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Alison Gopnik
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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.
- Alison Gopnik
#Care
#Just
#Keep Going
#More
#Person
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.
- Alison Gopnik
#Anything
#Attention
#Bad
#Children
#Mean
The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.
- Alison Gopnik
#Blank
#Brain
#Either
#Flexible
#Stone
The science can tell you that the thousands of pseudo-scientific parenting books out there - not to mention the 'Baby Einstein' DVDs and the flash cards and the brain-boosting toys - won't do a thing to make your baby smarter. That's largely because babies are already as smart as they can be; smarter than we are in some ways.
- Alison Gopnik
#Cards
#Parenting
#Science
#Smart
#Toys
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.
- Alison Gopnik
#Children
#Drive
#Food
#Questions
#Water
If parents are the fixed stars in the child's universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.
- Alison Gopnik
#Parents
#Sometimes
#Stars
#Universe
Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be.
- Alison Gopnik
#Childhood
#Children
#People
#Research
For better or worse, we live in possible worlds as much as actual ones. We are cursed by that characteristically human guilt and regret about what might have been in the past. But that may be the cost for our ability to hope and plan for what might be in the future.
- Alison Gopnik
#Future
#Hope
#Live
#Past
#Regret
Samuel Johnson called it the vanity of human wishes, and Buddhists talk about the endless cycle of desire. Social psychologists say we get trapped on a hedonic treadmill. What they all mean is that we wish, plan and work for things that we think will make us happy, but when we finally get them, we aren't nearly as happy as we thought we'd be.
- Alison Gopnik
#Desire
#Happy
#Human
#Wish
#Work
Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.
- Alison Gopnik
#Dogs
#Group
#Intelligent
#More
#Together
The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.
- Alison Gopnik
#Children
#Empathy
#Great
#Pen
#Room
Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.
- Alison Gopnik
#Children
#Development
#Research
#Young
From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.
- Alison Gopnik
#Childhood
#Children
#Perspective
#Time
We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness - better to be a spirit in Heaven than a zombie on Earth.
- Alison Gopnik
#Better
#Body
#Death
#Earth
#Fear
On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.
- Alison Gopnik
#Big City
#Big
#City
#Lost
#Web
Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.
- Alison Gopnik
#Knowledge
#Love
#Nature
#Truth
#World
If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame.
- Alison Gopnik
#Random
#See
#Shame
#Thinking
#Will
Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way. The human mind can change radically in just a few generations.
- Alison Gopnik
#Change
#Children
#Generation
#Mind
#New
Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.
- Alison Gopnik
#Imagine
#Invention
#Mother
#Play
#Technology
I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.
- Alison Gopnik
#Advice
#Boring
#Love
#Parenting
#Pay
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