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What Do Babies Think?

Part 3 of the TED Radio Hour episode Unstoppable Learning.

About Alison Gopnik's TED Talk

Alison Gopnik's research explores the sophisticated intelligence-gathering and decision-making that babies are doing when they play. She offers a glimpse into the minds of babies and young children, to show how much and how fast they learn.

About Alison Gopnik

What's it really like to see through the eyes of a child? Are babies and young children just empty, irrational vessels to be formed into little adults, until they become the perfect images of ourselves?

On the contrary, argues Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The author of The Philosophical Baby, The Scientist in the Crib and other influential books on cognitive development, Gopnik presents evidence that babies and children are conscious of far more than we give them credit for. They engage every sense and spend every waking moment discovering, filing away, analyzing and acting on information about how the world works.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

NPR/TED Staff