Alison Gopnik
Alison Gopnik
Alison Gopnikis an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth16 June 1955
CountryUnited States of America
simple focus healthy
The more obsessively we focus on what a particular food is going to do for us, the less healthy we've become. Simple pleasures become complicated.
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Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults.
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Siblings are the guarantors that the private childhood world - so unlike the adult world that scientists are only just beginning to understand it - is a fully shared and objective one.
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We do nothing for children between the ages of zero and five. And we seem to be quite happy to have children growing up in not just poverty, which wouldn't be so bad, but isolation, lack of people around them, lack of support, lack of ability to go out and play in the dirt.
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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.
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Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.
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Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral achievements.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm the oldest of six children and I had my own first baby when I was 23. So I've always been interested in babies, and I had lots of opportunities to watch them.
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I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.
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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.
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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.