Just finished reading another book…”The Philosophical Baby,” by Alison Gopnik. In all, I really enjoyed it!
Interestingly, Gopnik mentions how critical the child’s early environment is to their mental image of the world. This goes hand in hand with my review of the book The Future of the Body. Raised in a culture that believes in faith healing, esp, or telekinesis, a child would believe in and attempt to practice those abilities.
She discusses Bayesian statistics – the idea that we create probabilities of possibilities, since nothing is certain – and experiments that seem to show that children are interacting with the world in a statistical fashion.
Well, from the point of view of a psychologist who has spent her career doing statistical behavioral research on children, of course it looks as if they’re thinking statistically about the world. But is it necessarily true?
The issue is that our definitions of things (babies are statistically solving causal relationships in the world) will define not only the things themselves, but how we are able to think about other things in our world. Once we see through statistical glasses, everything looks like a statistic.
But it’s not.
The best example I can give is the one that Gopnik uses herself. Say you have an experiment in which you test a medication on high blood pressure. The group on the medication has a decrease in high blood pressure. You assume that it must be the medication causing the decrease in high blood pressure. Fine.
But then, someone else does an experiment in which they give both groups a pill, neither of which is medication, but they tell one group that they’re receiving the real medicine. The group that received the “real” placebo sees a decrease in HBP.
What was the medicine?
What happens, I think, as we become “adult” is that we rely more and more on the “causal” relationships we’ve identified in the world around us. We believe our own press…or do our own supply…however you want to look at it. Life becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Wherever you look, you find evidence for your beliefs. Because it’s all you are capable of seeing.
I really liked this book. It comes so close, throughout, to really showing how there is no true difference between children and adults – it just doesn’t quite get there.
For instance, the author frequently cites “habituation” studies of infants. “Habituation” refers to the tendency for infants to become disinterested in repetitive stimuli. That is, when the same thing happens over and over, you stop paying attention to it. However, habituation isn’t unique to infants, or to children…it’s common in all animals, at all “stages” of life. TV advertisers are very familiar with habituation. They change their commercials frequently enough to have a consistent effect on you. If they just played the same Coke commercial for five years, its effectiveness would be lost.
As a brief aside, it’s interesting to observe that habituation is a physical phenomenon. Most of the studies done on habituation are “psychological” studies. How long does it take till this person gets bored of xyz? But the brain is a physical entity, and the mind is a product of that physical brain. We can observe habituation in our bodies through exercise, or, say, caffeine. Have a cup of coffee in the morning, and it spikes your adrenals. Have a cup every morning for a year, and suddenly, it doesn’t have any effect at all.
All of the examples that Gopnik uses to illustrate how children’s minds operate really end up showing that, through culturally-crafted pruning of behavior, we become the self-fulfilling automatons of our culture.
While that statement is a little forceful, it isn’t too far from reality.
A great example of this shows up in the book, around the middle, where the author describes a researcher who was studying Mayan culture. Mayan mothers begin teaching their children basic skills at a very very young age, and they are careful to make sure that the children are paying attention. This particular researcher was stunned to find 18 month old babies wielding machetes against coconuts, without any concern from their mothers – just as amazed as the Mayan mothers were that the researcher’s young daughter could operate the sink and toilet in a modern bathroom without any supervision.
My biggest point of concern for what is not said in this book goes back to James Carse’s book “Finite and Infinite Games.”
I would say that the definition of “adult” in our US culture is – “one who plays only finite games.” If you play infinite games, you are “childish.”
You can play many finite games at the same time, but they all must be finite. For instance, you can simultaneously be Christian, a scientist, and an NRA member. But, as Carse says, you must play, so you cannot play.
The thing I love is the thing I hate. Alison Gopnik, through her exposition of psychological studies of infants and children (which necessarily draw a dividing line between them and adults), shows us the qualities that we, as adults, have given up…
That we can take up once again…
