What Do Babies Think?

            I found this Ted Talk to be extremely interesting. Alison Gopnik brought an interesting point in the very beginning, when she said that most people would assume that a baby was a very egocentric creature, especially back in the old days. But with the study she performed with her student, where she’d have a bowl set up of two different foods, the children surprised them. Even though the children didn’t enjoy the broccoli themselves, they’d still offer it to the student when she displayed her liking for it. This is interesting because the babies are eighteen months old. My nephew, who is currently fifteen months, behaves in a similar way. He’s started to get fussy around meal time, so in an attempt to get him to eat his food, my sister and I would pretend to eat some of it and enjoy it ourselves. This only prompted him to see our “enjoyment” of the food, and then have him pick up a piece and try to feed it to us instead. I found this quite interesting because of how this study was emulated in my real life, even though Gopnik said in her studies the eighteen month old babies were the ones catering to the needs of the other person. In fact, this intrigued me, especially as she went on to emphasize the importance of childhood and development with the crows versus the chickens.

I believe the prolonged period of childhood that we experience (which goes a lot longer than the end of adolescence like Gopnik said about her twenty three year old son) is definitel