Alison Gopnik quotes

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)
What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers. View quote
Alison Gopnik
What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. View quote
Alison Gopnik
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. View quote
Alison Gopnik
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?' View quote
Alison Gopnik
If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn't look like there's very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It's easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are. View quote
Alison Gopnik
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. View quote
Alison Gopnik
I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them. View quote
Alison Gopnik
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. View quote
Alison Gopnik
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. View quote
Alison Gopnik
On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city. (Alison Gopnik)
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. View quote
Alison Gopnik
One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood. View quote
Alison Gopnik
Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer. View quote
Alison Gopnik
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. View quote
Alison Gopnik
Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments. View quote
Alison Gopnik
It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old. View quote
Alison Gopnik
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. View quote
Alison Gopnik
The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment. View quote
Alison Gopnik
The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect. View quote
Alison Gopnik
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)
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. View quote
Alison Gopnik
Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention. View quote
Alison Gopnik
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. View quote
Alison Gopnik
The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans. View quote
Alison Gopnik