In The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life, Alison Gopnik talks about the differences in the way adults and babies experience the world:
"...Babies are actually aware of much more, much more intensely than we are.... Instead of experiencing a single aspect of their world and shutting down everything else, they seem to be experiencing everything at once. Their brains are soaked in cholinergic transmitters with few inhibitory transmitters to allay their effects. And their brains, as well as their minds, are dramatically plastic, profoundly open to new experiences....
"But what does it feel like to be this way?... Think about the adult experience of travel — particularly travels to an exotic place.... An adult in a strange place is like a baby in many ways. There is a great deal of new information available at once. And the traveler is not in a good position to make 'top-down' decisions beforehand about what kinds of information are going to be relevant. Like the baby, the traveler's attention is likely to be caught by external objects and events, rather than determined by her own intentions and decisions."
In the last decade there has been a revolution in our understanding of the minds of infants and young children. We used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Now Alison Gopnik — a leading psychologist and philosopher, as well as a mother — explains the cutting-edge scientific and psychological research that has revealed that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined.
Get FREE SHIPPING on this title and many others in our Holiday Gift Guide through December 12, 2014!
(Sale ends 11:59 PST)
Post a Comment