Preface

Scientists and cribs? We wrote this book to show that scientists, cribs and children do belong together.

For the last thirty years, scientists like us have been looking in cribs, playpens, nurseries and preschools. There have been hundreds of rigorous scientific studies that tell us how babies and young children think and learn. These studies have revolutionized our ideas about babies and young children, and about the nature of the human mind and brain. They have also helped answer profound and ancient philosophical questions. We can learn as much by looking in the crib and the nursery as by looking in the petri dish or the telescope. In some ways, we learn more--we learn what it means to be human.

In this book, we tell the story of the new science of children's minds. That story should be important to everyone who is interested in the mind and the brain. It's a central part of the new discipline called cognitive science. Cognitive science has united psychology, philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and neuroscience. New scientific insights often come from unexpected and even humble places, and some of the most important insights in cognitive science have come from the crib and the nursery. Understanding children has led us to understand ourselves in a new way.

Scientists and children belong together in another way, too. The new research shows that babies and young children know and learn more about the world than we could ever have imagined. They think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations, and even do experiments. Scientists and children belong together because they are the best learners in the universe. And that means that ordinary adults also have more powerful learning abilities than we might have thought. Grown-ups, after all, are all ex-children and potential scientists.

We hope this book will demonstrate that scientists and cribs belong together in still other ways. Parents are deeply, even passionately interested in children, or at least in their children. But parents find that their interest in children is treated differently than their interest in science. Books about science assume that their readers are serious, knowledgeable, intelligent, sophisticated adults who simply want to know about the things they care about. But books about babies and children are almost all books of advice-- how-to books. It's as if the only place you could read about evolution was in dog-breeding manuals, not in Steven Jay Gould; as if, lacking Stephen Hawking's insights, the layman's knowledge of the cosmos was reduced to "How to find the constellations." How-to books can be enormously useful, but they shouldn't be the only place parents can learn about something they care about as much as they care about children.

We hope this book will help fill that gap. The science of baby's minds should hold a special fascination for people who live with babies and young children every day. The picture of children that emerges is at once surprisingly familiar and surprisingly unfamiliar. Parents who read this book should find themselves both feeling the shock of recognition and the shock of the new.

There is yet another reason why scientists and cribs belong together. Everyone should be interested in understanding children because the future of the world, quite literally, depends on them. Recently there has been more and more recognition of that fact. But getting public policies about children right depends on getting the science right. The political sound-bites and op-ed page pieces are inevitably simplified. If citizens and voters are going to make the right political decisions about children, they need to understand what science tells us (and what it doesn't).

In writing this book we've faced the usual problems of scientists trying to explain their research. Science is elegant and orderly. But it is also messy, noisy, complicated and invariably embroiled in controversies and debates. We've tried to present what we think are the most interesting experiments, conclusions, ideas and speculations; but we couldn't possibly reflect the entire field in all its diversity and complexity. We've tried to indicate when we are talking about our own views and when we're talking about ideas that are generally accepted in the field, and to indicate the many questions that remain unanswered.

Chapter One

Ancient Questions and a Young Science

Walk upstairs, open the door gently, and look in the crib. What do you see? Most of us see a picture of innocence and helplessness, a clean slate. But, in fact, what we see in the crib is the greatest mind that has ever existed, the most powerful learning machine in the universe. The tiny fingers and mouth are exploration devices that probe the alien world around them with more precision than any Mars rover. The crumpled ears take a buzz of incomprehensible noise and flawlessly turn it into meaningful language. The wide eyes that sometimes seem to peer into your very soul actually do just that, deciphering your deepest feelings. The downy head surrounds a brain that is forming millions of new connections every day. That, at least, is what thirty years of scientific research have told us.

This book is about that research. What are these deeply familiar yet surprisingly strange creatures we call children really like? Of course, human beings have always wondered, pondered, and even agonized about their children. But most of the time, the questions people ask are practical. Some are immediate, questions about how to get them to eat more or cry less. Some are long-term, questions about how to turn them into the right kind of grownups. These are important questions, crucial for the survival of any civilization (not to mention any parent), but we won't have very much to say about them. This book won't tell you how to make babies easier or smarter or nicer, or how to get them to go to sleep or to Harvard. There are lots of books that do that, or anyway say they do, right between the cooking and house repairs sections in your local bookstore. Our questions are both harder and easier than the practical questions. We want to understand children, not renovate them.

While the purported answers to the practical questions fill volumes, all of us who have lived with babies and young children, or even just looked at them, have found ourselves asking deeper questions. We decided to become developmental 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). Babies are fascinating, mysterious, and just plain weird. Watch awhile. A three-month-old catches sight of the stripes on a shopping bag and follows it carefully as her father carries it around the room, staring with intense cross-eyed concentration. A one-year-old visiting the zoo points at the elephant and says triumphantly and with great certainty, "Doggie!" A "terrible two-year-old" turns toward the expressly forbidden switch of the computer and slowly, deliberately, watching his mother every moment, erases the day's work. As we change diapers and wipe noses, all of us, no matter how preoccupied, find ourselves exclaiming, "What's going on in that little head of hers? Where on earth did he get that from?"

Developmental psychologists have had the luxury of asking those questions systematically and even getting answers to them. We're actually starting to understand what's going on in that little head of hers and where on earth he got that from.

Studying babies is full of fascination in its own right. But developmental research also helps answer a more general, deep, and ancient question, not just about babies but about us. We human beings, no more than a few pounds of protein and water, have come to understand the origins of the universe, the nature of life, and even a few things about ourselves. No other animal, and not even the most sophisticated computer, knows as much. And yet every one of us started out as the helpless creature in the crib. Only a few tiny flickers of information from the outside world reach that creature--a few photons hitting its retinas, some sound waves vibrating at its eardrums--and yet we end up knowing how the world works. How do we do it? How did we get here from there?

The new research about babies holds answers to those questions, too. It turns out that the capacities that allow us to learn about the world and ourselves have their origins in infancy. We are born with the ability to discover the secrets of the universe and of our own minds, and with the drive to explore and experiment until we do. Science isn't just the specialized province of a chilly elite; instead, it's continuous with the kind of learning every one of us does when we're very small.

Trying to understand human nature is part of human nature. Developmental scientists are themselves engaged in the same enterprise and use the same cognitive tools as the babies they study. The scientist peering into the crib, looking for answers to some of the deepest questions about how minds and the world and language work, sees the scientist peering out of the crib, who, it turns out, is doing much the same thing. No wonder they both smile.