Popular Science Australia - 01.04.2018

32 POPULAR SCIENCE

height—crossing over into pop culture,

by appearing on shows like Good Morning

America and The Colbert Report. Gopnik’s

message: Adult cognitive primacy is an

illusion. Kids, her research shows, are not

proto-adults with fruit-fly-like attention

spans, but in fact our occasional superiors.

“Children, even very young children,” she

says, “are in many ways smarter, more

inventive, and better at learning than adults.”

The reason: size and shape matter. Research shows that

the bulk and structure of a child’s brain confer cognitive

strengths and weaknesses. Same goes for adults. For

example, a developed prefrontal cortex allows grown-ups

to focus, plan, and control our impulses: valuable skills

that let us write magazine articles and avoid jail time. But

evidence suggests a developed cortex can also make it hard

to learn new or surprising concepts and can impede creative

thinking. Toddler brains, constantly abuzz with fresh neural

connections, are more plastic and adaptive. This makes

them bad at remembering to put on pants but surprisingly

good at solving abstract puzzles and extracting unlikely

principles from extremely small amounts of information.

HESE ARE HANDY SKILLS. IT

turns out a lot of smart people want to think

this way—or want to build machines that

do. Artiicial-intelligence researchers at

places like Google and Uber hope to use

this unique understanding of the world’s most powerful

neural-learning apparatus—the one between a toddler's

ears—to create smarter self-driving cars. Coders can create

software that beats us at board games, but it’s harder to

apply those skills to a different task—say, trafic- pattern

analysis. Kids on the other hand, are genius at this kind of

generalised learning. “It’s not just that they igure out how

one game or machine works,” says Gopnik. Once they’ve

igured out how your iPhone works, she says, they’re

able to take that information and use it to igure out the

childproof sliding lock on the front door.

Cracking the codes of these little code breakers wasn’t

Gopnik’s original career plan. As an undergrad, she

began studying life’s big problems, toiling in the ield

of analytic philosophy. Back then, none of her peers

T

Insight

When it comes to learning

abstract concepts, preschoolers

beat adults. At 4 years old, 66 per

cent of calories are headed to her

brain—fuel for the exploration

and creative thinking that deine

this period. By the time she inish-

es preschool, her gray matter has

quadrupled in size.

An infant brain forms a million

new neural connections each

second, helping her to develop

emotions, motor skills,

attachments, and working

memory. At 11 months, she can

already form hypotheses about

how the world works. At 18

months, she has a sense of self.

We’re born helpless and dumb. As we mature,

experience and schooling teach us useful things,

and we get wise. Then, year by year, we slip back

into feeblemindedness. That’s the picture most

of us have of intelligence. Ironically, it’s dumb.

Research reveals that each period of cognitive

development offers learning strategies as well as

trade-offs. It’s that combo of aha and duh that

actually makes humans truly intelligent.

YOUR BRAIN,

FROM CRADLE TO

ROCKING CHAIR

Infant

0-18 months

Toddler

2-5 years

Baby Talk

Kids, Gopnik tells

people, are the R&D

unit of our species.