Within a year, most babies can have a conversation with their parents, share a joke, and begin wondering why people do the things they do. They babble, gesture, exchange glances, tease, mimic, and basically become sociable little members of the human race.8 This transition from the wrinkled newborn in the delivery suite to the socially savvy twelve-month-old is one of the most amazing transformations in life. Something very smart and very fast is happening. We may think computers are smart, but they are nothing in comparison to what a human infant can achieve over twelve months. It is only since engineers started to build computers that we have come to fully appreciate what being smart really is. All the simple things that babies excel at in their first year are some of the hardest problems that engineers have been trying to solve for decades; voice and face recognition, reaching and grasping, walking, reasoning, communication, understanding that others have minds, and even exhibiting humour. All the rudiments of these complex abilities can be found in human infants before their first birthday.
Fueled by the latest research, many parents in the West have come to regard their babies as miniature geniuses, born with unlimited abilities to think and learn. There is now a whole industry of preschool learning and education that taps into the parental desire to give children the best start in life. By ‘the best start in life’ what we actually mean is to make sure that our offspring are smarter than the next kid. As they choose among products with names like ‘Baby Einstein’, ‘Baby Bach’, ‘Baby Da Vinci’, ‘Baby Van Gogh’, ‘Baby Newton’, and ‘Baby Shakespeare’, I think that parents’ expectations are being somewhat unrealistically raised. In fact, a 2007 study of baby videos and DVDs found that they are associated with impaired language development, a report that infuriated the Walt Disney Company, which owns ‘Baby Einstein.’9
Parents are easy pickings for those willing to sell them products to enhance their child’s future earning potential. We buy black-and-white mobiles to hang over our baby’s crib to stimulate the visual areas of the brain (not necessary), chewable toys with bells inside to enhance eye–hand coordination with multisensory input (not necessary), Mozart tapes to improve concentration (myth), flash cards to teach the baby to read (unlikely), and DVDs for the baby to goggle at for hours on end to feed its information-hungry brain (not necessary).10
Like gardeners nurturing little plants, we have developed a ‘hothouse’ mentality to parenting. It’s mostly a Western obsession that has more to do with aspirations for our children’s success than hard science, but every caring parent is vulnerable. Even my wife, a highly educated medical expert, could not resist the urge to buy the black-and-white mobile.11 Yes, babies stare at them. They’re very noticeable – in the same way that anything black and white is noticeable – but such patterns are not going to accelerate normal growth.
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.12 A 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.’14 The 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.16 According 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.