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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.
Weak
Ineffective
Tree
Desired
Brain
Gardener
Giving
Bush
Much
Shape
Way
Connections
Pruned
Would
Plant
Prune
Shapes
Prunes

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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.
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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.
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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.
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Being a grandmother is a wonderful thing, so my advice is skip the children. Go straight to the grandchildren.
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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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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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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.
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I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.
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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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Caring, whether for children or the dying, shouldn't be instrumental. It should be an intrinsic, moral good.
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Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
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The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.
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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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Owning our past allows us to own our future.
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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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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.
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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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You read a bunch of books and you get a bunch of how-tos, and you take a bunch of classes and you learn a bunch of techniques. You set yourself goals and benchmarks. I think people have imported that into their experience of taking care of children.
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We don't wife our husbands and we don't child our parents.
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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.
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