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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.

Alison Gopnik

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Alison Gopnik
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: June 16
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
A. Gopnik
A Gopnik
Gopnik
Gopnik A
Gopnik A.
Thinking
Groups
Highly
Ways
Dogs
Animal
Shouldn
Chimps
Used
Group
Crows
Together
Animals
Lump
Different
Dog
Lumps
Way
Intelligent
Crow
Think
Certainly
Sophisticated

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The more obsessively we focus on what a particular food is going to do for us, the less healthy we've become. Simple pleasures become complicated.
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If parents are the fixed stars in the childs universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.
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Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: how should this society work? How should relationships among people work? The exploration is: who am I, what am I doing?
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One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.
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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.
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To support the people we care about is intrinsic, it is not instrumental. It's not something we do because we're hoping to get some other outcome.
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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.
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The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.
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Adults tend to think they have much free will. Kids younger than six are less sure. They may be more realistic!
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It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.
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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.
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If you just got enough expertise and enough special techniques and read up enough, then you could shape a child into the kind of adult you wanted. There's almost this kind of competitive enterprise. That picture is the picture I think people often imply when they use the word parenting.
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What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.
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The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
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