Play - free children's brilliant minds NYT Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Alison Gopnik

So there’s this lovely concept that I like of the numinous. And sometimes it’s connected with spirituality, but I don’t think it has to be. It’s this idea that you’re going through the world. And often, quite suddenly, if you’re an adult, everything in the world seems to be significant and important and important and significant in a way that makes you insignificant by comparison. My colleague, Dacher Keltner, has studied awe. And awe is kind of an example of this. But the numinous sort of turns up the dial on awe. And part of the numinous is it doesn’t just have to be about something that’s bigger than you, like a mountain. It could just be your garden or the street that you’re walking on. And suddenly that becomes illuminated. Everything around you becomes illuminated. And you yourself sort of disappear. And I think that’s kind of the best analogy I can think of for the state that the children are in. And it’s worth saying, it’s not like the children are always in that state. So the children, perhaps because they spend so much time in that state, also can be fussy and cranky and desperately wanting their next meal or desperately wanting comfort. They’re not always in that kind of broad state. But I think they spend much more of their time in that state. That’s more like their natural state than adults are.EZRA KLEIN: Do you think for kids that play or imaginative play should be understood as a form of consciousness, a state? ALISON GOPNIK: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there’s really a kind of coherent whole about what childhood is all about. So if you think from this broad evolutionary perspective about these creatures that are designed to explore, I think there’s a whole lot of other things that go with that. So one thing that goes with that is this broad-based consciousness. But another thing that goes with it is the activity of play. And if you think about play, the definition of play is that it’s the thing that you do when you’re not working. Now it’s not a form of experience and consciousness so much, but it’s a form of activity. It’s a form of actually doing things that, nevertheless, have this characteristic of not being immediately directed to a goal. If you look across animals, for example, very characteristically, it’s the young animals that are playing across an incredibly wide range of different kinds of animals. Sometimes if they’re mice, they’re play fighting. And if they’re crows, they’re playing with twigs and figuring out how they can use the twigs. So, what goes on in play is different. But it’s really fascinating that it’s the young animals who are playing. And all of the theories that we have about play are play’s another form of this kind of exploration. So it’s another way of having this explore state of being in the world. Now it’s not so much about you’re visually taking in all the information around you the way that you do when you’re exploring. Now it’s more like you’re actually doing things on the world to try to explore the space of possibilities. Another thing that people point out about play is play is fun. There’s a certain kind of happiness and joy that goes with being in that state when you’re just playing. And again, it’s not the state that kids are in all the time. But it’s the state that they’re in a lot of the time and a state that they’re in when they’re actually engaged in play. One of the things that’s really fascinating that’s coming out in A.I. now — and I’ve been spending a lot of time collaborating with people in computer science at Berkeley who are trying to design better artificial intelligence systems — the current systems that we have, I mean, the languages they’re designed to optimize, they’re really exploit systems. What you do with these systems is say, here’s what your goal is. You go out and maximize that goal. And it turns out that if you have a system like that, it will be very good at doing the things that it was optimized for, but not very good at being resilient, not very good at changing when things are different, right? I’ve been really struck working with people in robotics, for example. When people say, well, the robots have trouble generalizing, they don’t mean they have trouble generalizing from driving a Tesla to driving a Lexus. They mean they have trouble going from putting the block down at this point to putting the block down a centimeter to the left, right? I mean, they really have trouble generalizing even when they’re very good. And it turns out that if you get these systems to have a period of play, where they can just be generating things in a wilder way or get them to train on a human playing, they end up being much more resilient. They’re much better at generalizing, which is, of course, the great thing that children are also really good at. EZRA KLEIN: Do you think for kids that play or imaginative play should be understood as a form of consciousness, a state? ALISON GOPNIK: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there’s really a kind of coherent whole about what childhood is all about. So if you think from this broad evolutionary perspective about these creatures that are designed to explore, I think there’s a whole lot of other things that go with that. So one thing that goes with that is this broad-based consciousness. But another thing that goes with it is the activity of play. And if you think about play, the definition of play is that it’s the thing that you do when you’re not working. Now it’s not a form of experience and consciousness so much, but it’s a form of activity. It’s a form of actually doing things that, nevertheless, have this characteristic of not being immediately directed to a goal. If you look across animals, for example, very characteristically, it’s the young animals that are playing across an incredibly wide range of different kinds of animals. Sometimes if they’re mice, they’re play fighting. And if they’re crows, they’re playing with twigs and figuring out how they can use the twigs. So, what goes on in play is different. But it’s really fascinating that it’s the young animals who are playing. And all of the theories that we have about play are play’s another form of this kind of exploration. So it’s another way of having this explore state of being in the world. Now it’s not so much about you’re visually taking in all the information around you the way that you do when you’re exploring. Now it’s more like you’re actually doing things on the world to try to explore the space of possibilities. Another thing that people point out about play is play is fun. There’s a certain kind of happiness and joy that goes with being in that state when you’re just playing. And again, it’s not the state that kids are in all the time. But it’s the state that they’re in a lot of the time and a state that they’re in when they’re actually engaged in play. One of the things that’s really fascinating that’s coming out in A.I. now — and I’ve been spending a lot of time collaborating with people in computer science at Berkeley who are trying to design better artificial intelligence systems — the current systems that we have, I mean, the languages they’re designed to optimize, they’re really exploit systems. What you do with these systems is say, here’s what your goal is. You go out and maximize that goal. And it turns out that if you have a system like that, it will be very good at doing the things that it was optimized for, but not very good at being resilient, not very good at changing when things are different, right? I’ve been really struck working with people in robotics, for example. When people say, well, the robots have trouble generalizing, they don’t mean they have trouble generalizing from driving a Tesla to driving a Lexus. They mean they have trouble going from putting the block down at this point to putting the block down a centimeter to the left, right? I mean, they really have trouble generalizing even when they’re very good. And it turns out that if you get these systems to have a period of play, where they can just be generating things in a wilder way or get them to train on a human playing, they end up being much more resilient. They’re much better at generalizing, which is, of course, the great thing that children are also really good at. What does this somewhat deeper understanding of the child’s brain imply for caregivers? What does taking more seriously what these states of consciousness are like say about how you should act as a parent and uncle and aunt, a grandparent? ALISON GOPNIK: Well, I think here’s the wrong message to take, first of all, which I think is often the message that gets taken from this kind of information, especially in our time and our place and among people in our culture. The wrong message is, oh, OK, they’re doing all this learning, so we better start teaching them really, really early. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story We better make sure that all this learning is going to be shaped in the way that we want it to be shaped. And we better make sure that we’re doing the right things, and we’re buying the right apps, and we’re reading the right books, and we’re doing the right things to shape that kind of learning in the way that we, as adults, think that it should be shaped. And that’s not the right thing. That’s actually working against the very function of this early period of exploration and learning.