Alison Gopnik Quotes

53 quotes in 868 categories

• The brain knows the real secret of seduction, more effective than even music and martinis. Just keep whispering, 'Gee, you are really special' to that…
• Ineffective or weak brain connections are pruned in much the same way a gardener would prune a tree or bush, giving the plant a desired…
• What's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos.
• Owning our past allows us to own our future.
• The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.
• It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.
• Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing,
• Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and…
• The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.
• Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.
• I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.
• Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.
• Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific - this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then…
• Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your…
• Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
• On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.
• One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.
• Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.
• The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
• The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.

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