Education legend Sir Ken Robinson picked the talks he loves — all full of insight, bright ideas and, of course, creativity. About this event: "Baby Smarts" will be moderated by Dr. Mary Lusk. During this event, we will watch "What Do Babies Think?
A discussion about learning and babies will follow. Hans Rosling had a question: Do some religions have a higher birth rate than others -- and how does this affect global population growth?
With his trademark humor and sharp insight, Hans reaches a surprising conclusion on world fertility rates. How do babies learn so much from so little so quickly? In a fun, experiment-filled talk, cognitive scientist Laura Schulz shows how our young ones make decisions with a surprisingly strong sense of logic, well before they can talk. The global fertility rate, or the number of children per woman, has halved over the last 50 years.
What will having fewer babies mean for the future of humanity? In this funny, eye-opening talk, journalist and self-described exhausted dad Wajahat Ali examines how the current trend could lead to unexpected problems -- and shares why he believes Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know.
Clever lab experiments and brain scans show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world. After witnessing the "violent rage" shown by babies whenever deprived of an item they considered their own, Jean Piaget — a founding father of child psychology — observed something profound about human nature: Our sense of ownership emerges incredibly early. But why do we become so attached to things? Christian Jarrett details the psychology of Paternity leave has many benefits for dads, their partners and their babies -- but did you know it also has surprising benefits for companies?
This is what author Shu Matsuo Post learned from his seven transformative months of paternity leave -- and he says it can create more equal and diverse workplaces and even boost productivity.
Breast milk grows babies' bodies, fuels neurodevelopment, provides essential immunofactors and safeguards against famine and disease -- why, then, does science know more about tomatoes than mother's milk? Katie Hinde shares insights into this complex, life-giving substance and discusses the major gaps scientific research still needs to fill so w Sue Desmond-Hellmann is using precision public health -- an approach that incorporates big data, consumer monitoring, gene sequencing and other innovative tools -- to solve the world's most difficult medical problems.
It's already helped cut HIV transmission from mothers to babies by nearly half in sub-Saharan Africa, and now it's being used to What's going on inside the brains of animals?
Can we know what, or if, they're thinking and feeling? Carl Safina thinks we can. Using discoveries and anecdotes that span ecology, biology and behavioral science, he weaves together stories of whales, wolves, elephants and albatrosses to argue that just as we think, feel, use tools and express emot The news of society's growing inequality makes all of us uneasy.
But why? Dan Ariely reveals some new, surprising research on what we think is fair, as far as how wealth is distributed over societies In this prophetic talk -- just days before Dolly the sheep was stuffed -- biotech ethicist Gregory Stock looked forward to new, more meaningful and controversial technologies, like customizable babies, whose adoption might drive human evolution.
Why are babies cute? Why is cake sweet? Philosopher Dan Dennett has answers you wouldn't expect, as he shares evolution's counterintuitive reasoning on cute, sweet and sexy things plus a new theory from Matthew Hurley on why jokes are funny. Hard work, resilience and grit lead to success, right? This narrative pervades the way we think, says economist Darrick Hamilton, but the truth is that our chances at economic security have less to do with what we do and more to do with the wealth position we're born into.
We need women to work, and we need working women to have babies. So why is America one of the only countries in the world that offers no national paid leave to new working mothers? And essentially what Bayes did was to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, the way that scientists find out about the world.
So what scientists do is they have a hypothesis that they think might be likely to start with. They go out and test it against the evidence.
The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. Then they test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth. And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could do that.
And that mathematics is at the core of the best machine learning programs that we have now. And some 10 years ago, I suggested that babies might be doing the same thing. So if you want to know what's going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I think it actually looks something like this. This is Reverend Bayes's notebook. So I think those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they're revising to figure out how the world works.
All right, now that might seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate. Because after all, if you ask even grownups about statistics, they look extremely stupid. How could it be that children are doing statistics?
So to test this we used a machine that we have called the Blicket Detector. This is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some things on it and not others. And using this very simple machine, my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at learning about the world. Let me mention just one that we did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed you this detector, you would be likely to think to begin with that the way to make the detector go would be to put a block on top of the detector.
But actually, this detector works in a bit of a strange way. Because if you wave a block over the top of the detector, something you wouldn't ever think of to begin with, the detector will actually activate two out of three times. Whereas, if you do the likely thing, put the block on the detector, it will only activate two out of six times. So the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence. It looks as if the waving is a more effective strategy than the other strategy.
So we did just this; we gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we just asked them to make it go. And sure enough, the four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on top of the detector. Now there are two things that are really interesting about this. The first one is, again, remember, these are four year-olds. They're just learning how to count. But unconsciously, they're doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure.
And the other interesting thing is that they're using that evidence to get to an idea, get to a hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely to begin with. And in studies we've just been doing in my lab, similar studies, we've show that four year-olds are actually better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly the same task.
So in these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find out about the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to see if children are doing experiments. When children do experiments we call it "getting into everything" or else "playing.
And there's been a bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around is really a kind of experimental research program. Here's one from Cristine Legare's lab. What Cristine did was use our Blicket Detectors. And what she did was show children that yellow ones made it go and red ones didn't, and then she showed them an anomaly. And what you'll see is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses in the space of two minutes.
Boy: What's making this light up. Laughter I don't know. Boy: Oh, it's because this needs to be like this, and this needs to be like this. AG: Now this is his next idea.
He told the experimenter to do this, to try putting it out onto the other location. Not working either. Boy: Oh, because the light goes only to here, not here.
Oh, the bottom of this box has electricity in here, but this doesn't have electricity. Boy: It's lighting up. So when you put four. So you put four on this one to make it light up and two on this one to make it light up.
Now that is a particularly — that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical.
If you look at the way children play, when you ask them to explain something, what they really do is do a series of experiments. This is actually pretty typical of four year-olds. Well, what's it like to be this kind of creature? What's it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes?
Well, if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them have said that babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all. And I think just the opposite is true. I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults. Now here's what we know about how adult consciousness works.
And adults' attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight. So what happens for adults is we decide that something's relevant or important, we should pay attention to it.
Our consciousness of that thing that we're attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. And we even know something about the way the brain does this. So what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, sends a signal that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains.
So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different. I think babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness.
So babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing. But they're very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once. And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven't come on yet.
So when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention. So they're bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell them something and just looking at the thing that's important. That's the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn.
Well if we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think about cases where we're put in a new situation that we've never been in before — when we fall in love with someone new, or when we're in a new city for the first time.
And what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts, it expands, so that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home. And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you've been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters. So 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.
Laughter That's a fantastic way to be, but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o'clock in the morning. Now it's good to be a grownup. I don't want to say too much about how wonderful babies are. It's good to be a grownup. We can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And it makes sense that we put a lot of effort into making babies think like adults do. But if what we want is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more like children.
You have JavaScript disabled. Menu Main menu. Watch TED Talks. Alison Gopnik. Details About the talk. Video Boy: How about this?
0コメント