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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.
Brain
Gardener
Giving
Bush
Much
Shape
Way
Connections
Pruned
Would
Plant
Prune
Shapes
Prunes
Weak
Ineffective
Tree
Desired
More quotes by Alison Gopnik
The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
Alison Gopnik
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.
Alison Gopnik
Caring for children has always been one of the deepest and most satisfying things that a human being does, and yet it is hard to keep a healthy attitude toward it in our competitive, outcome-oriented society.
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
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
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?
Alison Gopnik
Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
Alison Gopnik
Owning our past allows us to own our future.
Alison Gopnik
What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.
Alison Gopnik
Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.
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
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
Preschool kids learn best when exploring, but kids in school learn best when they do things, interacting with a master. Unfortunately, our schools don't do much of either. Also, kids do need to learn how to deal with technology, and online education and otherwise using electronic devices as learning tools facilitates that.
Alison Gopnik
I'm culturally Jewish but, like most scientists, an atheist: I don't believe there's a God or supernatural world. Buddhism offers guidance on what to do in a world without God: It opines that truly being present in the world‚ experiencing and hanging out with your loved ones, provides all the significance you could want.
Alison Gopnik
We don't wife our husbands and we don't child our parents.
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
There is a tension between our desire to get our kids to turn out a particular way versus letting them develop to be their own person. If there were a pill that would make my child turn out the way I wanted, I'm not sure I'd take it.
Alison Gopnik
Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific - this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.
Alison Gopnik
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.
Alison Gopnik
We know that kids who grow up in an environment of warmth and support will thrive and function in whatever environment they find themselves. What we need to do is to do more to help poor kids have such an environment.
Alison Gopnik