WEBVTT - Do we ever stop being curious? 0:00:00.009 --> 0:00:02.789 This podcast was made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, 0:00:03.250 --> 0:00:06.130 the Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong. We'd like to pay 0:00:06.130 --> 0:00:09.250 respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging. 0:00:14.560 --> 0:00:17.879 From the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University 0:00:17.879 --> 0:00:20.399 of Melbourne, this is PsychTalks. 0:00:23.079 --> 0:00:25.719 From the University of Melbourne's School of Psychological Sciences, this 0:00:25.719 --> 0:00:26.799 is PsychTalks. 0:00:27.610 --> 0:00:29.209 We know we told you we'd finished for the season, 0:00:29.290 --> 0:00:31.530 but when an opportunity like this comes along, you just 0:00:31.530 --> 0:00:34.689 don't say no. This is a special bonus episode with 0:00:34.689 --> 0:00:37.889 a remarkable guest. Today we're joined by one of the 0:00:37.889 --> 0:00:41.090 world's most fascinating thinkers about how our minds grow, learn 0:00:41.090 --> 0:00:45.290 and change. Professor Alison Gopnik from the University of California, Berkeley. 0:00:46.150 --> 0:00:49.379 Alison's work has transformed our understanding of childhood learning, the 0:00:49.380 --> 0:00:52.909 imagination and intelligence. She's the author of The Scientist in 0:00:52.909 --> 0:00:56.770 the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and The Gardener and The Carpenter. 0:00:57.229 --> 0:00:59.299 And she's in Australia this week for the Pip Pattison 0:00:59.299 --> 0:01:01.110 Oration at the University of Melbourne. 0:01:01.880 --> 0:01:04.839 In her oration, Alison explores how different stages of life 0:01:04.839 --> 0:01:07.720 shape different forms of intelligence and what that means for 0:01:07.720 --> 0:01:11.399 how we think about learning, ageing, and even artificial intelligence. 0:01:12.199 --> 0:01:16.419 We'll talk about curiosity, care, and what humans do best, exploring, 0:01:16.580 --> 0:01:21.040 exploiting and empowering, and how those abilities evolve across the lifespan. 0:01:21.860 --> 0:01:25.040 Alison argues that curiosity takes different forms as we grow 0:01:25.220 --> 0:01:27.769 from exploring the world as children to exploiting what we've 0:01:27.769 --> 0:01:31.039 learned as adults to empowering others later in life. 0:01:36.699 --> 0:01:38.870 Alison, welcome to PsychTalks, and thank you so much for 0:01:38.870 --> 0:01:41.830 being generous with your time, um, during your very busy 0:01:41.910 --> 0:01:44.470 schedule down here. Before we get down to business, uh, 0:01:44.559 --> 0:01:45.569 how are you enjoying Melbourne? 0:01:45.669 --> 0:01:47.669 Oh, I love Melbourne. I was saying before, this is 0:01:47.669 --> 0:01:50.650 one of my favourite, this is one of my favourite cities. I, 0:01:51.069 --> 0:01:53.660 it combines two of the things from two other of 0:01:53.660 --> 0:01:58.589 my favourite places, Oxford and California, in that you have beautiful, tall, 0:01:58.629 --> 0:02:02.870 athletic people who are wry and ironic and pessimistic, which 0:02:02.870 --> 0:02:04.610 I think is just sort of a perfect combination. 0:02:05.069 --> 0:02:06.239 Terrific, I feel flattered. 0:02:07.440 --> 0:02:09.679 Let me begin with a bit of uh your own history. 0:02:09.800 --> 0:02:12.399 I'd forgotten that you did your doctoral work with Jerome 0:02:12.399 --> 0:02:15.380 Bruner at Oxford, um, and he's one of my heroes 0:02:15.380 --> 0:02:16.918 and has been for a long time, and I actually 0:02:16.919 --> 0:02:19.720 had his autobiography In Search of Mind with me on 0:02:19.720 --> 0:02:22.198 the plane when I flew to grad school in Philadelphia 0:02:22.479 --> 0:02:24.520 a very long time ago. Uh, and I went 0:02:24.675 --> 0:02:26.225 back to the book to see if you figured in it. 0:02:26.404 --> 0:02:29.125 And sure enough, uh, here's what Bruner writes about you 0:02:29.125 --> 0:02:32.475 in case you don't remember. He writes, "Alison Gopnik had 0:02:32.475 --> 0:02:34.883 come to the group from McGill. Her letters of recommendation 0:02:34.883 --> 0:02:37.085 urging us to take her in the department of Oxford 0:02:37.365 --> 0:02:39.565 on the grounds that she had taken everything available at 0:02:39.565 --> 0:02:43.875 McGill in linguistics, philosophy and psychology. She arrived an unreconstructed 0:02:43.875 --> 0:02:46.625 Chomsky and departed a disciple of Vygotsky." 0:02:47.550 --> 0:02:49.330 So you must have been quite a force of nature, 0:02:49.520 --> 0:02:52.029 and it must have been quite a formative experience. Can 0:02:52.029 --> 0:02:54.089 you say a bit about what it was like working 0:02:54.089 --> 0:02:57.490 with Bruner and whether the subsequent shape of your career 0:02:57.750 --> 0:02:59.669 was starting to form at that time? 0:02:59.910 --> 0:03:02.470 Yeah, I think it was very much. I was, I 0:03:02.470 --> 0:03:06.149 arrived actually being much more a philosopher than a psychologist. 0:03:06.300 --> 0:03:09.419 I had done, uh, uh, as, as he mentioned, I'd 0:03:09.419 --> 0:03:11.380 been at McGill and I'd taken all the classes in 0:03:11.380 --> 0:03:13.809 all the areas, in all the disciplines, but I was 0:03:13.850 --> 0:03:16.460 essentially a philosopher. And in fact, I was going to 0:03:16.460 --> 0:03:21.478 go to MIT to work with Jerome Fodor, the famous, uh, 0:03:21.580 --> 0:03:25.019 the famous kind of nativist philosopher, MIT philosopher. 0:03:25.360 --> 0:03:28.160 Um, and then at the very last minute, I did 0:03:28.160 --> 0:03:31.559 a sort of, you know, a grand tour after I'd 0:03:31.559 --> 0:03:35.039 finished my, my, uh, after I'd finished my BA and 0:03:35.039 --> 0:03:37.279 went to Oxford and it was so beautiful and it 0:03:37.279 --> 0:03:39.119 was so much like all the children's books that I'd 0:03:39.119 --> 0:03:40.839 been raised on that I thought I have to come 0:03:40.839 --> 0:03:43.720 here for at least a bit of the time. Um. 0:03:44.399 --> 0:03:45.990 So I decided what I would do is I would 0:03:45.990 --> 0:03:49.399 work with Jerry in his developmental lab, and I would 0:03:49.399 --> 0:03:53.979 also work in the philosophy department. So I was going 0:03:53.979 --> 0:03:56.919 up back and forth between Logic Lane, which is where 0:03:56.919 --> 0:04:00.539 the philosophy department was, and where people were talking about 0:04:00.759 --> 0:04:05.160 things like, uh, reference and meaning, up to Summertown, which 0:04:05.160 --> 0:04:07.389 is in the other end of Oxford, which is all 0:04:07.389 --> 0:04:09.440 where all the women and children are sort of parked 0:04:09.440 --> 0:04:11.300 out of, out of sight of the university. 0:04:11.619 --> 0:04:14.820 And Jerry, at the time, it's funny because I think 0:04:14.820 --> 0:04:16.940 about this now, and I realise, oh, he was at 0:04:16.940 --> 0:04:22.660 the absolute technological cutting edge, because we had video recording devices, 0:04:22.738 --> 0:04:26.899 which were, you know, giant, these giant reel-to-reel recorders that 0:04:26.899 --> 0:04:31.940 weighed 40 pounds and a giant camera on a tripod, 0:04:31.988 --> 0:04:34.920 and I would drag them out to look at these children. 0:04:35.190 --> 0:04:37.630 Um, and I just recorded all the things that these 0:04:37.630 --> 0:04:40.950 babies said for a year, uh, not a project I 0:04:40.950 --> 0:04:44.149 would allow any of my students to do nowadays. Um, 0:04:44.220 --> 0:04:47.230 and after that time, after about a year, as I 0:04:47.230 --> 0:04:49.190 thought about going back to be a philosopher at MIT, 0:04:49.269 --> 0:04:51.859 I realised that I could spend the rest of my 0:04:51.859 --> 0:04:55.510 life either with this group of dedicated searchers after truth 0:04:55.510 --> 0:04:56.350 who just wanted to 0:04:56.470 --> 0:04:59.070 solve the biggest problems in the universe, or else with 0:04:59.070 --> 0:05:02.988 a group of whiny, egocentric narcissists who needed to be 0:05:02.988 --> 0:05:05.089 taken care of by women all the time. And since 0:05:05.089 --> 0:05:06.709 the first group was the babies and the second group 0:05:06.709 --> 0:05:09.670 was the philosophers, that I figured I'd better spend the 0:05:09.670 --> 0:05:12.118 rest of my time with, uh, the rest of my 0:05:12.119 --> 0:05:12.799 time with the babies. 0:05:12.880 --> 0:05:16.039 But it was an absolutely formative, that was an absolutely 0:05:16.040 --> 0:05:20.119 formative year, and, um, and Jerry had a group of 0:05:20.119 --> 0:05:23.000 amazing graduate students. I think graduate school was kind of 0:05:23.000 --> 0:05:27.359 like a secondary critical period for, uh, for academics who, 0:05:27.500 --> 0:05:29.839 who went on to do a number of, you know, 0:05:29.920 --> 0:05:32.399 went on to become distinguished psychologists, but of course we 0:05:32.399 --> 0:05:36.040 were all just first year students then. And another thing 0:05:36.040 --> 0:05:38.549 that I realised when I came back to Oxford, uh, 0:05:38.570 --> 0:05:41.839 this year is that it was 1975, which was the 0:05:41.839 --> 0:05:45.535 nicest summer that anyone had had in Oxford since the 1920s. 0:05:45.545 --> 0:05:48.385 And when I was just back there in 2025, people 0:05:48.385 --> 0:05:51.964 were saying, you know, it hasn't been this sunny since 1975. So, 0:05:52.184 --> 0:05:56.024 it was this great summer of going punting and reading 0:05:56.024 --> 0:06:00.265 Piaget and, uh, and talking and, um, and a, you know, 0:06:00.385 --> 0:06:03.183 sort of ideal Oxford. The, the next year it rained 0:06:03.184 --> 0:06:04.625 a lot, but, um, 0:06:04.970 --> 0:06:07.769 And another thing is that this will speak to some 0:06:07.769 --> 0:06:09.609 of the content of what I was saying in my, 0:06:09.850 --> 0:06:11.450 in my talk. Oh, by the way, what makes it 0:06:11.450 --> 0:06:14.049 an oration? I've been curious about that. 0:06:14.170 --> 0:06:15.488 It's just a talk, but even better. 0:06:15.649 --> 0:06:17.410 Oh, a talk, but even better. OK. I thought it 0:06:17.410 --> 0:06:19.822 was kind of, I wasn't sure whether I should, you know, 0:06:19.822 --> 0:06:23.178 wear a toga or something, it seemed - I didn't wear 0:06:23.178 --> 0:06:23.899 a toga. 0:06:24.260 --> 0:06:26.459 Um, but one of the things that I've been arguing 0:06:26.459 --> 0:06:30.019 in my most recent work is thinking about the intelligence 0:06:30.019 --> 0:06:32.739 of care, thinking about the way that we care for 0:06:32.738 --> 0:06:36.029 other people and the very special characteristics that that has. 0:06:36.420 --> 0:06:39.339 And Jerry was a really good example of a mentor 0:06:39.339 --> 0:06:43.359 who got it right about how you should care for students. 0:06:43.619 --> 0:06:46.885 So he's had this very long distinguished group of students, 0:06:47.005 --> 0:06:49.484 but none of them were Brunarians. None of them just 0:06:49.485 --> 0:06:51.726 did the same thing that he did. And I think 0:06:51.726 --> 0:06:53.946 at the time, it was, could be a bit tense 0:06:53.946 --> 0:06:55.765 because the students would go off and, you know, say, 0:06:55.846 --> 0:06:58.164 oh well, that was a dumb idea of Jerry's, well, 0:06:58.246 --> 0:07:01.846 I'm going to do something else. But in retrospect, it 0:07:01.846 --> 0:07:04.805 means that he's had enormous, enormous influence. And if you 0:07:04.805 --> 0:07:08.126 compare him with someone like, like Chomsky, who I would have, 0:07:08.325 --> 0:07:08.705 you know, been 0:07:08.761 --> 0:07:12.291 working with an MIT, um, who is much more, much 0:07:12.291 --> 0:07:16.992 more carpenter-ish in his approach to, to students, wanted the 0:07:16.992 --> 0:07:20.592 students to have particular views, his particular views. But then 0:07:20.592 --> 0:07:22.911 that means that in the long run, you don't have 0:07:22.911 --> 0:07:25.742 as much influence. So I think, I think academic mentorship 0:07:25.742 --> 0:07:29.152 is another example where this intelligence of care, which Jerry 0:07:29.152 --> 0:07:31.951 had to a tremendous degree, being able to respect what 0:07:31.951 --> 0:07:34.799 his students were doing, being able to give them the 0:07:34.799 --> 0:07:38.799 resources they needed like the big giant reel-to-reel recorders to 0:07:39.130 --> 0:07:42.049 do their own work, um, and that ended, that's ended 0:07:42.049 --> 0:07:46.000 up really being very productive over many generations. 0:07:46.290 --> 0:07:47.929 So you were 'gardened' rather than 'carpented'. 0:07:48.130 --> 0:07:49.109 Exactly, that's right. 0:07:49.369 --> 0:07:51.010 And we will come back to that in a moment, 0:07:51.089 --> 0:07:53.989 but before we get to some of that work, um, 0:07:54.010 --> 0:07:55.769 we thought we'd treat our listeners to some of the 0:07:55.769 --> 0:07:58.470 big ideas from one of your earlier books, and we 0:07:58.470 --> 0:08:00.790 found this great quote from the Philosophical Baby, and I'll, 0:08:00.880 --> 0:08:01.440 I'll read it out. 0:08:01.572 --> 0:08:04.299 I'm sure you know it, but to our listeners, you say, 0:08:04.480 --> 0:08:07.320 "children are the R&D department of the human species, the 0:08:07.320 --> 0:08:11.140 blue sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing. 0:08:11.480 --> 0:08:14.359 Children think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and 0:08:14.359 --> 0:08:16.160 we take the 3 or 4 good ones and make 0:08:16.160 --> 0:08:16.700 them real." 0:08:16.950 --> 0:08:20.640 And then you also referred to the "useful uselessness of immaturity". 0:08:21.109 --> 0:08:24.029 So what do you think enables babies and children to 0:08:24.029 --> 0:08:26.989 be so imaginative and creative, and what's the use, or 0:08:26.989 --> 0:08:29.059 what can we learn from the way they approach that? 0:08:29.350 --> 0:08:31.750 So one of the things that I've been arguing recently 0:08:31.750 --> 0:08:35.429 is that rather than thinking as if there's a single mystical, 0:08:35.510 --> 0:08:39.429 mysterious thing called intelligence, and then if we build a computer, 0:08:39.469 --> 0:08:42.549 it will get more and more intelligent until it's super intelligent. 0:08:42.630 --> 0:08:46.020 That's not really the picture that comes from cognitive science. 0:08:46.270 --> 0:08:48.869 Instead we have a lot of different capacities that trade 0:08:48.869 --> 0:08:51.309 off against each other, that are in tension with each other. 0:08:51.659 --> 0:08:53.979 And one of the classic examples of this in computer 0:08:53.979 --> 0:08:58.099 science is what's called the explore-exploit dilemma. And essentially the 0:08:58.099 --> 0:09:02.020 idea is, you can't both be focused, go out into 0:09:02.020 --> 0:09:05.659 the world, do things in an efficient, effective way, and 0:09:05.659 --> 0:09:08.848 also explore all the possibilities that the world has to offer. 0:09:09.140 --> 0:09:12.450 Figure out how the world around you works. Um, and 0:09:12.450 --> 0:09:15.219 provably in computer science, you can't do both of those 0:09:15.219 --> 0:09:16.140 at the same time. 0:09:16.450 --> 0:09:19.039 Um, and the solution is to have, do one at 0:09:19.039 --> 0:09:22.169 one time and do another later, and often it's start 0:09:22.169 --> 0:09:23.890 out exploring and then exploiting. 0:09:24.200 --> 0:09:26.640 And what I've argued most recently is that childhood is 0:09:26.640 --> 0:09:30.039 really evolution's way of resolving that dilemma, because you have 0:09:30.039 --> 0:09:34.200 this early period where all you have to do is explore, um, 0:09:34.320 --> 0:09:37.239 go out, figure out how the world around you works. Um, 0:09:37.320 --> 0:09:40.159 and in particular, a time in which you can figure 0:09:40.159 --> 0:09:43.200 out new things about how the world around you works. Um, 0:09:43.239 --> 0:09:45.000 and then you can take those things you discover and 0:09:45.000 --> 0:09:46.729 put them to use to exploit later. 0:09:47.039 --> 0:09:49.229 I think there's two things that are important about that. 0:09:49.349 --> 0:09:52.590 One of them is that humans are actually adapted to 0:09:52.590 --> 0:09:56.030 what people in AI call the non-stationary environment, environments that 0:09:56.030 --> 0:09:58.789 change all the time. And there's very good evidence that 0:09:58.789 --> 0:10:01.890 when we evolved, part of what happened was that each 0:10:01.890 --> 0:10:05.510 generation was facing a slightly different environment, an environment that 0:10:05.510 --> 0:10:08.229 worked in different ways, and children are the ones who 0:10:08.229 --> 0:10:10.429 can actually be in that new environment. 0:10:10.719 --> 0:10:14.010 It's sort of we're all, essentially we're all immigrants. That's 0:10:14.010 --> 0:10:17.159 what we're, we're designed to be. We're designed to be immigrants, 0:10:17.200 --> 0:10:19.349 we're designed to be in a new place, and the 0:10:19.349 --> 0:10:21.880 children are the ones who get to really explore how 0:10:21.880 --> 0:10:24.340 that new place works. But of course, they can only 0:10:24.340 --> 0:10:28.520 do that because there are other people who are getting 0:10:28.520 --> 0:10:31.819 resources that will take care of them during that time. 0:10:32.039 --> 0:10:35.200 And in fact, in the Philosophical Baby, you describe young 0:10:35.200 --> 0:10:38.494 children as being like scientists, forming theories about their world 0:10:38.494 --> 0:10:41.054 and the social world and running little experiments. Is that 0:10:41.054 --> 0:10:43.934 how you think of children, like little baby Einsteins? 0:10:44.054 --> 0:10:47.655 Yeah, very much. So, and that's, you know, started out, 0:10:47.734 --> 0:10:49.775 that's an idea that people have sort of vaguely said. 0:10:50.205 --> 0:10:52.844 But back in the, back when I was starting with, uh, 0:10:52.934 --> 0:10:55.655 with Jerry Bruner, in fact, um, a number of us 0:10:55.655 --> 0:10:58.955 started arguing for what's come to be called the 'theory theory'. 0:10:59.015 --> 0:11:02.534 The idea that quite literally and specifically, we could say 0:11:02.534 --> 0:11:04.974 something about what it was that children were doing. 0:11:05.299 --> 0:11:11.510 And in the 00s, we started actually getting, uh, computational 0:11:11.510 --> 0:11:14.270 accounts of what the, at least in part, what the 0:11:14.270 --> 0:11:16.239 scientists were doing and what the children were doing, and 0:11:16.239 --> 0:11:19.309 to an amazing degree, but I must say, startling to 0:11:19.309 --> 0:11:22.729 all of us, including me, even 2 and 4-year-olds were 0:11:23.349 --> 0:11:26.949 solving problems, figuring out the world in, in ways that 0:11:26.950 --> 0:11:33.454 were characterised by these, these sophisticated, um, Bayesian causal inference mechanisms, 0:11:33.505 --> 0:11:35.424 for example, of the sort that you could use to 0:11:35.424 --> 0:11:37.085 explain what was going on in science. 0:11:37.344 --> 0:11:40.344 Um, so I think, I think the, the progress has 0:11:40.344 --> 0:11:44.064 made it even clearer that children are indeed literally doing 0:11:44.065 --> 0:11:48.255 the same things, performing the same computations that allow us to, uh, 0:11:48.465 --> 0:11:50.025 allow us to do science. And of course that makes sense. 0:11:50.065 --> 0:11:53.304 I mean, scientists are using the same brains that we 0:11:53.304 --> 0:11:56.184 all have, there must be some way that they're solving 0:11:56.184 --> 0:11:56.784 those problems. 0:11:56.864 --> 0:11:59.265 And I think one of the other things that's interesting 0:11:59.265 --> 0:12:04.340 is that many things that are bugs from the exploit 0:12:04.340 --> 0:12:08.140 perspective are features from the explore perspective and vice versa. 0:12:08.500 --> 0:12:11.400 So many things that traditionally made people think, oh, children 0:12:11.400 --> 0:12:15.099 aren't as smart as adults, like, the fact that they're noisy, 0:12:15.210 --> 0:12:18.789 both metaphorically and literally that they're, they seem to do 0:12:18.789 --> 0:12:21.949 these random things, they're, you can't quite predict what they're 0:12:21.950 --> 0:12:23.789 doing from one minute to the next. 0:12:23.950 --> 0:12:27.090 They spend all this time playing instead of doing anything 0:12:27.429 --> 0:12:32.739 terribly productive, they're kind of take impulsive, they take risks. 0:12:32.989 --> 0:12:34.500 Those are all things that are not good if you're 0:12:34.500 --> 0:12:37.349 trying to actually solve a problem or do something, but 0:12:37.349 --> 0:12:39.419 they're very good if you're trying to just learn as 0:12:39.419 --> 0:12:41.109 much as you can about what's going on around you. 0:12:41.601 --> 0:12:45.992 So just like you liken babies, young children to scientists, uh, 0:12:46.002 --> 0:12:48.681 in other work that you've published, you've likened scientists to babies, 0:12:48.761 --> 0:12:51.790 and I assume that's not just tantrums about rejected manuscripts, 0:12:51.881 --> 0:12:54.521 there's something deeper. Can you elaborate on that idea? 0:12:54.721 --> 0:12:57.311 Well, the idea is that, again, as I said, I mean, look, 0:12:57.361 --> 0:12:59.762 the scientists have the same brains that humans evolved in 0:12:59.761 --> 0:13:02.841 the Pleistocene, right? And I think there's a pretty good 0:13:02.841 --> 0:13:06.521 argument that what happens is that when you, uh, so 0:13:06.521 --> 0:13:10.133 one way of resolving these explore-exploit conflicts is by having 0:13:10.133 --> 0:13:13.294 a developmental period early on when you can explore. 0:13:13.573 --> 0:13:15.453 But another way is by having a kind of division 0:13:15.453 --> 0:13:19.294 of labour. So, when we put even grown-ups for some 0:13:19.294 --> 0:13:22.373 period of time in the same kind of circumstances as children, 0:13:22.414 --> 0:13:25.833 where there's nothing they absolutely immediately have to do, where 0:13:26.174 --> 0:13:28.414 they have the resources that they need to be able 0:13:28.414 --> 0:13:31.893 to solve problems, then you can see them implementing the 0:13:31.893 --> 0:13:34.893 same kinds of capacities that you see in children, these 0:13:34.893 --> 0:13:37.054 capacities for just figuring out the truth. 0:13:37.505 --> 0:13:40.226 And, and I think all humans have done that to 0:13:40.226 --> 0:13:43.505 some extent, but science gives us a way of institutionalising 0:13:43.505 --> 0:13:46.226 that idea that some people are allowed to just go 0:13:46.226 --> 0:13:49.635 out and explore and figure out the truth, and we've 0:13:49.635 --> 0:13:52.346 discovered as evolution seems to, that that's actually a good 0:13:52.346 --> 0:13:55.466 strategy in the long run for, for being successful and 0:13:55.466 --> 0:13:57.585 getting what we want, but in the short run it's 0:13:57.585 --> 0:14:00.356 just activating that kind of motivation. 0:14:00.666 --> 0:14:03.705 And to nurture that, going back to your most recent book, 0:14:03.785 --> 0:14:06.700 The Gardener and the Carpenter, you kind of say that 0:14:06.700 --> 0:14:10.439 rather than parents thinking about shaping a child into this 0:14:10.440 --> 0:14:14.140 desired product, which is the carpentry model, you argue that 0:14:14.140 --> 0:14:17.619 parenting should be more about creating a nurturing space and, 0:14:17.710 --> 0:14:20.099 and where children can develop like being a gardener, and 0:14:20.099 --> 0:14:22.099 I love this quote that you've got, and I'm sure 0:14:22.099 --> 0:14:25.380 a lot of parents can relate literally and metaphorical, metaphorically 0:14:25.380 --> 0:14:27.820 to this where you say "parenting involves a lot of 0:14:27.820 --> 0:14:30.280 exhausted digging and wallowing in manure." 0:14:31.409 --> 0:14:33.250 I have 3 children. They're kind of out of the 0:14:33.250 --> 0:14:35.690 manure phase, but you know, I, I think we can 0:14:35.690 --> 0:14:36.330 all relate to it. 0:14:36.750 --> 0:14:40.190 But for those parents who kind of might like the 0:14:40.190 --> 0:14:44.429 idea of the carpentry model of parenting, what can you 0:14:44.429 --> 0:14:47.219 tell them about why that is not the best way 0:14:47.219 --> 0:14:50.669 to kind of encourage the curiosity and, and creativity in 0:14:50.669 --> 0:14:51.270 their kids? 0:14:51.460 --> 0:14:54.270 Well, again, I mean if you think about it, think 0:14:54.270 --> 0:14:56.830 about that, that carpentry model is really a sort of 0:14:56.830 --> 0:14:59.950 exploit model which suggests that you have a goal, you 0:14:59.950 --> 0:15:03.080 have an outcome that you know about beforehand, and you'll 0:15:03.080 --> 0:15:04.809 succeed if you bring about that goal. 0:15:04.890 --> 0:15:06.890 So you know, if you are building a chair, you 0:15:06.890 --> 0:15:08.469 have an idea of what the chair looks like, and 0:15:08.469 --> 0:15:11.630 you're a good carpenter if you build that, that chair. 0:15:12.049 --> 0:15:15.770 But if what you want is to introduce more variability 0:15:15.770 --> 0:15:19.770 into the world, and there's a very close relationship between variability, 0:15:20.200 --> 0:15:24.510 exploration and learning, especially, again, learning about a new environment, 0:15:24.869 --> 0:15:27.070 then that's not a very good way of doing it. 0:15:27.150 --> 0:15:29.390 I mean, almost by definition, right? If you, if you 0:15:29.390 --> 0:15:31.390 know what the outcome is going to be, then you're 0:15:31.390 --> 0:15:33.309 not going to be, it's not going to be something surprising, 0:15:33.390 --> 0:15:35.309 it's not going to be something unusual, it's not going 0:15:35.309 --> 0:15:37.989 to be something that's never been in the world before. 0:15:38.250 --> 0:15:40.640 And if you think about what you do when you're gardening, 0:15:40.690 --> 0:15:42.809 at least if you're the kind of messy cottage gardener 0:15:42.809 --> 0:15:47.530 that I am, um, what happens is, and this is 0:15:47.530 --> 0:15:50.849 something profoundly about what makes for a good garden, is not, 0:15:51.090 --> 0:15:52.969 I'm going to shape each of these flowers to come 0:15:52.969 --> 0:15:55.650 out a particular way, but I'm going to develop an 0:15:55.650 --> 0:15:59.080 ecosystem that's robust enough, so that when there's a drought, 0:15:59.130 --> 0:16:02.767 or when it's the coldest day in Melbourne in 8 years, um, 0:16:02.887 --> 0:16:04.447 the garden's going to be able to survive. 0:16:04.546 --> 0:16:07.197 And it does that because different plants will flourish in 0:16:07.197 --> 0:16:09.767 different ways at different times. And I think it's the 0:16:09.767 --> 0:16:12.127 same way with parents and children. What you really want 0:16:12.127 --> 0:16:16.526 is to enable this wide variety of children with different 0:16:16.526 --> 0:16:20.966 strengths and different, um, and different weaknesses. And your role 0:16:20.966 --> 0:16:26.086 as a, a caregiver is to allow all of those, 0:16:26.156 --> 0:16:29.564 you know, allow all of those different flowers to to, uh, 0:16:29.684 --> 0:16:32.124 to bloom, that's, that's what your, you know, that's what 0:16:32.124 --> 0:16:32.604 your role is. 0:16:32.643 --> 0:16:34.684 A nd it, as, as you say in that quote, 0:16:34.763 --> 0:16:36.763 it's not like that's, it's not like you just sit 0:16:36.763 --> 0:16:39.203 back and it just happens by itself, it's, there's a 0:16:39.203 --> 0:16:41.643 lot of, there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot 0:16:41.643 --> 0:16:45.843 of manure involved, but, uh, but it's a very different picture, 0:16:45.883 --> 0:16:48.033 it's a very different model. 0:16:48.033 --> 0:16:49.564 It's a really beautiful image though, and I think even 0:16:49.564 --> 0:16:52.604 if our listeners don't know all the details of your work, 0:16:52.723 --> 0:16:55.203 just kind of talking about that you're a gardener, not 0:16:55.203 --> 0:16:58.020 a carpenter is so powerful as a parent. 0:16:58.380 --> 0:17:00.830 Well, I hope that that's true, and I hope that 0:17:00.830 --> 0:17:02.560 it has the effect, it's, and I think it has 0:17:02.560 --> 0:17:04.880 had the effect of empowering parents. But I have to 0:17:04.880 --> 0:17:07.311 say I have often been, when the book came out, 0:17:07.359 --> 0:17:08.990 I would be in, you know, this kind of a, 0:17:09.041 --> 0:17:11.600 an interview and someone would say, so, you know, what 0:17:11.600 --> 0:17:14.681 you're saying is you shouldn't have these specific goals, and 0:17:14.681 --> 0:17:17.119 we think that's great. Now, could you just tell our listeners, 0:17:17.240 --> 0:17:20.061 how do you go about being a gardener parent again? Like, 0:17:20.080 --> 0:17:21.961 what should you do to make sure that... 0:17:22.339 --> 0:17:25.189 um, it was sort of, it's a, it's very deep seated, 0:17:25.270 --> 0:17:28.469 it's a very deep seated set of anxieties. But actually, 0:17:28.540 --> 0:17:31.750 you know, it's funny, I, it's, the book is actually 0:17:31.979 --> 0:17:34.390 probably being read now more than it was when it 0:17:34.390 --> 0:17:36.510 first came out, and I think it was a bit 0:17:36.510 --> 0:17:40.290 prescient in that the pressures on parents to 0:17:40.780 --> 0:17:43.609 be carpenters to get their children out in a particular way, 0:17:43.619 --> 0:17:46.979 and also the sense that people have of now saying, no, 0:17:47.060 --> 0:17:50.050 that's not a good outcome. It's not letting us thrive, 0:17:50.099 --> 0:17:53.939 it's not letting our children thrive, our children aren't developing 0:17:53.939 --> 0:17:57.099 the ability to be resourceful, to be adults, to be 0:17:57.099 --> 0:17:59.060 able to do all the things that they need to do. 0:17:59.339 --> 0:18:02.039 I think that's actually just intensified in the 10 years since 0:18:02.039 --> 0:18:02.060 the book. 0:18:02.089 --> 0:18:04.780 And I think added to that the pressures of social media 0:18:04.780 --> 0:18:07.296 and screen time. I'm not surprised that more parents are 0:18:07.296 --> 0:18:07.786 reading that. 0:18:07.987 --> 0:18:10.306 And you know, one of the things that we know 0:18:10.307 --> 0:18:13.466 about young people, that's a very strange, there's this very 0:18:13.467 --> 0:18:16.696 strange profile now, which is in, in many respects, teenagers, 0:18:16.707 --> 0:18:19.406 for example, are doing better. They're not getting into trouble, 0:18:19.587 --> 0:18:23.227 crime is going down, um, there's fewer teenage pregnancies, there's 0:18:23.227 --> 0:18:26.745 less drug use, but they're not also not going out 0:18:26.746 --> 0:18:30.266 into the world and, and exploring and finding out about things, and, 0:18:30.467 --> 0:18:32.254 and they're much more anxious. 0:18:32.513 --> 0:18:34.592 And one of the things we know about anxiety, sort 0:18:34.593 --> 0:18:39.223 of counterintuitively, is that being very, very protected from ever 0:18:39.223 --> 0:18:42.823 seeing anything that's dangerous, actually makes you more anxious rather 0:18:42.823 --> 0:18:46.433 than less anxious. So the, the, the therapy for anxiety 0:18:46.433 --> 0:18:49.193 is to expose yourself to the thing that you're scared of. 0:18:49.473 --> 0:18:51.573 And I think it's kind of like a whole generation 0:18:51.573 --> 0:18:55.193 of children is being raised in a way that, that, 0:18:55.394 --> 0:18:58.359 you know, um, a cognitive behavioural therapist would say, oh no, 0:18:58.441 --> 0:19:01.240 that's a good recipe for making people anxious is to 0:19:01.240 --> 0:19:03.359 tell them all the time how dangerous things are and 0:19:03.359 --> 0:19:06.379 all the things that, yeah, all the things they can't do. 0:19:06.720 --> 0:19:08.940 So we'll move on from the beautiful image of manure 0:19:08.941 --> 0:19:12.230 and your past books towards what you spoke about uh 0:19:12.801 --> 0:19:16.190 yesterday at the oration, um, Alison, and, and uh you've 0:19:16.191 --> 0:19:18.701 already brought up this idea that there is no single 0:19:19.240 --> 0:19:23.409 intelligence and you've talked about the um explore versus exploit uh, 0:19:23.569 --> 0:19:27.188 distinction and, and how they are in some ways, uh, uh, 0:19:27.530 --> 0:19:29.159 tradable off against one another. 0:19:29.569 --> 0:19:32.160 And this idea that childhood is a stage of, uh, 0:19:32.170 --> 0:19:35.319 rampant exploration is such an important idea, especially you're not 0:19:35.319 --> 0:19:38.718 just saying, um, kids are aimlessly moving around and bumping 0:19:38.719 --> 0:19:41.589 into stuff and causing mischief, but they're really adept at 0:19:41.810 --> 0:19:44.909 figuring out how the world ticks, and you call this 0:19:44.910 --> 0:19:48.209 causal learning, and now not all of our listeners will have, um, 0:19:48.369 --> 0:19:50.280 backgrounds in academic psychology, so can you tell us a 0:19:50.280 --> 0:19:52.968 bit about how kids accomplish causal learning? 0:19:53.280 --> 0:19:55.459 And maybe along the way explain what a 'blicket' is. 0:19:55.880 --> 0:19:59.478 Yes, so, um, uh, to go back to what you 0:19:59.479 --> 0:20:03.139 were saying about the idea of the children being little scientists, um, 0:20:03.459 --> 0:20:05.560 one of the next questions that we asked is, OK, 0:20:05.640 --> 0:20:08.150 well what are scientists doing that lets them learn as 0:20:08.150 --> 0:20:08.869 much as they do? 0:20:09.089 --> 0:20:11.650 And at least one thing that they're definitely doing is 0:20:11.650 --> 0:20:13.780 figuring out the causal structure of the world. That's a 0:20:13.780 --> 0:20:16.968 really important part of science, and it's maybe the part 0:20:16.969 --> 0:20:19.170 of science that makes it most useful in the long 0:20:19.170 --> 0:20:21.569 run when we understand what causes what, that means you 0:20:21.569 --> 0:20:25.589 can do something to the cause and bring about the effect. Um, 0:20:25.810 --> 0:20:28.300 and we wanted to know when and how children were 0:20:28.300 --> 0:20:28.948 doing this. 0:20:29.250 --> 0:20:34.040 Now if you ask even adult scientists, and certainly ordinary adults, 0:20:34.089 --> 0:20:38.429 something like, when you have conditional probabilities and a confounder 0:20:38.430 --> 0:20:41.709 that you've controlled for, can you infer that there's actually 0:20:41.709 --> 0:20:44.040 a causal chain? Right, that will not, it, it's one 0:20:44.040 --> 0:20:45.909 of the good things about being a developmentalist is that 0:20:45.910 --> 0:20:48.270 you don't actually ask three year olds dumb questions like that, 0:20:48.339 --> 0:20:52.189 although sometimes psychologists ask grown-ups dumb questions like that. Um, 0:20:52.280 --> 0:20:54.550 so we wanted to test how is it that children 0:20:54.550 --> 0:20:56.229 are doing this, and the way we did it was 0:20:56.229 --> 0:20:58.810 we built a number of machines, but one of them 0:20:58.810 --> 0:21:01.099 that we used especially was called the blicket detector. 0:21:01.150 --> 0:21:03.855 It's a little box, and it lights up and plays 0:21:03.855 --> 0:21:06.215 music when you put some things on it and not 0:21:06.215 --> 0:21:09.656 other things. So even with this very simple system, there's 0:21:09.656 --> 0:21:11.505 lots of ways that it could work. It could be 0:21:11.505 --> 0:21:14.186 that the red one is a blicket that makes it go. 0:21:14.265 --> 0:21:16.105 Or it could be that you have to put on 0:21:16.105 --> 0:21:18.745 two blickets simultaneously to make it go. Or it could 0:21:18.744 --> 0:21:21.344 be that a blicket will keep it from going unless 0:21:21.345 --> 0:21:23.406 you have another blicket. I mean, there's all sorts of 0:21:24.066 --> 0:21:26.885 structure as to the way that it goes, it would work. 0:21:27.265 --> 0:21:30.021 And what we would do is to show the children 0:21:30.021 --> 0:21:33.761 the machine, show them some pattern of data about the machine. 0:21:33.862 --> 0:21:37.062 Another thing is maybe, uh, in one experiment we did 0:21:37.061 --> 0:21:40.942 actually with 2-year-olds, one block makes it go um 8 0:21:40.942 --> 0:21:43.891 out of 12 times, and another block makes it go, 0:21:44.342 --> 0:21:46.581 let me make sure I get the numbers right, you know, 0:21:46.702 --> 0:21:48.380 makes it go 2 out of 3 times, and then 0:21:48.381 --> 0:21:50.501 they had to, would have to do the probabilities to 0:21:50.501 --> 0:21:52.602 figure out which was, which one was more likely. 0:21:52.811 --> 0:21:55.520 And then we would just say, make the machine go, 0:21:55.599 --> 0:21:57.859 or we would say, tell me which one is a blicket, 0:21:57.920 --> 0:22:01.399 or tell me how it works. And using that technique, 0:22:01.510 --> 0:22:05.000 the children turned out to be incredibly sophisticated, as sophisticated 0:22:05.000 --> 0:22:10.060 as some of these very fancy computational AI causal inference, um, 0:22:10.119 --> 0:22:14.919 programs were. But what we've been doing more recently, um, 0:22:15.189 --> 0:22:17.119 you know, one of the things that we, we should 0:22:17.119 --> 0:22:21.079 always listen to what children are telling you um, especially 0:22:21.079 --> 0:22:24.198 as a developmental psychologist, and the main problem that we 0:22:24.199 --> 0:22:27.280 had with the machine, which parents out there may already 0:22:27.280 --> 0:22:29.958 have guessed, was the kids just wanted to play with it. 0:22:30.239 --> 0:22:32.260 And we had to say to them, no, no, you 0:22:32.260 --> 0:22:33.869 get to play with it at the end, just look 0:22:33.869 --> 0:22:36.280 very carefully at this pattern of data that I'm giving 0:22:36.280 --> 0:22:38.270 you in a very controlled way, and then you can, 0:22:38.599 --> 0:22:40.040 then you can play with it when we're done. 0:22:40.540 --> 0:22:44.680 And more recently I've been thinking, maybe that's telling us something. 0:22:44.780 --> 0:22:46.540 I mean, after all, how is it that we manage 0:22:46.540 --> 0:22:48.589 to find out as much as we do about the world? 0:22:48.660 --> 0:22:53.530 We do experiments and scientists do experiments, and um, 2-year-olds 0:22:53.530 --> 0:22:56.290 do experiments, but we call it getting into everything. Um, 0:22:56.369 --> 0:22:59.209 and if you look carefully at a 2-year-old or a 3-year-old, 0:22:59.290 --> 0:23:03.089 what you'll see is that they're just constantly, uh, constantly 0:23:03.089 --> 0:23:05.810 doing experiments. They can do more experiments in 5 minutes 0:23:05.810 --> 0:23:08.319 than we scientists can do in 5 years. 0:23:08.650 --> 0:23:10.410 So then we wanted to try and figure out, is 0:23:10.410 --> 0:23:14.245 there some way, again, formally computationally, that we could explain 0:23:14.244 --> 0:23:16.735 or describe what's going on. And it's important to say 0:23:16.734 --> 0:23:20.254 this is one of the big gaps in artificial, current 0:23:20.255 --> 0:23:24.696 artificial intelligence systems like the large models, is that they 0:23:24.696 --> 0:23:29.576 can summarise a lot of information that human beings have 0:23:29.576 --> 0:23:31.615 put out on the web. But what they don't do 0:23:31.615 --> 0:23:34.442 is go out and find something new. They don't do experiments. 0:23:34.541 --> 0:23:37.102 They don't find something that's really different from all the 0:23:37.102 --> 0:23:39.741 things that everybody else has said on the, um, has 0:23:39.741 --> 0:23:43.381 said on the web. And little children are doing that 0:23:43.381 --> 0:23:44.202 all the time. 0:23:44.462 --> 0:23:47.682 In your talk, you link childhood exploration of this sort 0:23:47.901 --> 0:23:51.102 to the sort of weirdness of the human life history, 0:23:51.222 --> 0:23:54.859 specifically the extended period of dependency on carers and also 0:23:54.859 --> 0:23:57.859 this um connection I hadn't heard before uh in terms 0:23:57.859 --> 0:24:01.218 of the close spacing of human kids, which Cassie can 0:24:01.219 --> 0:24:03.859 relate to with three, you know, lovely boys born 1 0:24:03.859 --> 0:24:04.500 year apart. 0:24:04.930 --> 0:24:08.929 Um, can you just explain that link between the human 0:24:08.930 --> 0:24:12.650 life history and that proneness to explore among human babies? 0:24:13.089 --> 0:24:15.849 So, a life history is things like how many young 0:24:15.849 --> 0:24:19.520 you have, how long you live, how, how long a 0:24:19.520 --> 0:24:21.689 period of fertility you have. It's all the, those kinds 0:24:21.689 --> 0:24:25.129 of features of, of a, an animal. And humans have 0:24:25.130 --> 0:24:27.849 this very bizarre life history because we have a very 0:24:27.849 --> 0:24:31.713 long childhood, much longer than any of our close primate relatives, uh, 0:24:31.843 --> 0:24:34.671 chimps are producing as much food as they're consuming by 0:24:34.672 --> 0:24:35.483 the time they're 7. 0:24:35.561 --> 0:24:39.161 And, you know, my 14-year-old grandson is definitely not doing that. 0:24:39.243 --> 0:24:42.922 And forager, even in forager, um, cultures, uh, kids aren't 0:24:42.922 --> 0:24:46.802 doing that until they're, say, 16 or 17. We also 0:24:46.802 --> 0:24:49.723 have the children more often, so we have babies about 0:24:49.723 --> 0:24:53.353 once every, every year or two, and, uh, um, chimps, 0:24:53.363 --> 0:24:55.855 for example, are only having babies once every 5 years 0:24:55.855 --> 0:24:59.066 or so, so we have a lot of these useless babies. Um, 0:24:59.196 --> 0:25:03.306 and it's, that's really puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. 0:25:03.576 --> 0:25:05.436 Another part of our life history is that we have 0:25:05.436 --> 0:25:09.676 postmenopausal grandmothers, so we have women who are living for 0:25:09.676 --> 0:25:12.436 another 20 years past their fertility, and it's not quite 0:25:12.436 --> 0:25:15.035 as sharply defined in men, but you also have men 0:25:15.036 --> 0:25:18.715 living another 20 years into their 70s or their 80s, um, 0:25:19.050 --> 0:25:22.669 And so the question is why this strange life history? 0:25:22.890 --> 0:25:24.719 And one of the things that you notice if you 0:25:24.719 --> 0:25:27.239 go out and look at many different animals, is that 0:25:27.569 --> 0:25:31.800 this combination of a very long childhood, lots of babies, 0:25:32.189 --> 0:25:35.119 lots of investment from other people and taking care of those, uh, 0:25:35.170 --> 0:25:37.930 from other animals and taking care of those babies, goes 0:25:37.930 --> 0:25:40.810 with having a big brain, goes with being able to learn, 0:25:40.969 --> 0:25:43.449 goes with being able to deal with many different kinds 0:25:43.449 --> 0:25:47.035 of environments to make tools, things that we might anthropomorphically 0:25:47.035 --> 0:25:49.055 think of as, as intelligence. 0:25:49.314 --> 0:25:50.755 And we seem to be sort of on the end 0:25:50.755 --> 0:25:52.984 of the distribution on all of those. 0:25:52.994 --> 0:25:56.014 That's where the New Caledonian crow comes in, you said, 0:25:56.364 --> 0:25:57.055 compared to the chicken. 0:25:57.234 --> 0:26:03.755 That's right. So, the New Caledonian crows are famously intelligent, um, 0:26:04.035 --> 0:26:06.724 use tools at a level that makes them look like primates, 0:26:06.795 --> 0:26:09.175 can solve all sorts of complicated problems. 0:26:09.435 --> 0:26:14.569 Um, and the fledglings are, are, they're fledglings until, uh, 0:26:14.819 --> 0:26:16.859 for 2 years, which is a very long time in 0:26:16.859 --> 0:26:19.410 the life of a bird. And there's some lovely studies 0:26:19.410 --> 0:26:23.079 that were actually done, uh, in New Zealand, showing that 0:26:23.140 --> 0:26:27.139 in that period, what they're doing is exploring. They're trying 0:26:27.140 --> 0:26:30.739 things out, they're failing, they're putting things in at the 0:26:30.739 --> 0:26:33.060 wrong end, putting the sticks in at the wrong end, 0:26:33.219 --> 0:26:37.045 going to the wrong termite, um, nests, and then it's 0:26:37.045 --> 0:26:39.405 in that period of exploration, and you know, the moms 0:26:39.405 --> 0:26:42.204 are sort of tapping their feet and dropping another worm 0:26:42.204 --> 0:26:44.484 into the baby crow's mouth. 0:26:44.724 --> 0:26:47.324 Um, and that's the period when they learn all the 0:26:47.324 --> 0:26:49.675 things that will enable them to thrive later on. The 0:26:49.675 --> 0:26:52.395 other example, by the way, is the quokka. So, um, 0:26:52.444 --> 0:26:57.405 quokkas are, are, have this very long period where the 0:26:57.405 --> 0:27:00.564 baby's inside of the pouch, and both males and females 0:27:00.564 --> 0:27:02.323 are involved in taking care of the baby. 0:27:02.650 --> 0:27:06.649 And they have really big brains for a marsupial. Um, I, 0:27:06.739 --> 0:27:08.699 I don't think anyone's quite figured out what they use 0:27:08.699 --> 0:27:10.170 their brains for, but they definitely have 0:27:11.839 --> 0:27:12.920 Smiling and creating tourism. 0:27:13.300 --> 0:27:16.099 Yeah, exactly, that's right. I was talking to someone at 0:27:16.099 --> 0:27:18.859 the talk yesterday who was saying they have very complicated 0:27:18.859 --> 0:27:22.319 social lives, and that's probably what they're using it for. 0:27:22.660 --> 0:27:24.540 I must just interject for a moment because my kids 0:27:24.540 --> 0:27:25.859 will listen to this and I don't want them to 0:27:25.859 --> 0:27:27.979 think that they're useless babies even though they were so 0:27:27.979 --> 0:27:28.958 close together, but. 0:27:29.719 --> 0:27:33.359 Um, related to that idea of learning how to impact 0:27:33.359 --> 0:27:37.479 your environment or to control your environment, you talked about 0:27:37.479 --> 0:27:41.520 empowerment or empowerment gain, this idea that we intrinsically want 0:27:41.520 --> 0:27:42.919 to learn how to, 0:27:43.670 --> 0:27:47.649 the, the, the relationship between our actions and our, their effects, 0:27:48.069 --> 0:27:51.030 and that that's intrinsically rewarding. Is that correct that we 0:27:51.030 --> 0:27:54.310 don't kind of need that external reward to learn how 0:27:54.310 --> 0:27:55.819 to control our environment? 0:27:56.109 --> 0:27:57.909 Yeah, so as I said, one of the things that 0:27:57.910 --> 0:28:01.510 I got interested in is what's driving children to be 0:28:01.510 --> 0:28:05.270 so experimental, right? Like what's the motivation that's letting them 0:28:05.270 --> 0:28:08.300 get into everything, um, I mean, that's using up a 0:28:08.300 --> 0:28:11.468 lot of calories to, to actually do that, why, why 0:28:11.469 --> 0:28:12.270 are they doing it? 0:28:12.540 --> 0:28:16.619 And a very interesting idea comes out of um reinforcement learning, 0:28:16.699 --> 0:28:18.859 which is one of the techniques that people have used 0:28:18.859 --> 0:28:22.129 a lot in, in AI. The idea behind reinforcement learning is, 0:28:22.359 --> 0:28:24.859 you do something, you're rewarded, you'll do it again. But 0:28:24.859 --> 0:28:27.650 of course usually the rewards are, you know, cheese or 0:28:27.650 --> 0:28:30.300 avoiding a shock or something like that. But an idea 0:28:30.300 --> 0:28:33.540 that people have had more recently is maybe doing something 0:28:33.540 --> 0:28:37.219 like being effective, making things happen in the environment, is 0:28:37.219 --> 0:28:40.484 a reward in and of itself, or uh finding something new 0:28:40.484 --> 0:28:42.224 is a reward in and of itself. 0:28:42.435 --> 0:28:45.285 And this idea of empowerment is that part of what 0:28:45.285 --> 0:28:47.045 you want to do is just be able to make 0:28:47.045 --> 0:28:49.885 things happen in the world around you. Whether they're good 0:28:49.885 --> 0:28:52.555 things or bad things. You just want to feel as 0:28:52.555 --> 0:28:56.224 if you know how to consistently make things happen. And 0:28:56.364 --> 0:28:58.805 I think when you start looking, especially at infants and 0:28:58.805 --> 0:29:01.805 toddlers from this perspective, you see them doing this all 0:29:01.805 --> 0:29:02.685 the time, you know, 0:29:02.925 --> 0:29:05.795 And there are some lovely experiments actually back from the 70s, 0:29:05.805 --> 0:29:09.329 where you could do something like uh, tie the baby's 0:29:09.329 --> 0:29:12.130 foot to a mobile with a ribbon, so that when 0:29:12.130 --> 0:29:15.410 the baby kicks, the mobile moves. And babies just think 0:29:15.410 --> 0:29:17.209 this is the most wonderful thing in the world, and 0:29:17.209 --> 0:29:19.930 they'll kick, and then they'll stop kicking, and then they'll 0:29:19.930 --> 0:29:22.689 wave their hands, and I had a video, one of 0:29:22.689 --> 0:29:25.329 the great things about being a developmental psychologist is you 0:29:25.329 --> 0:29:28.670 get to show cute videos of kids in your talks. Um, 0:29:29.170 --> 0:29:32.170 another nice thing about being, I have, I'm a grandmother 0:29:32.170 --> 0:29:36.369 of two groups of 3, within a short period of time. 0:29:36.800 --> 0:29:40.849 Um, uh, so I have this lovely video of my, 0:29:41.010 --> 0:29:44.410 my grandson Kit, with a, playing with a xylophone. And 0:29:44.410 --> 0:29:47.040 you can see him trying the stick end, and then 0:29:47.040 --> 0:29:49.750 trying the mallet end, and then trying his fat little hand, 0:29:49.810 --> 0:29:53.050 and seeing all these different ways that he could make noises, 0:29:53.130 --> 0:29:56.229 even though of course the tones aren't doing him any good, 0:29:56.319 --> 0:30:00.369 they're just cool. And he really likes the idea that 0:30:00.369 --> 0:30:03.515 he can be very consistently bringing about a certain sound 0:30:03.515 --> 0:30:06.444 by performing a certain action, and he's discovering that just 0:30:06.444 --> 0:30:08.285 in the course of playing with the xylophone. 0:30:08.525 --> 0:30:11.645 And if you think about all the best baby toys, 0:30:11.724 --> 0:30:15.604 like a busy box, right? That's really an empowerment device. 0:30:15.724 --> 0:30:19.834 Or Wired magazine talked about the, um, uh, once made 0:30:19.834 --> 0:30:22.604 a list of the world's 10 best toys and the 0:30:23.099 --> 0:30:26.619 top one was the stick. And again, if you know, 0:30:26.819 --> 0:30:29.819 if you have 3 boys, you know about sticks, and 0:30:29.819 --> 0:30:32.369 you may have had, so a stick is an amazing 0:30:32.369 --> 0:30:34.849 empowerment device, right? When you've got a stick, you've got 0:30:34.849 --> 0:30:38.829 this superpower. You can get things that are really far away, 0:30:38.939 --> 0:30:42.979 you can poke things, you can move things back and forth, um. 0:30:43.339 --> 0:30:46.579 And every, you know, whenever you go like for a 0:30:46.579 --> 0:30:48.859 walk in the forest with a child, they'll get this 0:30:48.859 --> 0:30:51.739 giant stick as big as them that they'll, they'll drag 0:30:51.739 --> 0:30:51.920 behind them. 0:30:52.219 --> 0:30:54.099 My kids are 8,9 and 10, and a stick is 0:30:54.099 --> 0:30:56.420 probably still, yeah, good thing. 0:30:57.140 --> 0:31:02.439 Um, actually there's a funny story. I, I, uh, was, um, uh, 0:31:02.979 --> 0:31:05.920 I was on a podcast like this on an interview programme, 0:31:05.979 --> 0:31:09.250 and my, my oldest grandson, who was then about 4, 0:31:09.300 --> 0:31:11.849 was listening to it. I said, see, grandmom's on the radio, listen. 0:31:12.680 --> 0:31:15.010 And grandmom on the radio said, you know, after all, 0:31:15.060 --> 0:31:17.729 you wouldn't, a 4 year old isn't going to know 0:31:17.729 --> 0:31:20.920 what to do when there's a mastodon, you know, when 0:31:20.920 --> 0:31:24.530 there's a, a, a charging mastodon coming at them. And 0:31:24.530 --> 0:31:27.770 he said, I'd know what to do. And I said, really? 0:31:27.849 --> 0:31:29.209 And he said, thought about it for a minute, he said, 0:31:29.489 --> 0:31:32.640 I'd use a stick, I'd use a stick. Um. 0:31:33.520 --> 0:31:37.479 Uh, but of course, the problem is, and I don't 0:31:37.479 --> 0:31:39.119 know if this has happened with your children, but it 0:31:39.119 --> 0:31:41.959 has certainly happened with mine, that the stick can also 0:31:41.959 --> 0:31:43.689 lead you to the emergency room, right? 0:31:44.800 --> 0:31:44.862 Absolutely! 0:31:44.862 --> 0:31:48.979 You know, you end up doing stitches and, uh, uh, 0:31:49.000 --> 0:31:51.040 so a stick is a really lovely example of the 0:31:51.040 --> 0:31:54.359 sort of thing that children love, just because it lets 0:31:54.359 --> 0:31:56.466 them do all sorts of new things in the world, 0:31:56.466 --> 0:32:00.114 and in spite of the fact that it can be dangerous. 0:32:00.515 --> 0:32:02.635 Towards the end of the talk, um, you introduced some 0:32:02.635 --> 0:32:06.135 new work you've been doing on caregiving, and you did, uh, um, 0:32:06.155 --> 0:32:08.113 allude to that a little bit earlier, and you describe 0:32:08.114 --> 0:32:10.635 it as a very neglected topic, um, but one that's 0:32:10.635 --> 0:32:13.915 especially important, especially among elders. Uh, and I think it's 0:32:13.915 --> 0:32:17.234 intriguing conceptually that you talk about caring as an intelligence 0:32:17.234 --> 0:32:20.194 or as a, um, set of capacities, because I think 0:32:20.194 --> 0:32:22.314 very often in psychology we tend to think of it 0:32:22.314 --> 0:32:24.714 as an emotional disposition or something like that. 0:32:25.160 --> 0:32:28.329 Uh, can you expand on that idea of care, caring 0:32:28.329 --> 0:32:32.130 or caregiving, uh, as an intelligence and maybe link it 0:32:32.130 --> 0:32:33.119 to the orca example? 0:32:33.329 --> 0:32:36.469 Yeah, yeah, right. Um, so think about that example of 0:32:36.469 --> 0:32:41.689 the ER and the stick. Um, the disadvantage of exploration, 0:32:41.849 --> 0:32:44.089 there's two disadvantages. One of them is you don't have 0:32:44.089 --> 0:32:46.609 resources while you're just exploring, and the other one is 0:32:46.609 --> 0:32:47.770 exploring be dangerous. 0:32:47.839 --> 0:32:50.689 It can, it can actually have, have negative utilities as 0:32:50.689 --> 0:32:53.530 well as positive ones. Um, and if you have a 0:32:53.530 --> 0:32:56.270 2 year old or a teenager, you know that those 0:32:56.729 --> 0:33:00.849 creatures can actually be driven to prefer the, the disagreeable 0:33:00.849 --> 0:33:03.449 outcomes as long as they're the ones who are in 0:33:03.449 --> 0:33:04.930 control and bringing them about. 0:33:05.250 --> 0:33:07.930 Um, so the thought is that in order to, for 0:33:07.930 --> 0:33:10.800 this kind of exploration to happen, you have to have 0:33:10.800 --> 0:33:14.489 something else, which is that you have to have another animal, a, 0:33:14.609 --> 0:33:18.089 a creature who's actually taking care of you during that period. Um, 0:33:18.209 --> 0:33:20.319 you know, when I was writing The Gardener and The Carpenter, 0:33:20.369 --> 0:33:22.449 I started thinking about it, because obviously if you're thinking 0:33:22.449 --> 0:33:26.910 about parents and being a parent, that involves caregiving. But 0:33:27.130 --> 0:33:29.709 Margaret Levi, who's a political scientist, and I started doing 0:33:29.709 --> 0:33:34.310 this project about it, and it's amazingly invisible in the 0:33:34.609 --> 0:33:36.699 social sciences, in the sciences in general. 0:33:36.849 --> 0:33:41.369 So, you know, in economics, caregiving never shows up in 0:33:41.369 --> 0:33:44.489 the GDP, right? I mean, care workers do, but the 0:33:44.489 --> 0:33:46.469 caregiving that we all do every day doesn't. 0:33:46.680 --> 0:33:50.405 Um, and if you look at political science, nobody talks about - 0:33:50.405 --> 0:33:53.084 moral philosophy, even though this is the thing that if 0:33:53.084 --> 0:33:56.395 you ask people, is, you know, the hardest moral decisions, 0:33:56.444 --> 0:33:58.844 the thing that gives their life meaning, the thing that 0:33:58.844 --> 0:34:02.204 they're most invested in, it's invisible in moral philosophy and 0:34:02.204 --> 0:34:06.604 moral psychology. Um, the intelligence part is, you know, there's 0:34:06.604 --> 0:34:09.564 an affective element about how you feel when you're caring 0:34:09.564 --> 0:34:12.324 for someone, but just think about how hard it is 0:34:12.324 --> 0:34:15.084 to decide what to do to care for someone. 0:34:15.428 --> 0:34:17.948 And part of the reason why it's so hard, uh, 0:34:18.069 --> 0:34:22.127 I've argued, is that the basic cognitive structure of caregiving 0:34:22.339 --> 0:34:25.708 is really different from the structure of all the other 0:34:25.708 --> 0:34:29.589 kinds of activities that we're engaged in. So, usually, say 0:34:29.589 --> 0:34:32.458 if we're in a social relationship with someone else, um, 0:34:32.789 --> 0:34:35.549 we have a kind of reciprocity. They do something for you, 0:34:35.668 --> 0:34:38.948 you do something for them, and there's whole fields of 0:34:38.948 --> 0:34:43.175 economics and game theory and a formal philosophy that, that 0:34:43.175 --> 0:34:47.495 describe these kind of complicated social contracts between, between one 0:34:47.495 --> 0:34:48.175 person and another. 0:34:48.415 --> 0:34:50.614 But that's not what caregiving's like, right? I mean, you 0:34:50.614 --> 0:34:54.174 don't think the person you're caring for is going to reciprocate. 0:34:54.304 --> 0:34:57.215 In fact, it's kind of striking that they don't reciprocate. Um, 0:34:57.455 --> 0:35:01.174 and by the way, we have this beautiful experimental design 0:35:01.175 --> 0:35:03.399 that we've just started. I didn't get a chance to 0:35:03.399 --> 0:35:06.350 talk about it in the talk. Uh, my, my postdoc, 0:35:06.479 --> 0:35:09.759 Melis Muradoglu has done this, where, what she's done is 0:35:09.760 --> 0:35:12.959 show children little vignettes of aliens. So this is an 0:35:12.959 --> 0:35:16.520 alien planet. Here's these little aliens. And in one vignette, 0:35:16.600 --> 0:35:19.360 what happens is, one of the aliens gets cold, and 0:35:19.360 --> 0:35:22.750 the other one gives him a sweater, and then the, the, 0:35:22.919 --> 0:35:26.360 the second alien gives a blanket to the first one. 0:35:26.459 --> 0:35:27.544 So it's sort of reciprocal. 0:35:27.824 --> 0:35:30.375 In the other one, what happens is, the alien gets cold, 0:35:30.385 --> 0:35:32.784 and the other alien gives him a sweater, and then 0:35:32.784 --> 0:35:34.495 the other alien gives him a blanket, and he doesn't 0:35:34.495 --> 0:35:37.424 do anything in return. And if you ask kids, which 0:35:37.425 --> 0:35:39.584 of those is, are friends and which of those are 0:35:39.584 --> 0:35:42.185 a mom and child, they say, oh, the mom and 0:35:42.185 --> 0:35:44.424 child is when you just keep taking care of the, 0:35:44.665 --> 0:35:47.504 you just keep taking care of the baby even when there's, they're, they're, 0:35:47.625 --> 0:35:50.574 you're not getting any return. Um, uh. 0:35:51.469 --> 0:35:53.449 And in fact, if you sort of, I mean, another 0:35:53.449 --> 0:35:56.070 kind of structure you could have that we're familiar with 0:35:56.070 --> 0:35:59.069 is a power relationship where one person has more resources, 0:35:59.189 --> 0:36:03.189 so the second person subordinates their goals to the first person's. 0:36:03.469 --> 0:36:06.229 But if you think about caring relationships, what happens is 0:36:06.229 --> 0:36:09.149 you have two people, one of them has more resources 0:36:09.149 --> 0:36:09.850 than the other. 0:36:10.189 --> 0:36:13.070 And as a result, because they know that the other 0:36:13.070 --> 0:36:16.428 person is needy, they go out of their way to 0:36:16.429 --> 0:36:18.709 try to help that other person to accomplish their goals. 0:36:18.989 --> 0:36:21.270 And if you've ever tried to do this, it's really tricky, 0:36:21.330 --> 0:36:23.870 because what goals do you want them to accomplish? Do 0:36:23.870 --> 0:36:28.138 you want them just to be better off, what, you know, uh, um, 0:36:28.310 --> 0:36:31.350 economists would call their objective utilities? Well, sometimes you just 0:36:31.350 --> 0:36:34.070 want to give them the sandwich that will, do you 0:36:34.070 --> 0:36:35.310 want to give them what they want? 0:36:35.925 --> 0:36:39.375 Do you want to let them watch Paw Patrol for, 0:36:40.254 --> 0:36:42.455 for 2 hours, as in the case of my 4 0:36:42.455 --> 0:36:46.975 year old? Well, sometimes you sort of do. Um, and 0:36:47.455 --> 0:36:50.604 when you think beyond just caring for children, think about 0:36:50.604 --> 0:36:53.714 the way that we extend our caregiving to elders, for example, 0:36:53.814 --> 0:36:57.054 or to spouses or to students, as I was mentioning 0:36:57.054 --> 0:37:00.435 with Jerry Bruner or, or to patients. 0:37:01.100 --> 0:37:04.629 Um, what we really want is to give them resources 0:37:04.629 --> 0:37:07.629 so they can be empowered, so, in this kind of 0:37:07.629 --> 0:37:10.428 technical sense that I was talking about before, so that 0:37:10.429 --> 0:37:13.580 they can actually go out and do things themselves. And 0:37:13.580 --> 0:37:15.469 that's a really tricky thing to know how to do, 0:37:15.550 --> 0:37:18.709 like how do you decide how much autonomy you should, 0:37:18.989 --> 0:37:20.590 you should give a teenager, right? 0:37:20.830 --> 0:37:24.497 When do you decide when your elderly father should stop driving, 0:37:24.616 --> 0:37:28.656 those are really cognitively complicated, and it's because the structure 0:37:28.656 --> 0:37:31.446 is really different from the kind of structure that we're, uh, 0:37:31.497 --> 0:37:33.257 we're used to. So we're used to the idea that 0:37:33.257 --> 0:37:35.396 what you do is you go out and do things 0:37:35.396 --> 0:37:38.056 to try to maximise your own goals, but we're not 0:37:38.056 --> 0:37:40.416 used to the idea that you're doing things to try 0:37:40.416 --> 0:37:43.767 to get someone else who is needy and need, and, 0:37:43.846 --> 0:37:46.576 and doesn't have resources to have resources. 0:37:47.503 --> 0:37:49.873 And yet, I mean, not only is this true about, 0:37:50.204 --> 0:37:52.704 not only is this true about our relationship to children 0:37:52.964 --> 0:37:57.232 and elders and um children and, um, and students and, 0:37:57.483 --> 0:38:01.083 and patients, but I think it's what religions talk about 0:38:01.083 --> 0:38:03.884 when they talk about Caritas. It's something about the way 0:38:03.884 --> 0:38:07.444 that we should be caring about the planet, or we 0:38:07.444 --> 0:38:09.783 care about the natural world. 0:38:10.031 --> 0:38:13.391 It's this combination of thinking, you know, the planet can't 0:38:13.391 --> 0:38:16.020 really take care of itself, we have an obligation to, 0:38:16.180 --> 0:38:18.740 to pursue its goals, even though exactly what its goals 0:38:18.739 --> 0:38:21.031 are might be really hard to figure out. 0:38:21.351 --> 0:38:24.670 Just on that caregiving topic, as a, as a parent, 0:38:24.750 --> 0:38:27.311 I think you're always conflicted between how much to kind 0:38:27.311 --> 0:38:29.871 of protect your child and how much to push them 0:38:29.871 --> 0:38:31.690 out into the world, and I think we're seeing that 0:38:31.690 --> 0:38:34.989 at the moment with, you know, kids probably having too 0:38:34.989 --> 0:38:37.360 much screen time and not enough outside time and now 0:38:37.360 --> 0:38:39.879 seeing that, that push for what is sort of being 0:38:39.879 --> 0:38:42.279 called as free range kids to get them out again. 0:38:42.399 --> 0:38:44.600 What, what's your kind of view on this, you know, 0:38:44.709 --> 0:38:47.199 getting kids more outside and doing things in the free 0:38:47.199 --> 0:38:48.620 range kids movement? 0:38:48.810 --> 0:38:51.139 Yeah, I think, I mean, as I say, I think 0:38:51.239 --> 0:38:53.159 that was kind of what I was talking about in 0:38:53.159 --> 0:38:54.959 The Gardener and the Carpenter, and I think it's just 0:38:54.959 --> 0:38:57.799 gotten more intense over the last, over the last 10 0:38:57.800 --> 0:39:01.219 years or so. Um, and there's good empirical evidence that, 0:39:01.250 --> 0:39:04.990 for instance, just the range, literally the range that children have, 0:39:05.071 --> 0:39:08.131 how far, how far away they go from home has 0:39:08.469 --> 0:39:10.391 really narrowed dramatically. 0:39:10.469 --> 0:39:14.510 And things like, you know, whether a 7 or 8-year-old 0:39:14.510 --> 0:39:18.009 could walk to school by themselves in big parts of 0:39:18.031 --> 0:39:22.150 the States. They won't, you won't let a 7-year-old, go 0:39:22.150 --> 0:39:23.910 out on the street by themselves, or go to the 0:39:23.910 --> 0:39:26.670 park by themselves, or go to the store by themselves. 0:39:26.989 --> 0:39:28.662 And as I said before, that just seems to be 0:39:28.661 --> 0:39:34.062 a recipe for having children who are not good at adulting, as, um, 0:39:34.460 --> 0:39:36.842 as they say now, and who are suffering from anxiety. 0:39:36.981 --> 0:39:39.541 So I think both of those, I, I think the, the, 0:39:39.622 --> 0:39:44.440 the kind of free range children ideas is really, uh, 0:39:44.622 --> 0:39:49.161 I mean it's ironic and very, uh, American maybe, that 0:39:49.342 --> 0:39:51.862 it has to be like a formula that you are 0:39:51.862 --> 0:39:54.422 going to tell your children to go by themselves to 0:39:54.422 --> 0:39:54.882 the grocery store. 0:39:55.282 --> 0:39:57.902 But that's better than, as opposed to, I, I was 0:39:57.902 --> 0:40:00.843 just hearing a wonderful um talk at, so we've been 0:40:00.843 --> 0:40:03.393 doing a series of workshops about caregiving to try to 0:40:03.693 --> 0:40:07.012 fill in this terrible uh gap. We have a special 0:40:07.012 --> 0:40:10.893 issue of the journal Daedalus, with philosophers and economists and 0:40:10.893 --> 0:40:14.093 social scientists talking about caregiving. Um, but we just did 0:40:14.093 --> 0:40:18.113 one with a bunch of anthropologists, and in forager cultures, 0:40:18.613 --> 0:40:22.133 not only are the 4-year-olds going out into the jungle 0:40:22.133 --> 0:40:24.924 to explore, but, you know, they're being taken care of 0:40:24.924 --> 0:40:27.482 by the 7-year-olds, and they're taking care of the babies, 0:40:27.523 --> 0:40:28.114 the infants. 0:40:28.204 --> 0:40:30.763 So, moms are going out to forage and they're taking 0:40:30.763 --> 0:40:33.163 their kids with them, and it's not just that they're 0:40:33.164 --> 0:40:35.644 looking after the kids, the kids are looking after themselves 0:40:35.643 --> 0:40:38.154 and looking after the other, the other kids, which means 0:40:38.154 --> 0:40:40.684 that by the time you're an adult having children yourself, 0:40:40.924 --> 0:40:43.644 you really know a lot about caregiving. You've developed this 0:40:43.643 --> 0:40:46.154 kind of intelligence of caregiving, and I think one of the, 0:40:46.444 --> 0:40:50.395 one of the great, you know, um, crises lacks in 0:40:50.395 --> 0:40:55.195 our current culture, possibly partly responsible for the, the sort 0:40:55.195 --> 0:40:58.834 of fertility crisis is that people don't, haven't learned about 0:40:58.834 --> 0:41:00.274 taking care of other people. 0:41:00.554 --> 0:41:02.513 And then of course, we have this other crisis, which 0:41:02.514 --> 0:41:05.794 is that we have this ageing population. So, you know, 0:41:05.875 --> 0:41:08.594 we've always had people in their 70s or 80s. Now 0:41:08.594 --> 0:41:10.834 we have a very large population of people in their 0:41:10.834 --> 0:41:13.435 70s and 80s, and we tend to sort of segregate 0:41:13.435 --> 0:41:16.834 them out into, into, away from the rest of the society. 0:41:17.506 --> 0:41:20.625 This gets to the point about the orcas. So, um, 0:41:20.986 --> 0:41:24.226 that care, I think there's good reason to, you know, again, 0:41:24.344 --> 0:41:26.986 we all do all of this, but elders seem to 0:41:26.986 --> 0:41:31.016 be particularly involved in care. And there's some evidence that 0:41:31.016 --> 0:41:33.706 grandmothers keep those, you know, when you think about those, 0:41:33.825 --> 0:41:37.186 those groups of babies, the infants and the toddler and 0:41:37.186 --> 0:41:40.185 the preschooler, the grandmothers are the ones in forager cultures 0:41:40.186 --> 0:41:42.906 who are really responsible for keeping the, the toddlers and 0:41:42.906 --> 0:41:45.957 the preschoolers alive while the mom is nursing the new baby. 0:41:46.536 --> 0:41:48.896 So the only other creature that we know of that has, 0:41:49.056 --> 0:41:50.736 the other, only other mammal we know of that has 0:41:50.737 --> 0:41:54.446 postmenopausal grandmothers is actually the orca, the killer whale. And 0:41:54.447 --> 0:41:58.096 it turns out that in orca pods, those grandmothers, those 0:41:58.096 --> 0:42:02.676 postmenopausal grandmothers, give information to the rest of the pod 0:42:02.937 --> 0:42:06.636 about things like, oh, there was, there was krill here 0:42:06.737 --> 0:42:09.416 30 years ago, now we're getting short of food. Here's 0:42:09.416 --> 0:42:11.416 the place to go to find out about the krill. 0:42:11.800 --> 0:42:15.399 And they pass on information. They have kind of cultural transmission, 0:42:15.500 --> 0:42:18.719 cultural learning about, here's the kind of things that you 0:42:18.719 --> 0:42:21.600 do to, to eat. I, I like the idea as 0:42:21.600 --> 0:42:24.718 a grandmother myself that the central thing that they do 0:42:24.719 --> 0:42:29.080 is give recipes for, um, to the next generation. But 0:42:29.080 --> 0:42:31.198 I think for humans, also, if you think about things 0:42:31.199 --> 0:42:34.600 like stories, or you think about songs, or you think about, 0:42:34.919 --> 0:42:38.524 you know, the big picture about how a culture, what's 0:42:38.524 --> 0:42:39.844 important in a culture or not. 0:42:40.125 --> 0:42:44.245 Those are things that characteristically elders are passing on to grandchildren. 0:42:44.645 --> 0:42:48.004 The parents typically are so terribly involved in just trying 0:42:48.004 --> 0:42:50.323 to put out fires, that they don't have as much 0:42:50.324 --> 0:42:52.205 time to do that. But you know, at night when 0:42:52.205 --> 0:42:56.155 you're around the fire, the grandmothers are the ones who are, uh, 0:42:56.205 --> 0:42:58.485 giving the, telling the myths and singing the stories, and 0:42:58.485 --> 0:43:00.264 the children are learning from them. 0:43:00.850 --> 0:43:03.850 Grandmothers and the grandfathers, um, and the grandfathers as well. 0:43:04.090 --> 0:43:07.969 And again, the fact that we segregate out the elders 0:43:07.969 --> 0:43:11.630 and the children, you know, uh, um I think is 0:43:11.590 --> 0:43:16.469 a terrible institutional failure and if we are pretty clear 0:43:16.469 --> 0:43:19.149 that it would be better for both ageing people and 0:43:19.149 --> 0:43:21.860 for children if they were interacting more. 0:43:22.270 --> 0:43:25.169 There's a, um, a show on the ABC here called 0:43:25.429 --> 0:43:27.979 Old People's Home for 3 [*4] Year Olds, where they 0:43:27.979 --> 0:43:32.669 basically take 3-year-olds into these kind of elder care homes 0:43:32.669 --> 0:43:35.939 and the relationships and the interactions are just beautiful and, 0:43:36.169 --> 0:43:39.090 It's funded from a, a, an educational grant, but they're 0:43:39.090 --> 0:43:42.040 just continuing it and you see these beautiful relationships come through. 0:43:42.250 --> 0:43:44.610 I mean, one of the things that I've proposed is 0:43:44.610 --> 0:43:46.689 that in America, for example, and this could be true 0:43:46.689 --> 0:43:49.770 in Australia as well, you know, there, we never quite 0:43:49.770 --> 0:43:52.330 have enough people for preschool, so you know, you want 0:43:52.330 --> 0:43:55.750 to have universal preschool, but there's never quite enough teachers there, 0:43:56.090 --> 0:43:58.810 and I proposed that we should just sort of have 0:43:58.810 --> 0:44:02.770 a designated grandmom in every, in every classroom and that 0:44:02.870 --> 0:44:05.489 it's not an ECE teacher, but just someone from the 0:44:05.489 --> 0:44:09.379 community who's an older person who wants to make some 0:44:09.379 --> 0:44:11.669 extra money and who wants to do something that has 0:44:11.669 --> 0:44:15.189 to do with little kids, and that's exactly the circumstance 0:44:15.189 --> 0:44:17.669 in which you can get these kind of close relationships 0:44:17.669 --> 0:44:22.290 that enable care and also enable things like cultural transmission. 0:44:22.590 --> 0:44:24.909 We probably should uh draw a close because you've been 0:44:24.909 --> 0:44:26.550 very generous with your time. Thank you so much for 0:44:26.550 --> 0:44:28.790 sharing your wisdom with us, Alison, and we hope you 0:44:28.790 --> 0:44:31.169 have a great rest of your stay here in Australia. 0:44:31.270 --> 0:44:33.830 Yes, well, as I say, very happy always to come 0:44:33.830 --> 0:44:36.839 and visit here. I went to the um, the Fitzroy 0:44:36.840 --> 0:44:39.199 Primary School Fete on the first day that I was here, 0:44:39.280 --> 0:44:43.270 which is wonderful, that enough, but that, I mean, not to, 0:44:43.679 --> 0:44:45.959 not to downgrade the wonders of talking to all the 0:44:45.959 --> 0:44:49.479 brilliant people at Melbourne, but that by itself was uh 0:44:49.479 --> 0:44:50.759 enough motivation to come back. 0:44:50.879 --> 0:44:52.679 We'll also make sure you get up to date with 0:44:52.679 --> 0:44:55.279 your Bluey episodes as a developmental psychologist. 0:44:56.060 --> 0:44:58.639 I am for no other reason, I would be grateful 0:44:58.639 --> 0:45:01.399 to the Australian nation for Bluey as a grandmother of 0:45:01.399 --> 0:45:02.699 six as well. 0:45:03.159 --> 0:45:04.959 Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. 0:45:07.760 --> 0:45:10.989 That was Professor Alison Gopnik from UC Berkeley joining us 0:45:10.989 --> 0:45:13.560 for a special psych talks episode recorded during her visit 0:45:13.560 --> 0:45:16.270 to Melbourne for the Pip Pattison Oration. You can find 0:45:16.270 --> 0:45:18.250 Alison's books and talks online. 0:45:19.090 --> 0:45:21.800 Psych Talks is produced by Mairead Murray, Gemma Papprill and 0:45:21.800 --> 0:45:25.770 Celia Harvey with sound engineering by Jack Palmer. I'm Nick Haslam. 0:45:26.129 --> 0:45:28.010 Thanks for listening to our special episode and if you 0:45:28.010 --> 0:45:30.638 haven't already, follow or subscribe so you don't miss our 0:45:30.639 --> 0:45:33.409 next episode. Until next time, take care.