Like any proud father of a small baby, I seem to spend half my life staring into her eyes, wondering what she's thinking and feeling, trying to imagine how she experiences the world. Until fairly recently, scientists and philosophers would have told me that the answer was simple: I might as well stare at a pigeon, because babies are no more intelligent or profound than the dumbest animal. But, as Alison Gopnik explains in her inspiring new book, "there's been a revolution in our scientific understanding of babies" and we now know that, in many ways, "young children are actually smarter, more imaginative, more caring and even more conscious than adults".
- The Philosophical Baby
- : What Children's Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life
- by Alison Gopnik
- Find this on the Guardian bookshop
Gopnik is a professor of psychology at the University of California and her descriptions of her working life hint at a lab crammed with infants yanking levers and pushing buttons while white-coated technicians follow their eye movements and scan their brains. A touch narcissistically, perhaps, Gopnik thinks of babies as scientists, too; she describes them as "learning machines", constantly experimenting on the world and analysing their own results with such enthusiasm and hard work that "any child will put the most productive scientist to shame".
Babies learn so fast and play so hard that they completely transform their own world-views every few months, abandoning all that they once knew and embracing entirely fresh ways of understanding their existence. "Really flexible and innovative adults might change their minds this way two or three times in a lifetime."
Like the greatest artists or engineers, children don't simply observe the world, they also imagine how it could be different. During our extraordinarily long childhoods, while we remain incapable of looking after ourselves and entirely dependent on our carers, we have the chance to develop our imaginations, flexing the most important muscle which sets us apart from any other animal.
As we grow older, we acquire self-discipline and restraint; we learn to ignore our surroundings, edit out distractions and focus our attention on a particular task. Which is why we may be able to drive a car or tie our shoelaces without stopping to examine the spider scurrying across the floor beside our foot; but our fierce imaginations have faded and grown mundane.
Gopnik describes children as the research and development department of the human species, spilling wild visions and unexpected inspirations. Adults are production and marketing, focusing on a particular project and following it through to its logical conclusion.
If all this sounds depressing - who wants to be a dreary, conservative adult when we've all once been radical, free-thinking infants? - then there's one slight consolation available to us: by becoming parents, we can learn the value of empathy and selfless love. You can't be a ruthless individualist while you're looking after a baby and "caring for children is an awfully fast and efficient way to experience at least a little saintliness". I'm not sure that this is entirely true - as far as I can tell, parents don't seem to be very much less vain, envious or ambitious than any other adults - but it's certainly a nice idea to reflect on during the sleepless nights.
What if we want to rid our adult minds of inhibitions and return to the joys of being a baby? Travel and meditation, suggests Gopnik, are the best ways to rekindle the imaginative confusion of our childhood, heightening our awareness by forcing us to experience the world anew. Visiting a strange country overwhelms our senses with experience, while some forms of meditation allow you to escape routine daily thoughts and instead "become vividly aware of everything around you at once" until all your senses "seem to be illuminated simultaneously, with little distinction between the trivial and the important, or the internal and external". That is how a baby experiences the world. "Babies, like Buddhas, are travellers in a little room."
Later chapters examine the vital role of love in successful parenting and describe the self-perpetuating cycles that babies and parents build into their own relationships: "Babies learn about the world based on what they see their parents do, and they act based on that knowledge. Those actions influence what their parents do, which influences what the babies do and how they act, and so forth. A naturally sad baby observes a sad mother, concludes that sadness is the human condition, acts sadly and makes her mother even more sad."
When such cycles are changed for the better, the transformation affects everyone. Gopnik describes a project in Michigan where primary schools in deprived areas were supplied with well-designed toys and abundant, dedicated carers. Not only did the children themselves drastically enhance their own lives - 20 and 30 years later, in comparison with a control group, they were "more prosperous, better educated, healthier and less likely to go to jail" - but they also influenced their own parents, teaching them to be more confident and capable, sending ripples of improvement throughout the community.
Gopnik writes with a nicely personal touch, often referring to her three children and five siblings (who include Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker essayist). She uses a clear and very readable prose, squarely aimed at the general reader and sensibly divided into short sections, ideal for anyone burdened by babies or toddlers. Her pages are packed with provocative observations and cunning insights. I'd highly recommend this fascinating book to any parent of a young child - and, indeed, anyone who has ever been a baby.
• Josh Lacey's The One That Got Away is published by Marion Lloyd. To order The Philosophical Baby for £13.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop