Alison Gopnik famous quotes

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

#Kids #Advice #Psychology

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.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Baby #Motivation #Inspiration

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.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Brain #Stones #Blank

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.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Mean #Heaven #Zombie

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.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Stars #Sibling #Parent

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 master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Children #Order #Breathing

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 sack of water and protein that is a body, and you can get it to do practically anything.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Real #Water #Brain

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 cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Children #Giving #Empathy

Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Children #Philosophy #Real

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.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Baby #Children #Parent

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.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Dog #Thinking #Animal

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

#Teenager #Peers #Want

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

#Teenage #Children #Answers

Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: How should this society work? How should relationships among people work? The exploration is: Who am I, what am I doing?
-- Alison Gopnik

#Children #Profound #People

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

#Long #Childhood #Humans

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

#Way #Influence #Experiments

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

#Radio #Improvement

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

#Phones #Mail #Phone Calls

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.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Teaching #Adults #Fundamentals

Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific - this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Children #Teaching #Play

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.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Mean #Parent #Leaving

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

#Mother #Technology #Play

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

#Design #Scientist #Experiments

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 ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Children #Data #Ideas

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

#Baby #Children #Marketing

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

#Inspiring #Powerful #Computer

Owning our past allows us to own our future.
-- Alison Gopnik

#Past #Our Future #Our Past

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

#Cities #Towns #Visitors

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,
-- Alison Gopnik

#Giving #Tree #Brain

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

#Inspiring #Player #Years