still
have everything in the world to learn and then under
certain definitions, aren't even real people yet, right They're not
exactly they're not they don't quite have a personhood right yet. Um,
they haven't acquired enough information. So that's what they used
to think of as as children. Just who are you know,
soon to be adults that haven't acquired enough information? Um.
(07:33):
But what he found is that qualitative thinking changes. In
other words, different kinds of learning comes online at different
points in development, and so you kind of think of
it as like we're preloaded with these modules in our brain,
but they don't fully develop until they get the cues
that they need. So I did want to flip over
really quickly and talk about Patricia Cool. She has a
(07:53):
great talk called The Linguistic Genius of Babies, and she
says that from zero to six months, babies are quote
citizens of the world, and they can distinguish between pronunciations
in every language, something that no adult brain can do,
because we eventually get pretty specialized in our language right
in our abilities. And she says that between eight and
(08:16):
ten months, babies exhibits statistical computation skills and their ability
to pick up and analyze language. So in other words,
they can take into account the relative frequency of the
sounds they hear and the transitional probabilities between syllables, and
this is what she says is statistical learning. So this
is all happening in their minds as we adults throw
(08:37):
a bunch of baby talk at them. Parentees, it's actually
called the parentees, although also called mothery'se uh. But it's
actually really important because there's that that sort of this
sort of changes in tone are important for the child
to begin to understand these different melodies of language. But
(08:58):
that zero to six months they is really fascinating to
me because if I hear Mandarin, I'm not going to
be able to distinguish between certain syllables because it is
not native to our standing. Yes, it's just an orange
to me, it's not a language barely making a sound,
but yeah, and why or are people always going I
was gonna make a really badgeck, but throwing ranges at
(09:21):
each other and trying to communicate instrument. I'm sorry, no,
not the manteline nice but no, I mean this is fascinating,
like how my ear has shut that out, that ability.
But these year to six month old kids, these infants
can actually just distinguish between these sounds, and she a.
Patricia Kool also says that kids by age seven begin
(09:45):
to fall off of linguistic map. What she means to
say is that language acquisition is absolutely open and optimal
before age seven. So and of course, you know, most
people our age didn't begin language lessons until later on
in their lives, which is sort of the wrong thing
to do, um. But that because by the time year seven,
(10:06):
your brain changes is and you're you're pruning a lot
of the neural connections that you don't necessarily need. So
we kind of lose that ability, um to some extent.
But one of the things that she points out is
that this one to one interaction is really important. You
have to see someone else's eyes in order to acquire language.
And we'll talk about the eyes and the importance about
(10:27):
that a little bit. So we we did a whole
episode I think more than one on math. And in
that we mentioned that the babies are capable of algorithmic
thinking even in early age. They don't have they don't
have numbers. They don't have this and this gets into
the whole question of his again his math a human
invention or a human discovery or something else. But the
(10:48):
idea here is that even though babies can't rattle off
one through ten, they have numbers. Since they can, they
can think algorithmically about the world around them, which is
which if you stop and think about that, I mean,
it's pretty phenomenal. Versus are sort of accepted mainstream viewing
of Oh, the child must be taught language, it must
(11:10):
be taught math, but it already has math. Yeah, And
this is why artificial intelligence is interested in babies because
in this way, as Elizabeth spoke, he says, they are root.
UM it's where human cognition and organization of the human
mind begins. And of course we want to try to
do this with computers as best that we can. UM.
(11:31):
I wanted to mention the world's first stored program electronic
digital computer. UH. This was in and it was called
the Small Scale Experimental Machine. It was also nicknamed Baby
and one of the programs that ran on it was
designed by Alan Turning. And we've talked about Alan Turning
before in terms of AI. He's a pioneer UM in
(11:52):
artificial intelligence and very I know, I was just thinking
about that yesterday. I was when I was revisiting some material. Yeah,
there's a great Radio Lab episode. I think it's shorty
or maybe it was a long I don't know, but
there was a reason Radio episode about him. That's really heartbreaking. Yeah,
he is a is an individual, is very very interesting
and UM certainly brilliant. He was. But Alison Gothnick talks
(12:16):
about Touring. She says that the classic Turing palm is
could you get a computer to be so sophisticated that
you couldn't tell the difference between the computer and a person.
But then Touring said that there was an even more
profound question, which was could you get a computer give
it the kind of data that every human being gets
as a child, and have it learned the kinds of
things things that a child can learn. Again, this is
(12:39):
the root uh brain that we're talking about, and certainly
machine learning is a is a huge part of our
ongoing development of AI. You know, like in creating machines
that work alongside humans. We want to do that so
that they can they can learn from their environment. So
machine learning is is key. And if you want to learn,
you learn to discover how something earns. The infant is
(13:02):
the place to look, right, And she says because they
have inductive learning techniques as well, just like computers. And
she even brings up the point that about fifteen years
ago researchers created Baiesian causal graphical models. Baisian is basically
like this inductive learning, right um. And these models map
out the way the world works for computers and also
(13:24):
mapped out patterns of probability. And this was really an
advance in computational um formal computation, I should say. In
about that same time, uh, that these computational systems were
coming online, cognitive psychologists began to form the idea that
babies are doing very much the same thing. So you
brought up this number sense that that kids have. And
(13:46):
what we're talking about here is Baiesian reasoning. That they
can take a random sample and understand the relationship between
that sample and the population is drawn from right, so
they can tell they can tell the difference between um,
three red balls and nine red balls. Yeah, not so much.
Maybe three red balls and four red balls. You know,
it becomes an algorithmic distinction there. But but yeah, they've
(14:10):
they've already got that hard wired in. Yeah. I mean
they are kind of like born accountants. Because if you
give a baby a picture an array of dots, and
there are four dots, and you have another array of
twelve dots, and you play sounds that four sounds, they
will begin to look at the four dots. If you
play twelve sounds, they look at the array of twelve dots.
(14:33):
And it doesn't matter how much time or the length
of the sound, as long as there are four of them, right,
or twelve of them, they will still do this. They
still have this understanding of more and less. As you say, so,
babies come preloaded with a little bit of math, and
they also come preloaded with a little bit of physics,
which is pretty crazy because it's it's again, it's easy
to think of the babies like the baby has no
idea how the world works. You know, it's this everything
(14:54):
is magical to this creature. Right. Uh, you know, he
thinks I disappear when I do my uh my my
peekaboot hands. But that's not the case, because ultimately this
child is born into a world again of of a
three D world, uh actually forty three spatial dimensions in
one of time. It's full of fixed and movable objects
(15:17):
they have to navigate, and so they have the the
gear in their head already to deal with this kind
of world. And so they intrinsically know things such as
and this was kind of heartbreaking in a way, the
teleportation is impossible. That they know that an object cannot
disappear from put point A in appearing point B without
physically traversing the distance between. Yeah, they know about object permanence.
(15:40):
They get that, and they get that that one object
can only occupy that time and space at that at
that moment. Uh. Spelky says that babies as early as
two months can begin to understand this. And what they
did is they took two cups. In one cup they
put one cracker, and but they did these these hand
motions like they were innuit to put put a cracker
(16:01):
in it. And then in another cup they put two crackers.
But they didn't do multiple hand motions. And what they
found is that over and over again, the baby kept
reaching for the one with more crackers in it, even
though they had sort of done this sleight of hand. Hey, look,
doesn't it look like I'm putting a ton more crackers
in here. So she's saying like that that ability is present,
(16:24):
you know, two months, which is amazing. So you need
to bring a baby with you to the the con
man with the cup game, Bring a baby, he'll see
right there, taken for always work, all right, and then
after that, like the baby, I don't know it turns
one or something, forget it now. I don't know what
time limit that has. Actually, I think that we just
build on that. And that's sort of her point. And
(16:44):
she also says that there are born Euclideans and they
use geometric clues to navigate through rooms. For instance, they're
more likely to use the lengths of walls in the
room to remember where a toy is hidden. And even
when they get older and they're three or four years old, um,
and they can name like, oh, that's a red wall,
they still will use that the actual um geometric clues
(17:07):
the length of the wall, rather than naming the color
as a way to navigate. All right. Now here's another question.
I mean we were with babies. Um, we with older children,
we're you know, we're often it's often easy to sort
of judge them. Is sort of like non moral, self
centered monsters. Uh, you know, so it doesn't. Yeah, so
you look at a baby and you're like, that baby
(17:28):
doesn't have morals. It doesn't know right from wrong, It
doesn't know what a you know, a criminal is. But
the research has actually shown different. Yeah, there's an article
from I O nine. Uh, it's babies are already superior
to us, to the rest of us by fifteen months.
The title of the article and what they were saying
is that until recently, it was thought that that children
(17:50):
didn't understand altruism until at least two years of age,
and that they didn't have a sense of fairness until
they were six or seven. But it turns out they
do have a sense of fair and us and altruism.
University of Wisconsin researcher Jessica Somerville had forty seven fifteen
month old children sit on their parents laps while they
were shown to videos. The first video had three characters,
(18:13):
one of whom had a bowl of crackers. See the
food thing is really important to these kids. That's right there.
This um laser focused on the food. The person shared
the crackers with the other two once in equal portions,
and then with one person getting more crackers than the
other people. So they see this the sense of finding
(18:34):
unfairness unfolding. The second video was exactly the same thing,
only this time around with milk substituted for crackers. So
the researchers were on the lookout for something called violation expectancy,
and this basically means the baby's paying more attention when
they're surprised, and this is important to Spelky. Elizabeth spell
Ky really keyed into this gaze um that infants have,
(18:56):
and it's really important because we talked about the eyes
in learning, and there are ways that you can actually
determine what a baby is thinking or reacting to with
with the their facial gestures. So if anybody's like, well,
how in the world, and I know this is happening,
is because they they're basically bidding and videoing these kids
and um tagging these looks of surprises. So anyway, the
(19:20):
baby's attention tended to park up really a lot when
the milk and crackers were unevenly shared. Then when they
were distributed equally because and that plays into algorithmic thinking.
They can definitely tell if someone's being slided by a
significant margin. Yes, because they expected it to be equal.
That was their expectation. Again, we talked about our brains.
They know what housing says, they we have have these
(19:42):
this pattern recognition hard baked into our brains. Um. So
another experiment was then done with the babies. They were
offered two toys. One was really fancy, one wasn't. And
so they then selected the toy that they preferred, and
then an unseen experiment or came into the room and
asked to share the boy. Okay, only one third of
(20:02):
the kids did. But here is the kicker. Of the
babies who shared their preferred toy also paid more attention
to the unequal sharing video. Okay. So in other words,
the vast majority of babies who gave up the toy
they liked an act of altruism were the ones who
were surprised by the act of unfairness. This is pointing
(20:23):
to like clear perception of as you say, have these
or unfairness injustices or injustices of the world. Wow and uh,
And I've also seen some experiments that involved like colored blocks,
where colored blocks are are being villainous to one another,
or even puppets, which which needately brought to mind Punch
(20:43):
and Judy. But but I'm trying to think of anybody's
really moral and Punch and Judy, I mean, because Punch
is awful and then he runs a foul of the
police who was kind of awful, and then the devil
and death I guess death. Yeah, Punch and Judy is
actually really um it's kind of heavy stuff for a kid. Yeah,
it's dark stuff. But anyway, I always think about it
(21:06):
for the Center of Puppet Roots here in Atlanta, because
they have a museum and they've got the Punch and
Judy and they always the scare the heck out of
me for some reason. We my my wife and I
went there once when they had just for I think
two nights they had a Punch and Judy Modern Punch
and Judy at come in that market themselves as the
world's best Punch and Judy show. If you do a
search for that online you'll find them. And uh and
(21:27):
they there. These are like a young couple. I don't
know they're a couple, but a young man and a
woman who like, learned Punch and Judy, which has a
different name in French, but I can't remember. Like each
country at European country has Punch and Judy, but they
have different names. But they learned that their puppetry craft
on the streets of Paris, like sleeping on the streets
in there in the puppet theater turned on its side,
(21:49):
and so they were just masters of the old school
Punch and Judy show. And they put it on and
it was phenomenal. It was just hilarious and and they
and just expertly done. So so Punch and Judy. It's
easy to look at and think, oh, well that's that's
a low puppetry, that's that's nothing, but it's it's quite
an art form. It's babies might appreciate. I think that
(22:10):
they would for sure. Uh So, speaking of Punch and
Judy in Paris and babies, when we get back, we
will actually find out what babies have to do with
Paris and even cappuccinos. All right, we're back. Babies need cappuccinos.
Is that where we're going with this? Yes, fuel them
(22:32):
with lots and we forget them milk. Just fill it
up with cappuccino. Um, Okay, no, we're we're gonna get
to this idea of babies and cappuccino in Paris in
a moment, but Alice and Gopnick again and wanted to
bring her up. Um. She has a talk called what
do Babies Think? Which is very interesting and she talks
about how babies have a different consciousness than us. And
(22:56):
I think it's a really interesting idea because she says,
if you look at an adult, an adult is basically
using sort of like a flashlight to laser focus on something. Right,
there's something we want to look at and think about,
we point the light on it. We block everything else up.
I'm thinking about my work, I'm thinking about my life,
I'm thinking about what that guy in the subway is doing.
(23:16):
It's it's just one thing after after another. We have
to focus on something and everything else sort of fades,
uh into the peripheral vision. Babies use more of this
sort of lantern to to fill their consciousness up with.
So I'm not focusing on any one particular thing. The
light is illuminating the room. Yes, And so she's saying
it's not that they don't pay attention. Well, they can't
(23:39):
not pay attention is the problem, and they're saying that
it's driven how it's driven by how information rich their
world is around them, and that when you look at
their brains, instead of just squirting a little bit of
trans neuro transmitter on the part of the brain that
they want to learn, their whole brain is soaked in neurotransmitters.
(23:59):
So they're like they're they're sponges. They're just they're like
hyper conscious of the world around them, blocking nothing out. Yeah,
you have to think about it this way because this
is really when the brain is like crazy active, and
as you get older, of course those neural connections begin
to get pruned away the stuff that you use, stuff
you don't use, and you get a more selective brain.
But for the time being, um, you do have this
(24:21):
no transmitter soaked brain. And this is why that they
have that sort of lantern vision of everything. They can't
really get anything out of their heads because they're considering everything. Um.
So she says, what's it like to be a baby?
It's like being in love in Paris for the first
time after you've had three double espressos doses. But I
(24:42):
mean this also plays right into I mean just one
of one of many reasons for why stimulation and uh,
and both on a like a physical level but also
an emotional level is important. Uh, young child because they're
they're sponges. They need to absorb, they need a world
to absorb. They need to see the sky, they need
interact with people. Um. And that's I mean, that's I'm one.
(25:05):
That's kind of funny. But there are children out there, um,
you know, particularly in an orphanage situations, who do not
get to see the sky. They stuff for sensory deprivation
and and it has a profound effect on them. And
conversely too, if if there is too much stimulation, that's
obviously when the brain gets overload. And we talked about
that too just in the scream episode have it. You know,
(25:25):
sometimes we have to scream because we all are over
stimulated at some point. Yeah, Like you show a baby
Baraka and Mike cries too much. They can much for
an adult to take him. I didn't cry, you didn't cry. No,
I might not be human. Everyone I know Christ the
scene with the homeless people and they're playing like that
can dance in the background. Sorry, the baby chicks getting
(25:47):
sexed and their beaks burned a tough nut. Um okay.
So god Nick says that that this different consciousness she thinks,
in some ways more conscious than adults are, and she
says that she just has empirical evidence at this point,
but she thinks that this, this is a real possibility
(26:09):
that kids are actually more conscious than we are. But
then we'll never be able to really answer that until
we actually can define consciousness and how it works, which
is always the big first step one define human consciousness. Right, yeah,
So there's this idea that creative people retain some of
the same kind of different consciousness, as she calls it,
(26:30):
and are able to tap into all these uh different
stimuli and think differently they which which plays him nicely
to be like, I always loved the CS Lewis quote
quote about when I was you know, about when I
was young, I just wanted to appear a very grown
up and all and and uh and and and now
as an adult, he celebrates the you know, the imagination
(26:53):
of childhood and wants to keep it alive in him
as as long as possible. You know. Yeah, well Picasso, right,
the same thing you think of like thoroughly grown up people,
and they are the most boring individuals on the planet.
I mean just push them over, you know, they just
just push him over. I don't push him over, but
you just want to. You're just like, oh, look, you've
(27:13):
just completely It's like an orange that's just been squeezed
out of all juice. You know, they're just a husk
and they're just like, that's just I don't even want
to know that person. So if you're feeling bored, you
have to go into your baby brain and you will
find liberation. Yeah. I feel like anybody worth throwing baby
brain still going on at least a little little nugget
of it in some area of their life. Baby brain
(27:35):
is good. Gothnik has a great take on this and
creativity and and the world does an illusion. She says,
if you think about that from the perspective of human evolution,
this idea of the of the baby brain, our great
capacity is not just that we learn about the world.
The thing that really makes us distinctive is that we
can imagine other ways that the world could be. That's
(27:58):
really where are enormous evolutionary juice comes from. We understand
the world, but that also lets us imagine other ways
it could be, and actually make those other worlds come true.
That's what's innovation technology, or that's what innovation technology and
science are all about. Think about everything that's in this
room right now. There's a right angle desk and electric
light in computers and window panes. Every single thing in
(28:20):
this room is imaginary. From the perspective of hunter gatherer,
we live in imaginary worlds. Yeah, I mean, we have
this profound ability to simulate possible futures and act accordingly. Yeah,
So it makes sense that the baby brain would need
to do this, that we would from the get go
start to try to do pattern recognition and and name
things and dream up things, uh, and be innovators. Um.
(28:44):
Which I think all of this to me is going
back to again language language, language acquisition, and this importance
of being able to look in another person's eyes and
learn from them. Specifically language acquisition. It putres a cool
cool has done a bunch of studies about this, that
kids who are taught other languages do not acquire through
(29:06):
CDs or television or other forms of media. One to
one is really important, which then sort of puts a
spotlight on the relationship between a caregiver and a child. Um.
This interaction between them. So you're looking at a baby's
face and the baby's looking in your face, and there's
(29:26):
facial recognition going on there. Obviously, a baby can identify
its mother by looking in the mother's face, which sounds
kind of like an overstatement of the obvious. But but
when you get into into neurologically looking at how how
it all works, it's it's pretty pretty phenomenal. And it's
the kind of thing that we're again trying to replicate
(29:47):
and are replicating to a large extents in computers. But
the baby has it programmed in from the start. So, yeah,
what's probably one of the most important things to you
as a child your caregiver staring at you and giving
you visu cues about language, about the world around you.
And yet when you're a really young infant, you're completely
hamstrung by your vision at that point, right, And this
(30:10):
this leads right into which a really mind blowing idea.
It's not this is not a settled theory by any stretch,
but it's a fascinating area to think about. Ran across
this article um Skeptic Magazine, which, if you're not familiar,
Skeptic Magazine is the publication. It's put together by a
Michael A. Schermer who we mentioned in the UFO abduction episode.
(30:33):
He's the cyclist who had an abduction experience due to
exhaustion and uh and uh and and then he went
on to study it and explained it in scientific terms.
And he's really really big into taking things that are
seemingly paranormal and then and then let's examine it from
a scientific point of view and figure out what's actually happening. Uh,
(30:54):
you know, not alien. So he's not like a conspiracy
not or anything. He's he's a dude that's grounded in
science and turning the gay of science on things that
are phenomenal. So, unsurprisingly, there was an article on Scriptic
Magazine by an author by the name of Frederick V. Momstrom,
and he wrote an arcohol close encounters of the facial
kind are UFO alien faces an inborn facial recognition template.
(31:18):
His argument here, all right, So, okay, so aliens, gray
aliens UM like UFO like unsolved mysteries, um close encounters
of the third kind kind of alien? You know what
I'm talking about? This Uh, this big gray head with
large black eyes and a a little mouth and a little nose.
(31:39):
And in these abduction uh experiences, the individuals perceiving these
things like looming over them. Uh. And there's generally like
there's something surgical or or you know, or or probe
related going on in these scenarios, you know, and there's
a sense of you know, there's some sleep paralysis or something,
and there's a sense of of of being of loose
(32:00):
in control and uh. Uh you know, listen to our
episode on the UFO deduction experiences for for a little
more about the science of what is actually going on
in these encounters. But the author here is focusing in
particularly on that face, like why why would we see
this gray alien face? And why do so many people
see it? Well, there are the same type of face. Now,
(32:22):
one really good explanation for that is that we saw
it on Unsolved Mysteries. We saw it faces, and we've
been primed to see that. That is, we've we've encountered
this story before in our fiction and uh, and so
it's ready to go when we actually encounter a paranormal
experience on a neurological level. But uh, Malmstrom's theory is
(32:44):
that what we're actually too tapping into here is the
infant facial recognition software that that that we have not
used in a long time but is still present. Uh.
The ideas that the baby's vision, uh, baby's vision, an
infants vision is is imperfect. You know, it's like they're
(33:04):
they're far they're near sighted. Everything's blurry and bright. So
what does mother's face look like to an infant with
that kind of vision? Bulbous head, right, and two long
slits fries and a little tiny nose holes and a
bit of a slash of a mouth. And this is
(33:25):
actually something that um that was borne out right by
this attempt to try to mimic, as you call it,
baby vision at this point, like what would this graphically
look like to us? Yeah, and he explored it by
taking taking this up, this prototypical female face, blurring it out,
(33:46):
blurring the images out and uh and just applying these
different layers that attempt to replicate infant site and you
get something that looks a lot like you know, Encounters
of the Third kind Unsolved Mysteries, gray alien. That's that's
stereotypical alien head. Yeah, and yeah, you guys should definitely
check it out. Just take a look at this, and
(34:07):
it begins to really make sense. And then of course
you you look at this information and you begin to wonder,
and this is a little bit wacky, but you begin
to wonder our alien abductions or sightings. Um. It's particularly
in the context of false awakenings that we've talked about before,
where your brain is coming back online too consciousness, but
(34:28):
your body is still in sleep paralysis. Is could this
idea that you see something that is other just a
ghost memory of your mother's face when in your earliest
memories as a baby. Because we have access presumably to
all of our memories, just not all the time, so
(34:52):
potentially in this kind of sleep situation, you might be
able to retrieve that. I know it's wacky, but it
is very interesting. Yeah, I found it, found it really fascinating. Again,
it's taking some you know, a paranormal experience and uh
and then trying to to understand it through science. And
it's just like I said, who knows if this holds up,
(35:14):
but it's a really interesting way of looking at it well,
and it underlines again what's some of the things amazing
that are amazing about how the infant mind works. Yeah,
and I think this idea too, of can can we
revisit our infant minds at some time. Is it through
just these specialized periods of disrupted sleep um or are
we way past those those memories? And to what extent
(35:36):
can we actually tap into it and make it work
for us so to speak? Because I mean, if you
think about it, we are statistical machines. We just have
these overlays of our experiences which sort of shut out
some possibilities for us in terms of what we can
dream for ourselves or understand. So if we could take
it back to our roots system and still be access
(35:56):
for are fully formed adult brains, that would be great.
More in forrrantly that the next time you're you're leaning
over the baby's cradle in your life, uh, and imagine
that that that the infant sees you as a as
a gray alien. And the next time you find yourself
curiously unable to move in your bed and you look
(36:16):
up and you see this, uh, this strange gray head
with big black eyes. Embrace it well, and that makes
you realize why some people are terrified if if that
were the case, that there was just a ghost memory
of their mother, because it's your mom, but it's not right,
So it's the other of course you're going to be like,
whoa alien? Yeah, Um, I wanted to mention real quick
(36:37):
that Elizabeth Falky fascinating uh cognitive psychologists. She if anybody
is interested. She actually took a lot of her data
and she pitted it against Lawrence Lawrence H. Summers, that
then president of Harvard who in two thousand and five
suggested that the shortage of women and um physical sciences
could be due to innate shortcome things and math. She
(37:01):
took all her statistical data from forty years and combed
through it to to actually make the point that it um,
that was not the case at all. There was no
different differentiation at all in terms of gender when it
came to babies, children, and science, and and this uh
(37:22):
innate or not innate ability to grasp math in a
meaningful way. So if anybody is interested in this. She
has a debate with her friend, actually, Stephen Pinker. We've
talked about him before. He is a neuroscientist, and that
we know him more in the context of him calling
musical abilities cheesecake, right, auditory cheesecake like it's just sort
(37:44):
of happened by accident. Um. But anyway, they have a
very very interesting debate on this topic. And uh, Spelky
is amazing. She has very um interesting takes on this topic.
And uh, and what are what are the books that
individuals can check out? Individuals listeners can check out if
they want to want to hear more. Gottenick as a book,
(38:05):
right she does. I believe I'm going to probably get
this wrong, but I think it's called The Psychology of Babies.
But you can just search for Alison Gothnik check her
out on TED. Also Elizabeth S. Bucky. Um, there are
two great resources if you want to learn more. All right, Well, um,
we're gonna skip the robe at today because he's got
a busted wheel. It's it's rough. He's all the way
(38:27):
through the side of the room and I'm not gonna
get up and walk over there to get mail. But
by all means, send us more mail you can. You
can reach out to us on Facebook. We were stuff
to blow your mind there. You can find us on
Twitter where we are blow the mind. We'd love to hear. Uh,
what are your observations with babies? I know the number
of you out there, our parents or you've at least
(38:48):
you know baby said, or you've you've had to or
you had an infant sibling or something. What are your
what were your interactions like, tell us what you think
about the infant mind and and have you glimpsed some
of what we're talking about in that child? And you
can always drop us a line at blew the Mind
at discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands
(39:14):
of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie.
We were just looking at an Onion article, weren't we were? Yeah.
It was from classic from seven. Uh, babies are stupid, Yeah,
(00:27):
which which was a phenomenally funny piece of the time
because you know, you read all this stuff about, oh,
babies are really you know, there's a lot going on
with the with the mind of an infant, and this
sort of turned that on its head by saying, you know,
actually babies are really stupid, because it's easy to to
sort of think think that on the surface because they
are they are helpless. Uh, they don't really don't really
(00:49):
understand how things work. They can't talk. They can't talk.
They're just crapping themselves like crazy, drooling and and and
just having intense emotional reactions to things, be at a
peekaboo game, Uh, some shiny object or um, uh, you know,
just or something even mildly unpleasant just set them off.
(01:10):
But turns out that they are learning machines. Yes, the
larval human is pretty amazing. They Yeah, they're absolutely amazing
in the same way that like a larval insight like it.
It doesn't look like much, but its whole thing is
eat and grow, eat and grow. Similar thing with the
with the larval human. It's it's it's whole mission is
to learn and grow, learn and grow and eat and
(01:31):
poop a lot. But learn, grow and think that. I think, yeah,
and this is very different for our species. Um. There
are some really good uh articles out there about this
extended childhood that we have, Like why in the world
does it take it so long to acquire language to
grow up to fend for ourselves? Yeah, because there are
(01:52):
their prey and most prey animals out there, such as
you know, deer, antelope, what have you. They're born and
they have to be on their feet and uh and
and running in pretty short order in order to survive.
There's no sticking around the nest necessarily or you know,
they just they have to turn into the adults very fast. Um. Likewise,
(02:14):
the kitten that my wife found is currently in a
box in our house. Bean, but like, uh, like pretty
pretty quickly, like we first got him. You know, he's
all you know, awkward and falling down and all and
and but and he's still awkward and falling down, but
you can already see him doing the things that cats
(02:35):
have to do. He's already running through the exercises of
hunting and pouncing and and you know, it's like all
the programming is there. And as soon as his body
catches up in just you know, a matter of you know,
months or weeks, he's gonna be good to go. He'll
be up and running. He doesn't need to be put
in a sling for ten months, right and carry it
all right. He also doesn't need to learn all that much, right,
(02:57):
So compared to other species, we humans, we have a
lunch a much longer period of immaturity, and psychologist Alice
and Gothnik actually says that there's a reason for that,
that long periods of immaturity are correlated to higher degree
of flexibility, intelligence, and learning. So, in other words, it's
neo cortex that we got, you know, thousands of thousands
of years ago that that that helps us so much
(03:18):
in our communication. Really takes a lot of effort, a
lot of resources to sort of feed that before we
can become uh, totally cognizance in a way that we
think of ourselves as adults. Right, And we see the
scenario in the classic crow versus chicken um argument, right,
because the chicken is is pretty stupid. There's not a
(03:39):
lot going on with the chicken, and they're up and
running pretty soon. They're up and running pretty soon, pretty fast.
You know, chick doesn't say a chicken very long. Pretty
soon it's a stupid chicken. Not so the crow. The
crow is pretty brilliant. I mean, the crow is a mean.
There have been all these fabulous studies about crow intelligence.
We could, we could and probably should do a whole
episode on crowl intelligence because their tool user they can
(04:00):
be trained to put coins, to collect coins and put
them into machines. Um. They're they're, they're they're just incredible,
incredible birds. But they also have a longer period of development. Well,
and as Alison up Nick says, one one of those
creatures ends up on the cover of Science and one
ends up in your soup pot. So there's there's a
(04:22):
reason for that. Right. Again, crows do have a longer
period of immaturity. Uh. But one of the things that
I think is really interesting is again this idea of
building up the neo cortex is communication centers in the
brain and um, we have touched on this a bit
in terms of babies, in their ability to mimic even
(04:44):
um they're crying. We talked about this German accent, yeah,
German accent or a French accent days after they're born,
such as their ability to to really absorb information about
how language works. And I thought that it was really
interesting to start this talk off with UM with language
(05:05):
sort of like the crux of our being, and I
wanted I've heard it described as the the operating system
for the human brain. Yeah, I mean, we're the We're
the hardware that you need windows on their right to
run it. Well, languages are windows. Yeah. Elizabeth Balky, she's
a cognitive psychologist. She has actually said like, this is
the reason why why we can do what we can do.
(05:25):
We have this competentive, comgnitorial approach to life because of language.
We can um, you know, enter into these scenarios where
let's say you're you're year old and you're trying to
figure out three dimensional areas. Um. But then you begin
to name things, and then you start to be able
to put this again, languages at the bedrock of this ability.
(05:49):
You begin to put these concepts with words, and you're
just lapping on more and more knowledge. Without this ability,
this language, then, which makes us uniquely human in terms
of its complexity, we wouldn't be the people we are today,
even just sitting here talking about this. Right, Like you
think of like what words do for us? Um, Like
(06:10):
you think of a word like genocide, one word that
that summons an intense amount of information about something that's
very complicated. Um Like, if I'm just if I don't
have a word for genocide, then they're trying to think
about it, like would occupy the entire mind, you know,
and you still wouldn't be able to grasp it. You
(06:30):
can sort of wrap it up in that term. And
then something like ballet is pretty complicated as well, but
I can wrap it up under the term ballet, and
then I can simultaneously hold both the word ballet and
genocide in my mind and collide those ideas, which you
can't do unless you have words for them. Right, And
this is an amazing thing that we can do. And
(06:51):
it turns out that, um, that the seeds for that
are present at birth. But before I want to talk
a little bit more about language, I did want to
mention Sean pj At this one in the century. He
wrote a book called Origins of Intelligence and Children, which
in and of itself is sort of like a revelation,
because what intelligence and children at that time period. Yeah,
(07:11):
just the idea that they're just bumbling buffoons that still
have everything in the world to learn and then under
certain definitions, aren't even real people yet, right They're not
exactly they're not they don't quite have a personhood right yet. Um,
they haven't acquired enough information. So that's what they used
to think of as as children. Just who are you know,
soon to be adults that haven't acquired enough information? Um.
(07:33):
But what he found is that qualitative thinking changes. In
other words, different kinds of learning comes online at different
points in development, and so you kind of think of
it as like we're preloaded with these modules in our brain,
but they don't fully develop until they get the cues
that they need. So I did want to flip over
really quickly and talk about Patricia Cool. She has a
(07:53):
great talk called The Linguistic Genius of Babies, and she
says that from zero to six months, babies are quote
citizens of the world, and they can distinguish between pronunciations
in every language, something that no adult brain can do,
because we eventually get pretty specialized in our language right
in our abilities. And she says that between eight and
(08:16):
ten months, babies exhibits statistical computation skills and their ability
to pick up and analyze language. So in other words,
they can take into account the relative frequency of the
sounds they hear and the transitional probabilities between syllables, and
this is what she says is statistical learning. So this
is all happening in their minds as we adults throw
(08:37):
a bunch of baby talk at them. Parentees, it's actually
called the parentees, although also called mothery'se uh. But it's
actually really important because there's that that sort of this
sort of changes in tone are important for the child
to begin to understand these different melodies of language. But
(08:58):
that zero to six months they is really fascinating to
me because if I hear Mandarin, I'm not going to
be able to distinguish between certain syllables because it is
not native to our standing. Yes, it's just an orange
to me, it's not a language barely making a sound,
but yeah, and why or are people always going I
was gonna make a really badgeck, but throwing ranges at
(09:21):
each other and trying to communicate instrument. I'm sorry, no,
not the manteline nice but no, I mean this is fascinating,
like how my ear has shut that out, that ability.
But these year to six month old kids, these infants
can actually just distinguish between these sounds, and she a.
Patricia Kool also says that kids by age seven begin
(09:45):
to fall off of linguistic map. What she means to
say is that language acquisition is absolutely open and optimal
before age seven. So and of course, you know, most
people our age didn't begin language lessons until later on
in their lives, which is sort of the wrong thing
to do, um. But that because by the time year seven,
(10:06):
your brain changes is and you're you're pruning a lot
of the neural connections that you don't necessarily need. So
we kind of lose that ability, um to some extent.
But one of the things that she points out is
that this one to one interaction is really important. You
have to see someone else's eyes in order to acquire language.
And we'll talk about the eyes and the importance about
(10:27):
that a little bit. So we we did a whole
episode I think more than one on math. And in
that we mentioned that the babies are capable of algorithmic
thinking even in early age. They don't have they don't
have numbers. They don't have this and this gets into
the whole question of his again his math a human
invention or a human discovery or something else. But the
(10:48):
idea here is that even though babies can't rattle off
one through ten, they have numbers. Since they can, they
can think algorithmically about the world around them, which is
which if you stop and think about that, I mean,
it's pretty phenomenal. Versus are sort of accepted mainstream viewing
of Oh, the child must be taught language, it must
(11:10):
be taught math, but it already has math. Yeah, And
this is why artificial intelligence is interested in babies because
in this way, as Elizabeth spoke, he says, they are root.
UM it's where human cognition and organization of the human
mind begins. And of course we want to try to
do this with computers as best that we can. UM.
(11:31):
I wanted to mention the world's first stored program electronic
digital computer. UH. This was in and it was called
the Small Scale Experimental Machine. It was also nicknamed Baby
and one of the programs that ran on it was
designed by Alan Turning. And we've talked about Alan Turning
before in terms of AI. He's a pioneer UM in
(11:52):
artificial intelligence and very I know, I was just thinking
about that yesterday. I was when I was revisiting some material. Yeah,
there's a great Radio Lab episode. I think it's shorty
or maybe it was a long I don't know, but
there was a reason Radio episode about him. That's really heartbreaking. Yeah,
he is a is an individual, is very very interesting
and UM certainly brilliant. He was. But Alison Gothnick talks
(12:16):
about Touring. She says that the classic Turing palm is
could you get a computer to be so sophisticated that
you couldn't tell the difference between the computer and a person.
But then Touring said that there was an even more
profound question, which was could you get a computer give
it the kind of data that every human being gets
as a child, and have it learned the kinds of
things things that a child can learn. Again, this is
(12:39):
the root uh brain that we're talking about, and certainly
machine learning is a is a huge part of our
ongoing development of AI. You know, like in creating machines
that work alongside humans. We want to do that so
that they can they can learn from their environment. So
machine learning is is key. And if you want to learn,
you learn to discover how something earns. The infant is
(13:02):
the place to look, right, And she says because they
have inductive learning techniques as well, just like computers. And
she even brings up the point that about fifteen years
ago researchers created Baiesian causal graphical models. Baisian is basically
like this inductive learning, right um. And these models map
out the way the world works for computers and also
(13:24):
mapped out patterns of probability. And this was really an
advance in computational um formal computation, I should say. In
about that same time, uh, that these computational systems were
coming online, cognitive psychologists began to form the idea that
babies are doing very much the same thing. So you
brought up this number sense that that kids have. And
(13:46):
what we're talking about here is Baiesian reasoning. That they
can take a random sample and understand the relationship between
that sample and the population is drawn from right, so
they can tell they can tell the difference between um,
three red balls and nine red balls. Yeah, not so much.
Maybe three red balls and four red balls. You know,
it becomes an algorithmic distinction there. But but yeah, they've
(14:10):
they've already got that hard wired in. Yeah. I mean
they are kind of like born accountants. Because if you
give a baby a picture an array of dots, and
there are four dots, and you have another array of
twelve dots, and you play sounds that four sounds, they
will begin to look at the four dots. If you
play twelve sounds, they look at the array of twelve dots.
(14:33):
And it doesn't matter how much time or the length
of the sound, as long as there are four of them, right,
or twelve of them, they will still do this. They
still have this understanding of more and less. As you say, so,
babies come preloaded with a little bit of math, and
they also come preloaded with a little bit of physics,
which is pretty crazy because it's it's again, it's easy
to think of the babies like the baby has no
idea how the world works. You know, it's this everything
(14:54):
is magical to this creature. Right. Uh, you know, he
thinks I disappear when I do my uh my my
peekaboot hands. But that's not the case, because ultimately this
child is born into a world again of of a
three D world, uh actually forty three spatial dimensions in
one of time. It's full of fixed and movable objects
(15:17):
they have to navigate, and so they have the the
gear in their head already to deal with this kind
of world. And so they intrinsically know things such as
and this was kind of heartbreaking in a way, the
teleportation is impossible. That they know that an object cannot
disappear from put point A in appearing point B without
physically traversing the distance between. Yeah, they know about object permanence.
(15:40):
They get that, and they get that that one object
can only occupy that time and space at that at
that moment. Uh. Spelky says that babies as early as
two months can begin to understand this. And what they
did is they took two cups. In one cup they
put one cracker, and but they did these these hand
motions like they were innuit to put put a cracker
(16:01):
in it. And then in another cup they put two crackers.
But they didn't do multiple hand motions. And what they
found is that over and over again, the baby kept
reaching for the one with more crackers in it, even
though they had sort of done this sleight of hand. Hey, look,
doesn't it look like I'm putting a ton more crackers
in here. So she's saying like that that ability is present,
(16:24):
you know, two months, which is amazing. So you need
to bring a baby with you to the the con
man with the cup game, Bring a baby, he'll see
right there, taken for always work, all right, and then
after that, like the baby, I don't know it turns
one or something, forget it now. I don't know what
time limit that has. Actually, I think that we just
build on that. And that's sort of her point. And
(16:44):
she also says that there are born Euclideans and they
use geometric clues to navigate through rooms. For instance, they're
more likely to use the lengths of walls in the
room to remember where a toy is hidden. And even
when they get older and they're three or four years old, um,
and they can name like, oh, that's a red wall,
they still will use that the actual um geometric clues
(17:07):
the length of the wall, rather than naming the color
as a way to navigate. All right. Now here's another question.
I mean we were with babies. Um, we with older children,
we're you know, we're often it's often easy to sort
of judge them. Is sort of like non moral, self
centered monsters. Uh, you know, so it doesn't. Yeah, so
you look at a baby and you're like, that baby
(17:28):
doesn't have morals. It doesn't know right from wrong, It
doesn't know what a you know, a criminal is. But
the research has actually shown different. Yeah, there's an article
from I O nine. Uh, it's babies are already superior
to us, to the rest of us by fifteen months.
The title of the article and what they were saying
is that until recently, it was thought that that children
(17:50):
didn't understand altruism until at least two years of age,
and that they didn't have a sense of fairness until
they were six or seven. But it turns out they
do have a sense of fair and us and altruism.
University of Wisconsin researcher Jessica Somerville had forty seven fifteen
month old children sit on their parents laps while they
were shown to videos. The first video had three characters,
(18:13):
one of whom had a bowl of crackers. See the
food thing is really important to these kids. That's right there.
This um laser focused on the food. The person shared
the crackers with the other two once in equal portions,
and then with one person getting more crackers than the
other people. So they see this the sense of finding
(18:34):
unfairness unfolding. The second video was exactly the same thing,
only this time around with milk substituted for crackers. So
the researchers were on the lookout for something called violation expectancy,
and this basically means the baby's paying more attention when
they're surprised, and this is important to Spelky. Elizabeth spell
Ky really keyed into this gaze um that infants have,
(18:56):
and it's really important because we talked about the eyes
in learning, and there are ways that you can actually
determine what a baby is thinking or reacting to with
with the their facial gestures. So if anybody's like, well,
how in the world, and I know this is happening,
is because they they're basically bidding and videoing these kids
and um tagging these looks of surprises. So anyway, the
(19:20):
baby's attention tended to park up really a lot when
the milk and crackers were unevenly shared. Then when they
were distributed equally because and that plays into algorithmic thinking.
They can definitely tell if someone's being slided by a
significant margin. Yes, because they expected it to be equal.
That was their expectation. Again, we talked about our brains.
They know what housing says, they we have have these
(19:42):
this pattern recognition hard baked into our brains. Um. So
another experiment was then done with the babies. They were
offered two toys. One was really fancy, one wasn't. And
so they then selected the toy that they preferred, and
then an unseen experiment or came into the room and
asked to share the boy. Okay, only one third of
(20:02):
the kids did. But here is the kicker. Of the
babies who shared their preferred toy also paid more attention
to the unequal sharing video. Okay. So in other words,
the vast majority of babies who gave up the toy
they liked an act of altruism were the ones who
were surprised by the act of unfairness. This is pointing
(20:23):
to like clear perception of as you say, have these
or unfairness injustices or injustices of the world. Wow and uh,
And I've also seen some experiments that involved like colored blocks,
where colored blocks are are being villainous to one another,
or even puppets, which which needately brought to mind Punch
(20:43):
and Judy. But but I'm trying to think of anybody's
really moral and Punch and Judy, I mean, because Punch
is awful and then he runs a foul of the
police who was kind of awful, and then the devil
and death I guess death. Yeah, Punch and Judy is
actually really um it's kind of heavy stuff for a kid. Yeah,
it's dark stuff. But anyway, I always think about it
(21:06):
for the Center of Puppet Roots here in Atlanta, because
they have a museum and they've got the Punch and
Judy and they always the scare the heck out of
me for some reason. We my my wife and I
went there once when they had just for I think
two nights they had a Punch and Judy Modern Punch
and Judy at come in that market themselves as the
world's best Punch and Judy show. If you do a
search for that online you'll find them. And uh and
(21:27):
they there. These are like a young couple. I don't
know they're a couple, but a young man and a
woman who like, learned Punch and Judy, which has a
different name in French, but I can't remember. Like each
country at European country has Punch and Judy, but they
have different names. But they learned that their puppetry craft
on the streets of Paris, like sleeping on the streets
in there in the puppet theater turned on its side,
(21:49):
and so they were just masters of the old school
Punch and Judy show. And they put it on and
it was phenomenal. It was just hilarious and and they
and just expertly done. So so Punch and Judy. It's
easy to look at and think, oh, well that's that's
a low puppetry, that's that's nothing, but it's it's quite
an art form. It's babies might appreciate. I think that
(22:10):
they would for sure. Uh So, speaking of Punch and
Judy in Paris and babies, when we get back, we
will actually find out what babies have to do with
Paris and even cappuccinos. All right, we're back. Babies need cappuccinos.
Is that where we're going with this? Yes, fuel them
(22:32):
with lots and we forget them milk. Just fill it
up with cappuccino. Um, Okay, no, we're we're gonna get
to this idea of babies and cappuccino in Paris in
a moment, but Alice and Gopnick again and wanted to
bring her up. Um. She has a talk called what
do Babies Think? Which is very interesting and she talks
about how babies have a different consciousness than us. And
(22:56):
I think it's a really interesting idea because she says,
if you look at an adult, an adult is basically
using sort of like a flashlight to laser focus on something. Right,
there's something we want to look at and think about,
we point the light on it. We block everything else up.
I'm thinking about my work, I'm thinking about my life,
I'm thinking about what that guy in the subway is doing.
(23:16):
It's it's just one thing after after another. We have
to focus on something and everything else sort of fades,
uh into the peripheral vision. Babies use more of this
sort of lantern to to fill their consciousness up with.
So I'm not focusing on any one particular thing. The
light is illuminating the room. Yes, And so she's saying
it's not that they don't pay attention. Well, they can't
(23:39):
not pay attention is the problem, and they're saying that
it's driven how it's driven by how information rich their
world is around them, and that when you look at
their brains, instead of just squirting a little bit of
trans neuro transmitter on the part of the brain that
they want to learn, their whole brain is soaked in neurotransmitters.
(23:59):
So they're like they're they're sponges. They're just they're like
hyper conscious of the world around them, blocking nothing out. Yeah,
you have to think about it this way because this
is really when the brain is like crazy active, and
as you get older, of course those neural connections begin
to get pruned away the stuff that you use, stuff
you don't use, and you get a more selective brain.
But for the time being, um, you do have this
(24:21):
no transmitter soaked brain. And this is why that they
have that sort of lantern vision of everything. They can't
really get anything out of their heads because they're considering everything. Um.
So she says, what's it like to be a baby?
It's like being in love in Paris for the first
time after you've had three double espressos doses. But I
(24:42):
mean this also plays right into I mean just one
of one of many reasons for why stimulation and uh,
and both on a like a physical level but also
an emotional level is important. Uh, young child because they're
they're sponges. They need to absorb, they need a world
to absorb. They need to see the sky, they need
interact with people. Um. And that's I mean, that's I'm one.
(25:05):
That's kind of funny. But there are children out there, um,
you know, particularly in an orphanage situations, who do not
get to see the sky. They stuff for sensory deprivation
and and it has a profound effect on them. And
conversely too, if if there is too much stimulation, that's
obviously when the brain gets overload. And we talked about
that too just in the scream episode have it. You know,
(25:25):
sometimes we have to scream because we all are over
stimulated at some point. Yeah, Like you show a baby
Baraka and Mike cries too much. They can much for
an adult to take him. I didn't cry, you didn't cry. No,
I might not be human. Everyone I know Christ the
scene with the homeless people and they're playing like that
can dance in the background. Sorry, the baby chicks getting
(25:47):
sexed and their beaks burned a tough nut. Um okay.
So god Nick says that that this different consciousness she thinks,
in some ways more conscious than adults are, and she
says that she just has empirical evidence at this point,
but she thinks that this, this is a real possibility
(26:09):
that kids are actually more conscious than we are. But
then we'll never be able to really answer that until
we actually can define consciousness and how it works, which
is always the big first step one define human consciousness. Right, yeah,
So there's this idea that creative people retain some of
the same kind of different consciousness, as she calls it,
(26:30):
and are able to tap into all these uh different
stimuli and think differently they which which plays him nicely
to be like, I always loved the CS Lewis quote
quote about when I was you know, about when I
was young, I just wanted to appear a very grown
up and all and and uh and and and now
as an adult, he celebrates the you know, the imagination
(26:53):
of childhood and wants to keep it alive in him
as as long as possible. You know. Yeah, well Picasso, right,
the same thing you think of like thoroughly grown up people,
and they are the most boring individuals on the planet.
I mean just push them over, you know, they just
just push him over. I don't push him over, but
you just want to. You're just like, oh, look, you've
(27:13):
just completely It's like an orange that's just been squeezed
out of all juice. You know, they're just a husk
and they're just like, that's just I don't even want
to know that person. So if you're feeling bored, you
have to go into your baby brain and you will
find liberation. Yeah. I feel like anybody worth throwing baby
brain still going on at least a little little nugget
of it in some area of their life. Baby brain
(27:35):
is good. Gothnik has a great take on this and
creativity and and the world does an illusion. She says,
if you think about that from the perspective of human evolution,
this idea of the of the baby brain, our great
capacity is not just that we learn about the world.
The thing that really makes us distinctive is that we
can imagine other ways that the world could be. That's
(27:58):
really where are enormous evolutionary juice comes from. We understand
the world, but that also lets us imagine other ways
it could be, and actually make those other worlds come true.
That's what's innovation technology, or that's what innovation technology and
science are all about. Think about everything that's in this
room right now. There's a right angle desk and electric
light in computers and window panes. Every single thing in
(28:20):
this room is imaginary. From the perspective of hunter gatherer,
we live in imaginary worlds. Yeah, I mean, we have
this profound ability to simulate possible futures and act accordingly. Yeah,
So it makes sense that the baby brain would need
to do this, that we would from the get go
start to try to do pattern recognition and and name
things and dream up things, uh, and be innovators. Um.
(28:44):
Which I think all of this to me is going
back to again language language, language acquisition, and this importance
of being able to look in another person's eyes and
learn from them. Specifically language acquisition. It putres a cool
cool has done a bunch of studies about this, that
kids who are taught other languages do not acquire through
(29:06):
CDs or television or other forms of media. One to
one is really important, which then sort of puts a
spotlight on the relationship between a caregiver and a child. Um.
This interaction between them. So you're looking at a baby's
face and the baby's looking in your face, and there's
(29:26):
facial recognition going on there. Obviously, a baby can identify
its mother by looking in the mother's face, which sounds
kind of like an overstatement of the obvious. But but
when you get into into neurologically looking at how how
it all works, it's it's pretty pretty phenomenal. And it's
the kind of thing that we're again trying to replicate
(29:47):
and are replicating to a large extents in computers. But
the baby has it programmed in from the start. So, yeah,
what's probably one of the most important things to you
as a child your caregiver staring at you and giving
you visu cues about language, about the world around you.
And yet when you're a really young infant, you're completely
hamstrung by your vision at that point, right, And this
(30:10):
this leads right into which a really mind blowing idea.
It's not this is not a settled theory by any stretch,
but it's a fascinating area to think about. Ran across
this article um Skeptic Magazine, which, if you're not familiar,
Skeptic Magazine is the publication. It's put together by a
Michael A. Schermer who we mentioned in the UFO abduction episode.
(30:33):
He's the cyclist who had an abduction experience due to
exhaustion and uh and uh and and then he went
on to study it and explained it in scientific terms.
And he's really really big into taking things that are
seemingly paranormal and then and then let's examine it from
a scientific point of view and figure out what's actually happening. Uh,
(30:54):
you know, not alien. So he's not like a conspiracy
not or anything. He's he's a dude that's grounded in
science and turning the gay of science on things that
are phenomenal. So, unsurprisingly, there was an article on Scriptic
Magazine by an author by the name of Frederick V. Momstrom,
and he wrote an arcohol close encounters of the facial
kind are UFO alien faces an inborn facial recognition template.
(31:18):
His argument here, all right, So, okay, so aliens, gray
aliens UM like UFO like unsolved mysteries, um close encounters
of the third kind kind of alien? You know what
I'm talking about? This Uh, this big gray head with
large black eyes and a a little mouth and a little nose.
(31:39):
And in these abduction uh experiences, the individuals perceiving these
things like looming over them. Uh. And there's generally like
there's something surgical or or you know, or or probe
related going on in these scenarios, you know, and there's
a sense of you know, there's some sleep paralysis or something,
and there's a sense of of of being of loose
(32:00):
in control and uh. Uh you know, listen to our
episode on the UFO deduction experiences for for a little
more about the science of what is actually going on
in these encounters. But the author here is focusing in
particularly on that face, like why why would we see
this gray alien face? And why do so many people
see it? Well, there are the same type of face. Now,
(32:22):
one really good explanation for that is that we saw
it on Unsolved Mysteries. We saw it faces, and we've
been primed to see that. That is, we've we've encountered
this story before in our fiction and uh, and so
it's ready to go when we actually encounter a paranormal
experience on a neurological level. But uh, Malmstrom's theory is
(32:44):
that what we're actually too tapping into here is the
infant facial recognition software that that that we have not
used in a long time but is still present. Uh.
The ideas that the baby's vision, uh, baby's vision, an
infants vision is is imperfect. You know, it's like they're
(33:04):
they're far they're near sighted. Everything's blurry and bright. So
what does mother's face look like to an infant with
that kind of vision? Bulbous head, right, and two long
slits fries and a little tiny nose holes and a
bit of a slash of a mouth. And this is
(33:25):
actually something that um that was borne out right by
this attempt to try to mimic, as you call it,
baby vision at this point, like what would this graphically
look like to us? Yeah, and he explored it by
taking taking this up, this prototypical female face, blurring it out,
(33:46):
blurring the images out and uh and just applying these
different layers that attempt to replicate infant site and you
get something that looks a lot like you know, Encounters
of the Third kind Unsolved Mysteries, gray alien. That's that's
stereotypical alien head. Yeah, and yeah, you guys should definitely
check it out. Just take a look at this, and
(34:07):
it begins to really make sense. And then of course
you you look at this information and you begin to wonder,
and this is a little bit wacky, but you begin
to wonder our alien abductions or sightings. Um. It's particularly
in the context of false awakenings that we've talked about before,
where your brain is coming back online too consciousness, but
(34:28):
your body is still in sleep paralysis. Is could this
idea that you see something that is other just a
ghost memory of your mother's face when in your earliest
memories as a baby. Because we have access presumably to
all of our memories, just not all the time, so
(34:52):
potentially in this kind of sleep situation, you might be
able to retrieve that. I know it's wacky, but it
is very interesting. Yeah, I found it, found it really fascinating. Again,
it's taking some you know, a paranormal experience and uh
and then trying to to understand it through science. And
it's just like I said, who knows if this holds up,
(35:14):
but it's a really interesting way of looking at it well,
and it underlines again what's some of the things amazing
that are amazing about how the infant mind works. Yeah,
and I think this idea too, of can can we
revisit our infant minds at some time. Is it through
just these specialized periods of disrupted sleep um or are
we way past those those memories? And to what extent
(35:36):
can we actually tap into it and make it work
for us so to speak? Because I mean, if you
think about it, we are statistical machines. We just have
these overlays of our experiences which sort of shut out
some possibilities for us in terms of what we can
dream for ourselves or understand. So if we could take
it back to our roots system and still be access
(35:56):
for are fully formed adult brains, that would be great.
More in forrrantly that the next time you're you're leaning
over the baby's cradle in your life, uh, and imagine
that that that the infant sees you as a as
a gray alien. And the next time you find yourself
curiously unable to move in your bed and you look
(36:16):
up and you see this, uh, this strange gray head
with big black eyes. Embrace it well, and that makes
you realize why some people are terrified if if that
were the case, that there was just a ghost memory
of their mother, because it's your mom, but it's not right,
So it's the other of course you're going to be like,
whoa alien? Yeah, Um, I wanted to mention real quick
(36:37):
that Elizabeth Falky fascinating uh cognitive psychologists. She if anybody
is interested. She actually took a lot of her data
and she pitted it against Lawrence Lawrence H. Summers, that
then president of Harvard who in two thousand and five
suggested that the shortage of women and um physical sciences
could be due to innate shortcome things and math. She
(37:01):
took all her statistical data from forty years and combed
through it to to actually make the point that it um,
that was not the case at all. There was no
different differentiation at all in terms of gender when it
came to babies, children, and science, and and this uh
(37:22):
innate or not innate ability to grasp math in a
meaningful way. So if anybody is interested in this. She
has a debate with her friend, actually, Stephen Pinker. We've
talked about him before. He is a neuroscientist, and that
we know him more in the context of him calling
musical abilities cheesecake, right, auditory cheesecake like it's just sort
(37:44):
of happened by accident. Um. But anyway, they have a
very very interesting debate on this topic. And uh, Spelky
is amazing. She has very um interesting takes on this topic.
And uh, and what are what are the books that
individuals can check out? Individuals listeners can check out if
they want to want to hear more. Gottenick as a book,
(38:05):
right she does. I believe I'm going to probably get
this wrong, but I think it's called The Psychology of Babies.
But you can just search for Alison Gothnik check her
out on TED. Also Elizabeth S. Bucky. Um, there are
two great resources if you want to learn more. All right, Well, um,
we're gonna skip the robe at today because he's got
a busted wheel. It's it's rough. He's all the way
(38:27):
through the side of the room and I'm not gonna
get up and walk over there to get mail. But
by all means, send us more mail you can. You
can reach out to us on Facebook. We were stuff
to blow your mind there. You can find us on
Twitter where we are blow the mind. We'd love to hear. Uh,
what are your observations with babies? I know the number
of you out there, our parents or you've at least
(38:48):
you know baby said, or you've you've had to or
you had an infant sibling or something. What are your
what were your interactions like, tell us what you think
about the infant mind and and have you glimpsed some
of what we're talking about in that child? And you
can always drop us a line at blew the Mind
at discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands
(39:14):
of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com
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