Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Love doesn't have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love's purpose is not to shape our beloved's destiny, but to help them shape their own. It isn't to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn't one we would choose ourselves, or even one we would choose for them. The

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.

Knowledge guides emotion more than emotion distorts knowledge.

It's not that children are little scientists but that scientists are big children.

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.)

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.

I'll show that babies, like scientists, use statistics and experiments to learn about the world.

children only begin to understand differences in desires when they are about eighteen months old...Toddlers are systematically testing the dimensions on which their desires and the desires of others may be in conflict... The terrible twos reflects a genuine clash between children's need to understand other people and their need to live happily with them.

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.

Our brains are designed to arrive at an accurate picture of the world, and to use that accurate picture to act on the world effectively, at least overall and in the long run. The same computational and neurological capacities that let us make discoveries about physics or biology also let us make discoveries about love.

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.)

even toddlers know that rules should be followed but that they can be changed. These two capacities, capacities for love and law, for caring about others and following the rules, allow our characteristically human combination of moral depth and flexibility.

If the child is a budding psychologist, we parents are the laboratory rats.

But as Freud and Elvis both remarked, apocryphally at least, work and love are the two things that make life worthwhile.