My Little Scientist

My inspiration for becoming a teacher is my daughter, her insiatiable drive to learn, and the realization that her educational and spiritual development is the greatest responsibility me or my wife will ever have. She is 15 months old now and continually testing her boundaries, picking up new skills, expanding her vocabulary, and grasping new concepts. Every day she experiences something new, and at least once a day she says something or does something she's never done before.

I'm currently reading The Scientist In The Crib, a book written by three cognitive scientists named Gopnik, Metzoff, and Kuhl. The title has two meanings. First, it offers a description of how scientists look into the crib to study infants and their learning processes. Second, it shows how children are born with innate learning mechanisms similar to those used in the modern scientific method. Children are scientists who continually form, test, and reevaluate theories about the world around them and every scientist in the world is merely an overgrown child who is applying an evolutionary adaptation--the human learning mechanism--to new areas of collective knowledge.

We can hook electrodes to our little scientist's head to monitor her brainwaves as she learns and observes the world around her. And as this picture shows, that's exactly what we've done, as part of a study on how babies process different kinds of faces. She, at 12 months old, was processing faces on a level that modern science can not yet properly explain, and her parents are so proud!

This is exactly the type of experiment described by Gopnik et al. that has already answered three philosophical problems that stumped Socrates and his followers for over 2500 years: 1) How do we first realize that other people have minds just like our own; 2) How do we first turn the images that reach our eyes into an accurate representation of the world; and 3) How do we first realize that some of the sounds we hear are a language that can be deciphered into meaning.

If you want the answers, read the book or ask a baby.