Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.
What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.
What makes knowledge automatic is what gets you to Carnegie Hall - practice, practice, practice.
The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct.
Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.
The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.
What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.
Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.
Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.
The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.
I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.
Historically, absolute IQ scores have risen substantially as we've changed our environment so that more people go to school longer.
Our babies are like penguins; penguin babies can't exist unless more than one person is taking care of them. They just can't keep going.
Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.
Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.
Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It's just they are equally interested in exploring both.
Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise.
Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults.
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.
The real excitement is collaborating with computer scientists and neuroscientists and starting to understand in detail how children learn so much so quickly.
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.
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.
We say that children are bad at paying attention, but we really mean that they're bad at not paying attention - they easily get distracted by anything interesting.
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.
Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral achievements.
We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously and effortlessly.
Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.
Being a developmental psychologist didn't make me any better at dealing with my own children, no. I muddled through, and, believe me, fretted and worried with the best of them.
We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness - better to be a spirit in Heaven than a zombie on Earth.
Siblings are the guarantors that the private childhood world - so unlike the adult world that scientists are only just beginning to understand it - is a fully shared and objective one.
We know what makes babies smart and happy and thrive. It's having human beings who are dedicated to caring for them - human beings who are well supported, not stressed out and not poor.
Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.
If parents are the fixed stars in the child's universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.
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.
Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.
One of the things I say is, 'You want to know what it's like to be a baby? It's like being in love for the first time in Paris after four double espressos.' And boy, you are alive and conscious.
One of the things I say is from an evolutionary point of view: probably the ideal rich environment for a baby includes more mud, livestock, and relatives than most of us could tolerate nowadays.
Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.
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.
The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.
Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way. The human mind can change radically in just a few generations.
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.
Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.
Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be.
Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.
The brain knows the real secret of seduction, more effective than even music and martinis. Just keep whispering, 'Gee, you are really special' to that sack of water and protein that is a body, and you can get it to do practically anything.
From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.
A theory not only explains the world we see, it lets us imagine other worlds, and, even more significantly, lets us act to create those worlds. Developing everyday theories, like scientific theories, has allowed human beings to change the world.