Best Alison Gopnik Quotes
- The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of… Across
- Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults. Adult
- The real excitement is collaborating with computer scientists and neuroscientists and starting to understand in detail how children learn so much so quickly. Children
- As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world.… Adult
- Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the… Actually Help
- Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and… Achievements
- We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously and effortlessly. Adult
- One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find… All
- One of the things I say is from an evolutionary point of view: probably the ideal rich environment for a baby includes more mud, livestock,… Baby
- In most places and times in human history, babies have had not just one person but lots of people around who were really paying attention… Attention
- If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much… Brilliant
- Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes… All
- For better or worse, we live in possible worlds as much as actual ones. We are cursed by that characteristically human guilt and regret about… Ability
- Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as… Asking
- If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a… Design
- I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as… Always Seemed
- Siblings are the guarantors that the private childhood world - so unlike the adult world that scientists are only just beginning to understand it -… Adult
- Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you… Answers
- Even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real, whether in books or movies or in their… Able
- From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to… Adult
- A theory not only explains the world we see, it lets us imagine other worlds, and, even more significantly, lets us act to create those… Act
- Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct. Ability
- We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness - better… Better
- Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series.… Baseball
- What makes knowledge automatic is what gets you to Carnegie Hall - practice, practice, practice. Automatic