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What it is like to be a baby
I found these claims intriguing, but memory did not provide a test:
Gopnik argues that babies are not only conscious, they are more conscious than adults. Her argument for this view begins with the idea that people in general -- adults, that is -- have more conscious experience of what they attend to than of what they disregard...
Baby brains, Gopnik says, exhibit a much broader plasticity than adults' and have a general neurochemistry similar to the neurochemistry involved in adult attention. Babies learn more quickly than we do, and about more things, and pick up more incidental knowledge outside a narrow band of attention. Gopnik suggests that we think of attention, in adults, as something like a mechanism that turns part of our mature and slow-changing brains, for a brief period, flexible, quick learning, and plastic -- baby-like -- while suppressing change in the rest of the brain.
So what is it like to be a baby? According to Gopnik, it's something like attending to everything at once: There's much less of the reflexive and ignored, the non-conscious, the automatic and expert. She suggests that the closest approximation adults typically get to baby-like experience is when they are in completely novel environments, such as very different cultures, where everything is new.
In my view, some people have a better sense (a much better sense) of what it is like to be a baby than others...
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 27, 2007 at 07:27 AM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
Wasn't this the argument for taking psychedelic drugs? "The Doors of Perception" and all that?
Posted by: Arnold Kling at Jun 27, 2007 8:26:12 AM
And to follow a drug post... I have often noticed babies at a certain age often go into what i call the "stoned baby" look. It's as if they're saying, "Whoa, look at all of that... that stuff!" I certainly buy into the idea that babies are not filtering as much, but when everything is new, it can lead to overload...
Isaac
Posted by: Isaac Crawford at Jun 27, 2007 8:36:40 AM
As for the last post(s)...
When our second was a year and a half old, we got her a cat calendar. Big picture for every month. Picture for every day. Picture filling in the blanks at the beginning and end of each month. Her response?
"Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. (& etc)". We took it & hid it.
===
More generally, however, both of our daughters exhibited what I call "discovery breathing" from a very early age. When something particularly focused their attention, they would begin rapid, deep breathing. This was clearly different behavior from normal play.
Posted by: Nathan Zook at Jun 27, 2007 8:48:14 AM
This view of babies could have some effect on the abortion debate, no?
As to attention, babies have to pay attention to everything because they don't yet have a framework within which to fit perceptions. This framework tells adults if a particular piece of data is significant or not. Things that don't help flesh out the framework can be safely ignored. Babies can't afford to ignore anything. Must be scary to be a baby, or a child. Maybe that's why (most) kids want to grow up so much.
Posted by: Robert Speirs at Jun 27, 2007 9:48:26 AM
A few years ago I asked most of my friends about their first memories. On average my female friends had much earlier memories than my male friends. Some of these memories were from before they could talk.
It’s not hard to find possible problems with these stories, but I’d be interested to know if this were part of a general trend.
Posted by: stuart at Jun 27, 2007 9:51:12 AM
One concern with this hypothesis is that babies don't typically seem to learn to use their bodies that well. A young adult who puts some time
and attention into learning how their body works can more-or-less invent a martial art that while much less powerful than traditional martial
arts, is much more powerful than the natural fighting techniques that emerge from whatever babies do.
Posted by: michael vassar at Jun 27, 2007 10:04:48 AM
Yes, it is pretty clear to me, as I have become more open to experience and less "living in my mind" that babies and young children are much more conscious to what is happening, and older children and adults are much more living out of a conceptual script and framework. Peak experiences are moments when awareness escapes the rigidness of its conceptual shackles and self-conscious thoughts.
Posted by: Matthew at Jun 27, 2007 11:04:43 AM
I'd guess that people with autism are much more baby-like in this respect than the general public at large. And friends tell me that Arnold Kling is absolutely right.
Posted by: eriks at Jun 27, 2007 12:06:41 PM
"Wasn't this the argument for taking psychedelic drugs? "The Doors of Perception" and all that?"--A.K.
I wouldn't say it was the argument for such drug use. It was more a characterization of one effect.
Posted by: ben tillman at Jun 27, 2007 12:52:40 PM
This view of babies could have some effect on the abortion debate, no?
The euthanasia debate too.
Posted by: ad at Jun 27, 2007 4:06:44 PM
Makes sense to me. One of the things that strongly characterizes a friend's seventeen-month-old is that she notices things that we never do (for instance, if there is anything in the room that looks like a cat, even if it is near the ceiling, she notices it). She gives every impression of simply not knowing what is unimportant yet, hence paying attention to everything. (With my five-month-old, of course, I have no idea what she's paying attention to half the time, but sometimes it's clearly not what I would consider the important thing.)
stuart: I believe my first memory is from somewhere in the thirteen months range (and I'm female). It's of my being pretty short and my mother being bedridden but not concerned by this fact; given that she was almost never sick growing up, we hypothesize it's a surgery she had, which of course we can date precisely.
eriks: I'd wondered about the autism thing myself, given that, iirc, autism symptoms don't manifest until at least six months; seems like there must be something that goes one way in autistics, another in neurotypicals, that doesn't kick in for a while. "Starting to narrow down where attention should go" seems worthy of investigation as anything.
Posted by: Andromeda at Jun 27, 2007 4:24:42 PM
I am struck by how 1-2 year olds of my acquaintance are able to point out animals (dogs, cats) in the streets whereas I rarely notice them. I remember a friend's son yelling "Meow" on a busy, crowd-filled pedestrian street and immediately pointed at a cat, a feat equivalent to finding Waldo in a crowd. My guess is that whereas I am typically focused on an internal monologue or particular train of thought, the babies are busy soaking up and organizing their sense data.
Posted by: Shiraz Allidina at Jun 27, 2007 4:52:22 PM
It is freakish how my one-year-old will remember the text from a book having heard it only once. I find parenting extremely enjoyable for this reason, that the kids see things you never notice and make interesting new connections. It's also depressing to reflect on how slow I am to learn things (comparatively) now.
Posted by: Paul N at Jun 27, 2007 7:06:21 PM
I remember as a child thinking that when I grew up I wouldn't be conscious anymore, although I didn't
think if it in terms of consciousness. I just thought that when I grew up I would know what to do and I
would do it automatically. I was looking forward to it. Felt kind of cheated that it didn't happen.
Posted by: Ronald Brak at Jun 27, 2007 9:07:26 PM
--One concern with this hypothesis is that babies don't typically seem to learn to use their bodies that well.
I don't think you've had recent experience with a toddler. My one year old figured out how to take his first unassisted step on a Monday, and by that Saturday was running without falling at all. He learned how to open and close bottles with caps by watching me do it, and did that by 9 months. He figured out how to use a hammer before a year old, too.
Most infants and toddlers are attentive to sounds that we have long since tuned out. Just like they'll notice anything like a cat, they'll notice anything sounding like a car, or airplane, even if you didn't even realize the sound was there.
Their prior probabilities are not yet set like ours are. re: connections to autism: it's not just a "too much information" issue in autism, though that's part of the spectrum. It's the inability to register other people as people rather than things, as if you can't move out of the me-centered infancy stage.
Posted by: anon at Jun 27, 2007 10:15:01 PM
"She suggests that the closest approximation adults typically get to baby-like experience is when they are in completely novel environments, such as very different cultures, where everything is new." I think I experienced this living in Europe when I couldn't understand the mutterings on the streets or the advertisements. I was aware that I was relying on completely different tools of observation to find my way around and discern meanings (facial expressions, tone of voice, appearance, eye contact). Even these cues where different from home, though, so I got by on pure observation. It was completely liberating.
Posted by: anon at Jun 28, 2007 11:31:48 AM
