Hood, Bruce - Supersense

Parents have been cajoled into thinking that natural abilities need a helping hand – or worse, that they can be made better than nature originally intended. Of course, environment is important, but you would have to raise a baby in a dark cardboard box with very little input to produce the sorts of long-term disadvantages that most parents worry about. 12A normal world with people chatting away, offering attention and affection with food and the occasional toy to play with, is sufficient for nature’s programme to unfold. So if you are a first-time parent or grandparent, relax and chill. There is no need for concern when it comes to infant development. It will take care of itself in an ordinary loving household. If a child develops a problem, it’s not going to be due to a lack of parental care in a typical setting. It takes severe deprivation to alter the program of normal development. Any concern about understimulation from the environment simply reflects how little we appreciate the complexity of the day-to-day existence that we take for granted.

The image of the brilliant Einsteinian baby was shattered by the following shocking report published in 1997:

Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid

LOS ANGELES – A surprising new study released Monday by UCLA’s Institute For Child Development revealed that human babies, long thought by psychologists to be highly inquisitive and adaptable, are actually extraordinarily stupid.

The study, an 18-month battery of intelligence tests administered to over 3,500 babies, concluded categorically that babies are ‘so stupid, it’s not even funny.’

According to Institute president Molly Bentley, in an effort to determine infant survival instincts when attacked, the babies were prodded in an aggressive manner with a broken broom handle. Over 90 per cent of them, when poked, failed to make even rudimentary attempts to defend themselves. The remaining 10 per cent responded by vacating their bowels.

‘It is unlikely that the presence of the babies’ fecal matter, however foul-smelling, would have a measurable defensive effect against an attacker in a real-world situation’, Bentley said. 13

The report went on to reveal that in comparison to dogs, chickens, and even worms, babies also performed the least adaptively when left on a mound of dirt in a torrential downpour. While the other creatures sought cover, the babies just lay there gurgling.

When I last checked, there was no UCLA Institute for Child Development, and I doubt there ever will be following this spoof article written for the satirical publication The Onion . These are not the sorts of experiments that scientists conduct on babies, though after reading in the last chapter about John Watson’s terrorizing of Little Albert, you might be forgiven for thinking that such experiments are not beyond the realm of possibility. Of course babies cannot defend themselves from attack with a broom handle. They don’t need to. That’s what parents are for. They are the ones wired to protect their offspring from attack. The article is lampooning the 1993 cover feature for the nowdefunct US Life magazine, ‘Babies Are Smarter Than You Think.’ 14The cover title went on to proclaim, ‘They can add before they can count. They can understand 100 words before they can speak. And, at three months, their powers of memory are far greater than we ever imagined.’ Babies may not be able to defend themselves from a broom handle attack, but when it comes to brainpower, they are deceptively smart. Of course, you would be hard-pressed to recognize this. Babies seem so helpless, and, yes, you would think that any creature lying there in the mud and rain is pretty dumb, but you would be wrong. In comparison to a collection of chips, circuits, and transistors, as Marvin Minsky graphically put it, that helpless child is the most amazing meat machine on the planet. 15

INVISIBLE IDIOTS

It is reported that during the Cold War of the 1960s the American CIA was developing machine speech recognition to translate English into Russian and back again. 16According to the story, on the debut test-run of one system, the head of operations decided to try out the common phrase ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ The computer translated this into Russian, in which it became ‘invisible idiot.’ ‘Out of sight’ is indeed ‘invisible’, and ‘out of mind’ could mean an idiot. Similarly, ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, came back as ‘The vodka is okay, but the meat is rotten.’ These translations make sense literally but bear very little resemblance to the meaning of the phrase in the original language, and they remind us that human understanding requires a conceptual mind, one that can think of ideas and reason over and beyond simple input. As with the colourless green dreams of Noam Chomsky that we encountered earlier, our minds contain information that helps us interpret and make sense.

Even at the basic input stage, our stored knowledge helps us interpret the world. For example, if I were to ask you, ‘Do you wreck a nice peach?’ I expect you would look at me quizzically. Now, if you ask this question out loud rather than reading it, you hear and understand it as ‘Do you recognize speech?’, not as an inquiry about whether you are inclined towards destructive acts aimed at pleasurable juicy fruits. You hear one interpretation and not another. This is because destroying a peach is not a common phrase or idea that we entertain. In the same way that we saw the illusory square in chapter 1, our stored knowledge helps us hear and interpret such ambiguous input. We hear one sentence and not another. Where does this knowledge come from? It seems such an obvious answer that knowledge must come from the world of experience. Everything you know must be learned. But is it as simple as that?

Most people are familiar with the blank-slate metaphor that was originally popularized by the British philosopher John Locke in the eighteenth century. 17The idea is simple enough – children are born without knowledge, and experience shapes them by writing on their minds as though they were blank sheets of paper. Other philosophers, such as Descartes and Kant, pointed out that something has to be built in, otherwise it would be impossible to extract knowledge from a cluttered world of experience. 18The brain is more like a biological computer that has an operating system we call the mind. That operating system tells us what to pay attention to and how to process information. Without the right operating system, you can’t make sense of input – like listening to a foreign language and being unable to understand a word of what is said. Where would you begin? How would you know what you were looking for without some plan? It’s like trying to build a house without foundations – you need some embedded structures in the ground to make it stable. The same is true for knowledge. You need rules built in from the start to anchor the information. 19In other words, you need to be born with some form of mind design. How else would you get beyond James’s ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’?

AT THE SOUND OF THE DINNER BELL

For many years the importance of mind design was largely ignored in Western psychology. This was partly because in Russia, at the turn of the twentieth century, Ivan Pavlov, working on the physiology of digestion in dogs, stumbled on something that every dog owner knows. Dogs begin to salivate just before you bring them their food. Pavlov called this ‘psychic secretion’, because it was a reflex behaviour that seemed to be triggered before food was delivered. Dogs are not psychic. They simply learn when dinner is coming by noticing clues such as the sound of the electric can opener in the kitchen just before food arrives. This seems so trivially obvious today, but Pavlov recognized a really important discovery when he saw one – so important that he was awarded a Nobel Prize for it. He realized that animals could be trained to anticipate rewards on the basis of cues. By pairing the sound of a bell with food that naturally causes dogs to slobber, eventually the dogs learned to associate the sound of the bell alone with the impending arrival of dinner. On hearing the bell, the dogs began to drool. It may be my overactive imagination, but I seem to remember a similar response in my old school playground when the bell sounded for lunch. The ringing was enough to make mouths salivate and stomachs rumble.