Alison Gopnik Quotes

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

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.

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.

The more obsessively we focus on what a particular food is going to do for us, the less healthy we've become. Simple pleasures become complicated.

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.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.

Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.

The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.

Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.

We don't measure the quality of our other relationships by how well the other person turns out, for instance whether my husband is a better person after 10 years than he was when I first met him.

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 peers.

We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness - better to be a spirit in Heaven than a zombie on Earth.

The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.

If parents are the fixed stars in the childs universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.

The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.

Adults tend to think they have much free will. Kids younger than six are less sure. They may be more realistic!

We don't wife our husbands and we don't child our parents.

It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.

To support the people we care about is intrinsic, it is not instrumental. It's not something we do because we're hoping to get some other outcome.

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 shape.

One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.

Caring, whether for children or the dying, shouldn't be instrumental. It should be an intrinsic, moral good.

Being a grandmother is a wonderful thing, so my advice is skip the children. Go straight to the grandchildren.

Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.

Owning our past allows us to own our future.

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 lot like a 3-year-old.

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.

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 would otherwise.

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 deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.