Alison
Gopnik is a psychologist and the author of an acclaimed book, The Philosophical Baby: What Children's
Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love & the Meaning of Life (plus a few other
books on how babies think). Two years ago she also gave a TED talk dramatizing
some of her own findings and those of fellow child psychologists. In much of
the talk, she explains (with some striking examples) how babies and small
children are much cleverer that they are usually given credit for, to the point
of engaging in some protoscientific thinking (with a penchant for hypothesis
testing, etc.). At some point, though, she makes an even bolder claim. She says
babies and children are, in fact, even more conscious than adults. And she
offers a simple neuroscientific explanation for this counterintuitive juvenile
advantage.
In
Gopnik’s view, adult consciousness works like a spotlight – it typically
deploys a “very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention.” And once the adult
mind focuses on this or that very intensely, “everything else goes dark.” Why
is adult consciousness so narrow and prone to tunnel vision? Once the
prefrontal cortex of an adult is activated, it shuts down activity in much of
the rest of the brain (I guess she refers to what neuroscientists call the
“default network” of the brain which is involved a more holistic, intuitive,
emotionally-colored neural processing). Babies and young
children, on the other hand, seem blessed with “more of a lantern of
consciousness” as opposed to the spotlight version adults have developed. Since
their prefrontal cortices are less mature, and inhibitory processes in their
brains are weaker, “they are very good at taking in lots of information from
lots of different sources.
Gopnik’s
point about the upside of less focused attention is quite refreshing. But I am afraid
her perspective itself might be a good illustration of the limitations she attributes
to adult consciousness. There are in fact experiments demonstrating that the
intense focus she describes is not a human universal. For example, when
American and Asian students are asked to look at a picture, there is a marked
difference in the ways they perceive it. Most Americans do tend to focus on the
central object, and to recall later more details related to it as opposed to
the background. Asians, meanwhile, typically have the opposite tendency. So
Gopnik might have partly fallen in the trap now known as the WEIRD problem in
psychology and neuroscience – the reliance of these fields on test subjects
from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries (many of
them college students, who tend to be even bigger outliers as compared to the
general population); and the tendency of Western researchers to attribute
universal validity to the statistically significant findings they reach working
with such culturally, psychologically, and neurophysiologically atypical human
material.
