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These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
The Philosophical Baby
Clearly, childhood must
serve a purpose, especially human childhood that appears to be so senseless
from an evolutionary point of view (no other cub is so helpless in the world).
Children spend years practicing a form of mental gymnastics that other species
can't do, and that provides the human species with an evolutionary advantage:
the ability to map the world and to imagine worlds that don't exist. The US
psychologist Alison Gopnikbelieves that the ability of imagining alternative worlds (of
dealing with "counterfactuals") peaks during childhood. Far from
being limited to the "here" and "now" as Piagetassumed, children understand
how the real world works and then project that knowledge into many other
possible worlds. The fact that children don't seem to be capable of
distinguishing between reality and fantasy should not be taken as evidence of
cognitive limitation but of cognitive power: they are very creative instead of
being passive (like adults tend to be). Because all of this is due
to a physically different structure of the brain (mainly in the prefrontal
cortex, that doesn't mature until the mid-20s), Gopnik goes as far as to claim
that children and adults are two different subspecies of the same species, Homo
Sapiens. Children are also capable of
creating "theories of mind", i.e. of understanding the goals and
desires of other children and people in general. The way they understand psychology
is similar to the way they understand the physical world: they create
"psychological counterfactuals", i.e. imaginary companions. With them
they rehearse the rules of psychology the same way that they rehearse the rules
of physics when they imagine hypothetical worlds. Children are aware that these
imaginary companions don't exist, just like they are aware that imaginary
worlds don't exist. Children construct maps of both the physical world and of
the psychological world. In both cases children first understand the world,
then they imagine hypothetical worlds, then they are ready to actually create
worlds. In the physical world this translates into action. In the psychological
world this translates into dealing with other minds and trying to make them do
what we want them to do (which includes the complex interplay of discussions,
strategies, and even deceit and lies). The key to learning is
probability theory. Children act just like scientists. They perform experiments
and then update their beliefs, each belief being weighed probabilistically.
This is true of both facts about the world and facts about people. Gopnik
concludes that statistical analysis is actually wired inside the brain. When
Thomas Bayesformulated his theorem (the main building block of probabilistic
reasoning) he had actually stumbled on a property of the brain. However, the way children
acquire their knowledge about the world is different from the way a scientist
does because their brain works in a fundamentally different way. The adult
brain regulates attention by inhibiting distractions and thereby
"focusing" on something. The baby's brain is still lacking in
inhibitory neurotransmitters and therefore absorbs everything that is going on
rather than focusing on one particular aspect of reality. The adult brain can
balance cholinergic and inhibitory neurotransmitters, whereas the baby's brain
is dominated by cholinergic ones. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Memory" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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