Real supercomputers are in the crib

The next time you glance at a baby in a crib, appreciate the fact that you are looking at more than just another cute face. You are peering at what scientists are starting to believe is the greatest learning machine in the universe.

The mind behind those bright blue or brown eyes is faster and far more sophisticated than any computer built, say the authors of the new book “The Scientist in the Crib.”

Patricia Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff

Written by the University of Washington husband-wife team of developmental scientists, Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl, and University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Alison Gopnik, the book is a thoughtful and sometimes humorous exploration of how babies learn. In addition, the authors propose that the way babies acquire knowledge has an uncanny resemblance to how adults use the scientific method to conduct research.

“The Scientist in the Crib,” published by William Morrow and Company, Inc., is not another how-to book. It’s a book aimed at parents and other adults who want to know how children’s minds work as much as they want to know about feeding them and changing their diapers. The book explains the remarkable transformation that happens in the human brain during the first three years of life and how, often unknowingly, parents and others help the process along.

“We are born to teach” said Kuhl, “We do this naturally and quite unconsciously. It seems as if nature designed us to teach babies in the same way it designed babies to learn.”

The authors wrote the book from the dual perspective of being parents and leading figures in the new field of human developmental science. Meltzoff, a UW psychology professor, has done pioneering research into how much infants know and how they learn. Kuhl, a professor of speech and hearing science, is one of the world’s leading authorities on language and speech acquisition. Gopnik is a UC psychology professor and authority on child learning, psychology and philosophy.

“The new science shows that babies are thinking, solving problems and actively learning long before kindergarten,” said Meltzoff. “Developmental scientists are in the crib trying to understand babies, but when the babies look up they are also trying to understand us. Of course, as the babies conduct their mini-psychology experiments, we adults are sometimes used as their laboratory rats.

“Research shows that babies and young children know and learn more about the world than we could ever have imagined. When babies are born, they already know many important and surprising things about objects, people and language. Babies also easily and naturally solve new problems that are far beyond the abilities of the most powerful computers. They think, make predictions, look for explanations and even do experiments. And all this spectacular learning happens as part of everyday life in the ordinary child’s world of peek-a-boo, drop the spoon and the terrible twos.

“It’s the same process in science,” he said. “As adults we have the capacity to do science because we were once babies. We have this curiosity that in children is called play. Scientists just have bigger and more expensive toys. It’s not that children are little scientists but that scientists are big children.”

In the book, the authors also explore why: