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The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind
Alison Gopnik
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Knowledge guides emotion more than emotion distorts knowledge.”
“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.)”
“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.)”
“If the child is a budding psychologist, we parents are the laboratory rats.”
“..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.”
“What makes the terrible twos so terrible is not that the babies do things you don't want them to do --- one-year-olds are plenty good at that --- but that they do things because you don't want them to.”
“The most interesting thing about babies is that they are so enormously interested; the most wonderful thing about them is their infinite capacity for wonder.”
“The dominant view was that children were essentially defective adults. They were defined by the things they didn’t know and couldn’t do.”
“The advantage of learning is that it allows you to find out about your particular environment. The disadvantage is that until you do find out, you don't know what to do; you're helpless. We may have two evolutionary gifts: great abilities to learn about the world around us and a long protected period in which to deploy those abilities.”
“Like their parents, the Korean children used more verbs than the English-speaking kids, while the English-speaking kids used more nouns. But in addition, the Korean-speaking children learned how to solve problems like using the rake to get the out-of-reach toy well before the English-speaking children. English speakers, though, started categorizing objects earlier than the Korean speakers.”
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Book Keywords:
children, developmental-psychology, martians, development-psychology, parenting