Alison Gopnik Quotes & Sayings (Page 7)

“One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.”

“The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.”

“I'm the oldest of six children and I had my own first baby when I was 23. So I've always been interested in babies, and I had lots of opportunities to watch them.”

“I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.”

“If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame.”

“Many philosophers say it's impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that's not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It's just that they haven't explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about.”

“One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.”

“Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.”

“Something like reading depends a lot on just having people around you who talk to you and read you books, more than sitting down and, say, doing a reading drill when you're 3 or 4 years old.”

“The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.”