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Ineffective or weak brain connections are pruned in much the same way a gardener would prune a tree or bush, giving the plant a desired shape.
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.
Giving
Bush
Much
Shape
Way
Connections
Pruned
Would
Plant
Prune
Shapes
Prunes
Weak
Ineffective
Tree
Desired
Brain
Gardener
More quotes by Alison Gopnik
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.
Alison Gopnik
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.
Alison Gopnik
Caring, whether for children or the dying, shouldn't be instrumental. It should be an intrinsic, moral good.
Alison Gopnik
The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
Alison Gopnik
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.
Alison Gopnik
On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.
Alison Gopnik
Instead of just saying, I love my baby and I pick him up because he's adorable and it's so nice to cuddle with him, we practice attachment parenting. We let our children play outside and have age-appropriate freedoms and are labeled free-range parents.
Alison Gopnik
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.
Alison Gopnik
Adults tend to think they have much free will. Kids younger than six are less sure. They may be more realistic!
Alison Gopnik
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.
Alison Gopnik
Some people say that parents don't matter, and that's not true at all. The irony is that we pay attention to all these things that don't matter, and not to what does matter, such as parents having enough resources to provide an environment where their children have both security and freedom.
Alison Gopnik
One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.
Alison Gopnik
Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.
Alison Gopnik
We don't measure the quality of our other relationships by how well the other person turns out, for instance whether my husband is a better person after 10 years than he was when I first met him.
Alison Gopnik
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.
Alison Gopnik
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.
Alison Gopnik
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.
Alison Gopnik
It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.
Alison Gopnik
We provide a secure, stable space for children to grow up in, so children will be able to take risks and have adventures and do things that are unexpected. If there isn't a risk that your children can fail, then you haven't succeeded as a parent.
Alison Gopnik
Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
Alison Gopnik