Alison Gopnik Quotes & Sayings

Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way. The human mind can change radically in just a few generations. — Alison Gopnik

Overall, female scientists have fewer resources than male scientists, just as poor people have less access to health care. But if you compare male and female scientists with identical resources, you find that the women are just as likely to be successful. — Alison Gopnik

Historically, absolute IQ scores have risen substantially as we've changed our environment so that more people go to school longer. — Alison Gopnik

Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school. — Alison Gopnik

We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously and effortlessly. — Alison Gopnik

For better or worse, we live in possible worlds as much as actual ones. We are cursed by that characteristically human guilt and regret about what might have been in the past. But that may be the cost for our ability to hope and plan for what might be in the future. — Alison Gopnik

One of the things I say is, 'You want to know what it's like to be a baby? It's like being in love for the first time in Paris after four double espressos.' And boy, you are alive and conscious. — Alison Gopnik

A theory not only explains the world we see, it lets us imagine other worlds, and, even more significantly, lets us act to create those worlds. Developing everyday theories, like scientific theories, has allowed human beings to change the world. — Alison Gopnik

If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old. — Alison Gopnik

Ineffective or weak brain connections are pruned in much the same way a gardener would prune a tree or bush, giving the plant a desired shape, — Alison Gopnik

It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old. — Alison Gopnik

The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either. — Alison Gopnik

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them. — Alison Gopnik

Being a developmental psychologist didn't make me any better at dealing with my own children, no. I muddled through, and, believe me, fretted and worried with the best of them. — Alison Gopnik

Siblings are the guarantors that the private childhood world - so unlike the adult world that scientists are only just beginning to understand it - is a fully shared and objective one. — Alison Gopnik

I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling. — Alison Gopnik

As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness. — Alison Gopnik

When nobody read, dyslexia wasn't a problem. When most people had to hunt, a minor genetic variation in your ability to focus attention was hardly a problem, and may even have been an advantage. When most people have to make it through high school, the same variation can become a genuinely life-altering disease. — Alison Gopnik

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. — Alison Gopnik

The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library. — Alison Gopnik

Initially children use just a few names, mostly for familiar things and people. But when they are still just beginning to talk, many babies will suddenly start naming everything and asking for the names of everything they see. In fact, what'sat? is itself often one of the earliest words. An eighteen-month-old baby will go into a triumphant frenzy of pointing and naming: "What'sat! Dog! What'sat! Clock! What'sat juice, spoon, orange, high chair, clock! Clock! Clock!" Often this is the point at which even fondly attentive parents lose track of how many new words the baby has learned. It's as if the baby discovers that everything has a name, and this discovery triggers a kind of naming explosion. — Alison Gopnik

The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one. — Alison Gopnik

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. — Alison Gopnik

Samuel Johnson called it the vanity of human wishes, and Buddhists talk about the endless cycle of desire. Social psychologists say we get trapped on a hedonic treadmill. What they all mean is that we wish, plan and work for things that we think will make us happy, but when we finally get them, we aren't nearly as happy as we thought we'd be. — Alison Gopnik

Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: 'How should this society work? How should relationships among people work?' The exploration is: 'Who am I, what am I doing?' — Alison Gopnik

The thing that is most important is having people who are involved and engaged with the kids and also are not stressed and can be involved with them. And that's actually not boring and banal. That actually takes a lot of work to make that happen, and it's not something that our society does very well at all. — Alison Gopnik

One of the things I say is from an evolutionary point of view: probably the ideal rich environment for a baby includes more mud, livestock, and relatives than most of us could tolerate nowadays. — Alison Gopnik

Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific - this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions. — Alison Gopnik

What makes knowledge automatic is what gets you to Carnegie Hall - practice, practice, practice. — Alison Gopnik

I think universities are trying to figure out how we could use what we know about learning to change our education system, but it is sort of funny that they don't necessarily seem to be consulting the people who are sitting right there on campus. — Alison Gopnik

Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water. — Alison Gopnik

Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb. — Alison Gopnik

Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral achievements. — Alison Gopnik

In fact, our brains are most active, and hungriest, in the first few years of life. Even as adults, our brains use a lot of energy: when you just sit still, about 20 percent of your calories go to your brain. One-year-olds use much more than that, and by four, fully 66 percent of calories go to the brain, more than at any other period of development. In fact, the physical growth of children slows down in early childhood to compensate for the explosive activity of their brains. — Alison Gopnik

From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults. — Alison Gopnik

We know what makes babies smart and happy and thrive. It's having human beings who are dedicated to caring for them - human beings who are well supported, not stressed out and not poor. — Alison Gopnik

The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment. — Alison Gopnik

Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways. — Alison Gopnik

Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It's just they are equally interested in exploring both. — Alison Gopnik

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers. — Alison Gopnik

Knowledge guides emotion more than emotion distorts knowledge. — Alison Gopnik

We do nothing for children between the ages of zero and five. And we seem to be quite happy to have children growing up in not just poverty, which wouldn't be so bad, but isolation, lack of people around them, lack of support, lack of ability to go out and play in the dirt. — Alison Gopnik

If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame. — Alison Gopnik

Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be. — Alison Gopnik

Literature is the equivalent of the climate scientist's computer simulations: set up some new starting conditions, run the whole complicated process and see what happens. — Alison Gopnik

Something like reading depends a lot on just having people around you who talk to you and read you books, more than sitting down and, say, doing a reading drill when you're 3 or 4 years old. — Alison Gopnik

If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn't look like there's very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It's easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are. — Alison Gopnik

In most places and times in human history, babies have had not just one person but lots of people around who were really paying attention to them around, dedicated to them, cared to them, were related to them. I think the big shift in our culture is the isolation in which many children are growing up. — Alison Gopnik

I'm the oldest of six children and I had my own first baby when I was 23. So I've always been interested in babies, and I had lots of opportunities to watch them. — Alison Gopnik

Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities. — Alison Gopnik

The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect. — Alison Gopnik

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. — Alison Gopnik

What we want in students is creativity and a willingness to fail. I always say to students, 'If you've never at some point stayed up all night talking to your new boyfriend about the meaning of life instead of preparing for the test, then you're not really an intellectual.' — Alison Gopnik

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention. — Alison Gopnik

The real excitement is collaborating with computer scientists and neuroscientists and starting to understand in detail how children learn so much so quickly. — Alison Gopnik

We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness - better to be a spirit in Heaven than a zombie on Earth. — Alison Gopnik

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way. — Alison Gopnik

Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical. — Alison Gopnik

Many philosophers say it's impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that's not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It's just that they haven't explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about. — Alison Gopnik

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. — Alison Gopnik

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways. — Alison Gopnik

It's not that children are little scientists - it's that scientists are big children. Scientists actually are the few people who as adults get to have this protected time when they can just explore, play, figure out what the world is like. — Alison Gopnik

We have lots of evidence that putting investments in early childhood education, even evidence from very hard-nosed economists, is one of the very best investments that the society can possibly make. And yet we still don't have public support for things like preschools. — Alison Gopnik

One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood. — Alison Gopnik

Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology. — Alison Gopnik

On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city. — Alison Gopnik

Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing. — Alison Gopnik

The brain knows the real secret of seduction, more effective than even music and martinis. Just keep whispering, 'Gee, you are really special' to that sack of water and protein that is a body, and you can get it to do practically anything. — Alison Gopnik

Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults. — Alison Gopnik

Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer. — Alison Gopnik

Even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real, whether in books or movies or in their own pretend play. Children with the most elaborate and beloved imaginary friends will gently remind overenthusiastic adults that these companions are, after all, just pretend. — Alison Gopnik

I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children. — Alison Gopnik

What, of course, we want in a university is for people to learn the skills they're going to need outside the classroom. So, having a system that had more emphasis on inquiry and exploration but also on learning and practising specific skills would fit much better with how we know people learn. — Alison Gopnik

We say that children are bad at paying attention, but we really mean that they're bad at not paying attention - they easily get distracted by anything interesting. — Alison Gopnik

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. — Alison Gopnik

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments. — Alison Gopnik

Owning our past allows us to own our future. — Alison Gopnik

Our babies are like penguins; penguin babies can't exist unless more than one person is taking care of them. They just can't keep going. — Alison Gopnik

Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct. — Alison Gopnik

If parents are the fixed stars in the child's universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby. — Alison Gopnik

The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans. — Alison Gopnik

The science can tell you that the thousands of pseudo-scientific parenting books out there - not to mention the 'Baby Einstein' DVDs and the flash cards and the brain-boosting toys - won't do a thing to make your baby smarter. That's largely because babies are already as smart as they can be; smarter than we are in some ways. — Alison Gopnik

We decided to become development psychologists and study children because there aren't any Martians. These brilliant beings with the little bodies and big heads are the closest we can get to a truly alien intelligence (even if we may occasionally suspect that they are bent on making us their slaves.) — Alison Gopnik