Hood, Bruce - Supersense

Piaget believed that from the start young infants do not understand the world as made up of permanent, real objects but that they treat the world as an extension of their own minds. As though having a bizarre vivid dream. Piaget claimed, infants cannot tell the difference between reality and having a thought. Their world is like the world depicted in the sci-fi blockbuster The Matrix , in which evil computers keep the human race in a state of virtual reality by directly feeding experiences into their brains. 25The computers create the illusion of a normal world. In truth, all the humans are captives, harvested for the energy they produce but completely unaware of their true predicament or surroundings. They are unaware of the external reality that exists outside their minds. In the same way, Piaget’s newborns are oblivious to an external reality. They have no concept that the sensations and perceptions they experience in their minds are generated by a real, external world that continues existing even when the baby is asleep. So if some object is really out there, but out of sight, as far as the infant is concerned it does not exist. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ became Piaget’s signature slogan for this extreme view of the young infant’s failure to grasp the permanence of reality. A true understanding of external reality is something babies have to discover for themselves, he claimed, and to do this they need to get interactive.

SEARCHING FOR THE MIND

Somewhere around four to five months, babies get good at reaching and grasping objects. 26It soon becomes a compulsive behaviour that they just can’t stop themselves doing. Any graspable object within reach will do. When my oldest daughter was about this age, I used to carry her on my back in one of those papoose baby holders that leaves their little legs dangling but their arms free to stretch out. When she was not pulling my ears or hair like some demonic monkey on my back, she was always trying to grab anything that came within reach. One day in a supermarket, unbeknownst to me, she reached out and grasped a polythene bag that was hanging from a roll next to the fruit aisle while I was preoccupied with selecting the best apples. I continued walking down the aisle, unaware that I was trailing thirty feet of bags before the smirks of other shoppers alerted me to the growing train of plastic bags behind me.

This fascination with grasping objects is something that Piaget recognized as really important. It means that babies are starting to take an interest in their surroundings. The baby is actively engaging the world. Yet the young infant still does not understand that reality is something different from their mind and independent of their actions. Piaget came to this bizarre conclusion by watching his own young children at play and noticing something peculiar that was to become one of the most famous and studied phenomena in infant psychology. You can repeat this demonstration yourself if you happen to have a six- to eight-month-old infant at hand. 27

Take one baby and place a graspable object in front of him. So long as he is not already holding something, he will automatically reach out and pick it up, and then jam it in his mouth for taste evaluation. Now unclasp the object and repeat the procedure, only this time quickly cover the object with a cloth and momentarily distract the infant by snapping your fingers. Hey presto! It’s gone. It’s the easiest magic trick in the world. Most babies will stop and then look around as if the object has disappeared. They do not search underneath the cloth for it. They may pick up the cloth, but rarely as a way of retrieving the object. Because it is out of sight, it is literally out of mind. It no longer exists.

When infants do search under a cloth, a few months later, they still do not understand objects as separate from themselves. For example, if you hide an object under a cushion, a ten-month-old baby will look for it there. But if you then hide the object at a new location in full view of the baby, she will go back and search under the original cushion. The baby believes that his own act of searching will magically re-create the object at the old location. Young children behave as though their minds and actions can control the world. Only through experience do they begin to appreciate the true nature of reality as separate.

MAGICAL BABIES

As it turns out, Piaget was wrong about ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for babies. We now know that they don’t think magically about physical objects. They are not deluded in thinking that their own thoughts make physical things materialize. Babies do know that a real world of objects exists out there. You just have to ask the question in the right way – one that obviously does not require language (because you may be waiting all day for an answer) and does not involve searching for hidden objects. How can this be done? Ironically, the ingenious answer involves a bit of magic.

Everybody likes a good magic trick. Why? Because we don’t believe in magic. If we really did think that objects can vanish into thin air, then a conjurer’s illusion would be of little surprise to us. Magic tricks work because they violate our beliefs about the world. They cause us to be surprised, to stare in wonder, to look puzzled, applaud, and then want to see it done again. The same is true to some extent with infants. They may not be able to give a round of applause and demand an encore, but they do look longer at the magical outcome of a conjurer’s trick. You can measure this simply by the amount of time they spend staring at an impossible outcome in comparison to a possible one.

Over the past twenty years, scientists have used this simple principle to reveal the workings of the baby mind. 28If babies look longer at a trick, then they must appreciate that some physical law is being broken. Somewhere inside their heads, there is some mental machinery clanking away trying to make sense of an illusion by paying more attention. For example, imagine you are a baby watching a puppet show. On the stage sits a Mickey Mouse doll. A screen comes down to hide the doll, and then a hand comes stage left to deposit another Mickey Mouse doll behind the screen. How many Mickey Mouses (or should that be Mickey Mice) are there behind the screen? Easy, you say, there are two. But when the screen is raised revealing three, you know something is amiss. The same is true for babies. They look longer at three dolls. They also look longer when only one doll is revealed, but not when there are two. They know one plus one equals two. By five months of age, babies have the basics of mental arithmetic. 29

Hundreds of experiments have shown that babies can reason about similar unseen events in their head. They can think about hidden objects, where they are, how many there are, and even what they are made of. Where does this knowledge come from? Many such experiments show sophisticated and rapid learning that has led Harvard infant psychologist Liz Spelke to propose that some rules for object knowledge must be built in from birth in the same way the rules for learning language are. 30Evolution has provided babies with a set of principles to decode the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ that the real world presents to us each time we open our eyes:

Rule 1:

Objects do not go in and out of existence like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland . Their solidity dictates that they are not phantoms that can move through walls. Likewise, other solid objects cannot move through them.

Rule 2:

Objects are bounded so that they do not break up and then come back together again. This rule helps to distinguish between solid objects and gloop such as applesauce or liquids.

Rule 3:

Objects move on continuous paths so that they cannot teleport from one part of the room to another part without being seen crossing in between.