Alison Gopnik: What do babies think?

From the TED blog, a nice talk from Alison Gopnik on the minds of babies. Below that video is a much longer talk with her at Freedom Domain Radio, hosted by Stefan. Gopnik is the author of The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life and The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind, as well as some more academic books on infant cognition.

TED Talks - Alison Gopnik: What do babies think?

“Babies and young children are like the R and D division of the human species,” says psychologist Alison Gopnik. Her research explores the sophisticated intelligence-gathering and decision-making that babies are really doing when they play. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 18:29.)

This is a longer and therefore more in-depth interview with Gopnik - enjoy! You may never think about babies the same way ever again.

"The Philosophical Baby" - Dr Alison Gopnik Interviewed on Freedomain Radio

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University. Her honors include a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada University Research Fellowship, an Osher Visiting Scientist Fellowship at the Exploratorium, a Center for the Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship, and a Moore Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. She is an internationally recognized leader in the study of childrens learning and development and was the first to argue that childrens minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions. She was one of the founders of the study of "theory of mind", illuminating how children come to understand the minds of others, and she formulated the "theory theory", the idea that children learn in the same way that scientists do.