I found these claims intriguing, but memory did not provide a test:
Gopnik argues that babies are not only conscious, they are more conscious
than adults. Her argument for this view begins with the idea that
people in general — adults, that is — have more conscious experience
of what they attend to than of what they disregard…Baby brains, Gopnik says, exhibit a much broader plasticity than adults’ and have a general neurochemistry
similar to the neurochemistry involved in adult attention. Babies learn
more quickly than we do, and about more things, and pick up more
incidental knowledge outside a narrow band of attention. Gopnik
suggests that we think of attention, in adults, as something like a
mechanism that turns part of our mature and slow-changing
brains, for a brief period, flexible, quick learning, and plastic –
baby-like — while suppressing change in the rest of the brain.So
what is it like to be a baby? According to Gopnik, it’s something like
attending to everything at once: There’s much less of the reflexive and
ignored, the non-conscious, the automatic and expert. She suggests that
the closest approximation adults typically get to baby-like experience
is when they are in completely novel environments, such as very
different cultures, where everything is new.
In my view, some people have a better sense (a much better sense) of what it is like to be a baby than others…
Wasn’t this the argument for taking psychedelic drugs? “The Doors of Perception” and all that?
As for the last post(s)…
When our second was a year and a half old, we got her a cat calendar. Big picture for every month. Picture for every day. Picture filling in the blanks at the beginning and end of each month. Her response?
“Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. (& etc)”. We took it & hid it.
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More generally, however, both of our daughters exhibited what I call “discovery breathing” from a very early age. When something particularly focused their attention, they would begin rapid, deep breathing. This was clearly different behavior from normal play.
A few years ago I asked most of my friends about their first memories. On average my female friends had much earlier memories than my male friends. Some of these memories were from before they could talk.
It’s not hard to find possible problems with these stories, but I’d be interested to know if this were part of a general trend.
Yes, it is pretty clear to me, as I have become more open to experience and less “living in my mind” that babies and young children are much more conscious to what is happening, and older children and adults are much more living out of a conceptual script and framework. Peak experiences are moments when awareness escapes the rigidness of its conceptual shackles and self-conscious thoughts.
“Wasn’t this the argument for taking psychedelic drugs? “The Doors of Perception” and all that?”–A.K.
I wouldn’t say it was the argument for such drug use. It was more a characterization of one effect.
Makes sense to me. One of the things that strongly characterizes a friend’s seventeen-month-old is that she notices things that we never do (for instance, if there is anything in the room that looks like a cat, even if it is near the ceiling, she notices it). She gives every impression of simply not knowing what is unimportant yet, hence paying attention to everything. (With my five-month-old, of course, I have no idea what she’s paying attention to half the time, but sometimes it’s clearly not what I would consider the important thing.)
stuart: I believe my first memory is from somewhere in the thirteen months range (and I’m female). It’s of my being pretty short and my mother being bedridden but not concerned by this fact; given that she was almost never sick growing up, we hypothesize it’s a surgery she had, which of course we can date precisely.
eriks: I’d wondered about the autism thing myself, given that, iirc, autism symptoms don’t manifest until at least six months; seems like there must be something that goes one way in autistics, another in neurotypicals, that doesn’t kick in for a while. “Starting to narrow down where attention should go” seems worthy of investigation as anything.
It is freakish how my one-year-old will remember the text from a book having heard it only once. I find parenting extremely enjoyable for this reason, that the kids see things you never notice and make interesting new connections. It’s also depressing to reflect on how slow I am to learn things (comparatively) now.
–One concern with this hypothesis is that babies don’t typically seem to learn to use their bodies that well.
I don’t think you’ve had recent experience with a toddler. My one year old figured out how to take his first unassisted step on a Monday, and by that Saturday was running without falling at all. He learned how to open and close bottles with caps by watching me do it, and did that by 9 months. He figured out how to use a hammer before a year old, too.
Most infants and toddlers are attentive to sounds that we have long since tuned out. Just like they’ll notice anything like a cat, they’ll notice anything sounding like a car, or airplane, even if you didn’t even realize the sound was there.
Their prior probabilities are not yet set like ours are. re: connections to autism: it’s not just a “too much information” issue in autism, though that’s part of the spectrum. It’s the inability to register other people as people rather than things, as if you can’t move out of the me-centered infancy stage.
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