Maria Carmela M.

Arcilla February 22, 2019

11886439 Child Development

A Reaction Paper on “What do babies think?” (TED Talk) By Alison Gopnik

The brain is the most complex of all the human body parts. Alison Gopnik, in her TED

talk entitled “What do babies think?”, shared a refreshing new take on this truth by exploring the

complex minds of babies. She even goes so far as to claim that “babies’ brains are the most

powerful learning computers on the planet”. At first, I thought to myself that this was quite a

huge assertion to make, considering the technology available today. However, throughout her

discussion, Dr. Gopnik provided empirical data gathered from a series of experiments to

adequately support her statements about the true abilities of babies.

One particular experiment presented during the talk that truly captured my interest was

the one involving broccoli, crackers, and the cognitive difference between 18-month olds and 15-

month olds. Dr. Gopnik and her team discovered that 18-month old babies possessed the ability

to take the perspective of other people and understand thoughts that are different from their own.

This was something that 15-month olds were not yet capable of doing. It’s sufficient to say, then,

that an interesting discovery was made, regarding just how rapidly babies learn. In the short span

of 3 months, the babies had gained knowledge about something so profound. I was so pleased

and amused at this and was able to easily relate it to my own experience as a Behavior Therapist

for children.

My line of work requires me to conduct individual behavioural assessments, develop

intervention plans, and make progress reports on top of other responsibilities. We make use of
specific assessment tools that help us identify children’s strengths and weaknesses across a

variety of critical skills. These tools also make it easy for us to monitor the length of time it takes

for different children to acquire new skills. Throughout the years of doing this kind of work, I

witnessed how children, who initially did not have functional ways of communicating, could

request for anything they wanted vocally or even through pictures, in the span of merely a week.

Doing assessments and progress reports made me realize the immense capacity of a child’s brain

and their innate desire to learn. It was true what Dr. Gopnik was saying, children indeed have

very powerful learning mechanisms.

It becomes crucial then, to stimulate a child’s brain during this developmental stage, to

maximize their incredible ability to learn about the world. Dr. Gopnik mentioned that in order to

do so, children must be exposed to and submerged in all kinds of play, because it is during play

and more sophisticated levels of interaction that children develop cognitive, social, emotional,

and physical skills. More importantly, she posits that the quality and duration of time that

children are nurtured give a huge impact on their development as well. Perhaps the best way to

build a child’s knowledge is to engage them in playful relationships with others. By doing so, we

can support their learning journey and help cultivate their imagination so that they can create

their own hypotheses about how things around them function. Furthermore, she also mentioned

an important truth, that children are better than adults in taking in information from different

sources at once. I immediately thought of my own capacity to acquire skills in comparison to the

children I work with. It seems that I may only know more than they do because of the length of

time I have been alive. But the fact that lies is that they are smarter than I could even imagine.

Dr. Gopnik concludes her talk with an interesting thought, that maybe adults should starting

thinking more as children do. And I couldn’t agree more. I realized how constricted our adult
brains have become, due to the experiences, traumas, stresses, and priorities we have. Unlike

children, adults have conditioned themselves to be goal-oriented, to focus only at one thing at a

time. I hope to be more like a child then, in the sense that there is so much more about the world

that I want to discover and learn about, which my adult brain now could have difficulty

comprehending.