Babies are smarter than us??

Last Tuesday, I finally pushed myself back to my Ted talk club. Our theme this week is about babies. No, I am not talking about sex education, pregnancy, family planning, or how to change diapers or feed a baby.  It is about babies' brain and its development.  Thanks Luke for picking a very interesting topic as usual.

Have we ever wondered if we should learn how to learn things from babies? That thought never came to my mind before. Well, probably I do not have children so that I do not interact with them a lot to realize that there are many things that I should learn from them. To me, babies are ingratiatingly cute when they are happy and smiling but very messy and troublesome when they start crying for their demands.  However, the talk by Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC, Berkeley and the second given by Patricia Kuhl, a professor of Speeach and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington that we watched on Tuesday provides us different perspectives when we look at babies.  They are not irrational, illogical, or egocentric as we think.  Instead they are deep thinkers and they own great learning and innovation skills that we should learn from them. 

Here are the links of two Ted talks

The speech by Alison provides a general idea on the ability of babies to learn and pick up things very fast.  For example she conducted an experiment with babies to investigate if babies figure out what other people are thinking and feeling.  Basically, she gave babies one bowl of broccoli and one bowl of goldenfish rackers and tried to figure it out if babies knew what her student likes or dislikes between them, broccoli or goldenfish rackers.  She first realized that all of the babies preferred the crackers to the raw broccoli after they tasted them.  However when her student acted that what she liked was the opposite of what the babies liked (she acted as if she liked raw broccoli rather the crackers) and then her student asked the babies to give her one of two things they have.  She found out that surprisingly, 18 month old babies gave her student raw broccoli instead of goldenfish crackers.

Alison proposes a couple of hypotheses to explain the powerful learning ability among babies.  First, the babies have long childhood than any kind of animals that allows them to solely focus on learning.  It can be true to me. Babies do not have to worry about anything.  They entirely depend on dull, sluggish, sleep-deprived parents, who are fond of them, for survivalJ.  When the babies have nothing to worry, they might be bored, leading them to observe and explore things around them to keep them busyJ. Second, it is about the development of the prefrontal cortex, a part of our brain.  The more we activate prefrontal cortex, the more it becomes flexible and more plastic, thereby sending more signals to our brain.  She found that babies’ prefrontal cortex is flooded with more neurotransmitters that are good at inducing learning and plasticity that adult’s. 

Although there are a couple things she overstates in her talk for example saying that our adults should take all babies’ idea and put them into practice, in general, I like her take-home message.  We, grown-up adults, should stop being lazy thinkers and should keep our mind activated and keep our brain open to new things, if we want to own the powerful learning and innovation ability like babiesJ. 

The second talk by Patricia specifically focuses on the ability of learning new language among babies. Her experiment reveals that the linguistic ability of the babies develops very early.  Babies can distinguish different sounds from different languages in different countries very early, unlike adults.  However, babies and children are geniuses in language till 7 and then this decline keep reducing sharply till puberty, in which we fall off the map.  The reason for it is that babies absorb new languages, changing their brain while adults are governed by memory that is formed during the early development.  Thus, like Alison, she emphasizes the importance of openness of our brain to new things when we are still little kids.  However it seems that adults tend to lose this ability when they grow up and get older.

 Those above talks remind me of the story of Joshua Foer, the US memory champion and the author of the book “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”.   To cut a long story short, Joshua describes his process of training him from a person with an average memory to be a champion who could recall 107 first and last names associated with each of the person after staring those names and faces in 15 minutes, 88 digit mixed up in 5 minutes, and setting up a new record of memorizing deck of cards in order after they were flashed in front of him in one minute and forty seconds.  Joshua said that our brain and memory is trainable and the process to train our brain and memory is the same as the process of building up our muscle.  The more we train and it active, the better it is.

Back to the topic of the post about if babies are smarter than us. I do not think that babies are really smarter than us.  However, they are better than us at opening themselves to new things and keep their brain active.  Grown-up adults tend to shut down our brain to new things. It can make sense because we have so many things to worry, or we sometimes get used to mundane activities that do not require us to think much, or we become so focused on what we are doing, we forget that there are other interesting things.  If we can keep our brain active and open as babies and children, we should be able cultivate our learning and innovation skills as they do. Any skill is able to be learnt.  Despite easier said than done, back to the old saw practice makes perfect.

PS: Another suggestion is that you should record all activities of your babies and show those videos to them when they become a grownup.  In doing so, they can remind of themselves being an awesome learner when they are little kids and who knows that they might be able to utilize some of their innovative ideas they come up during their childhood (j/k).