The Mind of a Child

00:00:00 words whether it meets your expectations or exceeds them or doesn't meet them at all we really want to know about it so I'll be coming around I'm Rob penzer I'm the associate director of the Helix center before I get to the introductions today I just have a few announcements of upcoming roundtables uh next Saturday April 25th

00:00:31 another John Templeton founded Round Table the changing nature of Free Will with philosopher ail bil gramy Economist L cabal Theologian Bridget K neuroscientist Kenneth kashida and mathematician Simon Koken then Saturday May 2nd trauma and its After Effects part one war and genocide with historian Adam Sachs multimedia director and publicist gried Vagner psychoanalyst Eva veale and journalist Phil

00:01:03 zisy then on Saturday May 16th humans and animals continuities and discontinuities with mindbody investigator Theodore Diamond Jr animal cognitive scientists Irene pepperberg and Diana Ree and still others I want to let you know about the Helix Center annual benefit dinner which will take place Friday evening May 8th information and ticket purchases are available website www Helix center.org and we encourage you to follow us on Facebook

00:01:34 and uh tweet on Twitter if uh if you're so dis disposed okay now on to today's group uh when I uh mention your name please raise your hand so the audience uh will recognize you Patricia Bower is Asa Griggs kendler professor of psychology at emmer University where she also serves as senior associate Dean for research at its College of artarts and Sciences her research on autobiographical memory and its development and in particular the phenomenon of infantile or childhood

00:02:06 Amnesia is the subject of her book remembering the Time of Our Lives memory and infancy and Beyond as well as author of numerous empirical articles throughout her career her work has been funded by the Unis Kennedy Shriver National Institute of child health and human development she also currently directs an NIH predoctoral training Grant on mechanisms of learning across development and species Paul Harris is the Victor s Thomas professor of education at Harvard University his research is in the development of cognition emotion and Imagination

00:02:38 reflected in his past books children and emotion and the work of the IM his most recent book trusting what you're told how children learn from others which received an Elanor mcabe award from the American Psychological Association and the book award of the cognitive development Society describes his current studies of how children learn about history science and religion on the basis of what trusted informants tell them Regina p is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice with a special interest in parents and couples she has studied

00:03:10 and written about Neuroscience for mental health professionals and the lay public in 2008 she founded the center for reflective parenting whose mission is to promote healthy child development by strength bonds that children have with all those who care for them through an emphasis on reflective thinking the current focus of her writing is reflective parenting in relationship to Child Development brain development and the parent child relationship Colin Phillips is professor and distinguished scholar teacher in the department of linguistics at the University of

00:03:41 Maryland where he directs the language Science Center and is a of the neuroscience and cognitive Science Program he investigates the mental and neuro coding of language children's effortless acquisition of language and linguistic Illusions his research has investigated 15 languages and he directs Lang excuse me landscape an online portal for language diversity that combines interactive mapping with diverse resources for 6,400 languages he is also an Evangel science a broadly

00:04:11 inter interdisiplinary field that connects fundamental science with applications in education technology and health Steven J wine is associate Dean for child analysis training and supervising analyst and supervisor for Child and Adolescent analysis at the New York psychoanalytic society and Institute in addition to his Devotion to clinical practice research and teaching he is a member of the center for advanced psychoanalytic studies with the late Sydney blat he co-authored the assessment of qualitative and structural dimensions of object relations the

00:04:42 object relations inventory uh he participated for 20 years in a multi-disciplinary study group on learning disabilities in 2008 the New York psychoanalytic presented him with the Charles brener teaching award for outstanding contributions to psychoanalytic education Paul zalinsky is a children's book illustrator and writer a winner of numerous Awards including the calicott medal for his retelling of Rapunzel and three cot honors for Hansen gredle for rumble stillin and for swamp Angel his Styles

00:05:13 range from Renaissance inspired oil paintings for his fairy tales to more cartoonish drawings of the recent Z is for moose certain of his books particularly the wheels on the bus one of my son's all-time favorites by the way communicate strikingly well with learning disabled or autistic children he holds an MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art and a ba from yel college where he was in the first class that Murray Sendak ever taught he sits on the board of the Society of children's book writers and illustrators co-chairs the children's and young adult Committee of Penn American Center and

00:05:44 volunteers with other organizations that promote books and Literacy for children and now on to our panel well I'm particular particularly glad to be here today on my own turf I guess I'm the only one who's used to this building and this organization but many years ago Paul and I met um we were classmates in college although we didn't know each other in college but I

00:06:15 knew his name because my children grew up on the wheels of the bus and Rumple s skin and they came to the reunion and after Paul and I started talking in the Peabody Museum where all the dinosaurs were I asked my kids if they would like to meet meet him because I figured they'd be so excited about the books and actually meeting the man who had done the illustration and my daughter was in fact very excited because she said she had never met a living author before uh that might be one illustration of the difference between children and

00:06:46 adults Minds well I I didn't grow up wanting to be a children's book uh maker because because I had the same same point of view I didn't really know that living people did them and I had books that were very important to me but I kind of assumed they were made by dead people it's largely true I guess increasingly well I don't know if who should just join in but I am stimulated

00:07:19 to think about um in I've I've always been fascinated with why children are so fixated on stories I used to tell my kids stories and I could do I could take 9-hour car trips with them as long as I kept up the story and so fast forward now that I'm studying about the Neuroscience of the brain I'm writing a book on reflective parenting for so in my research I came up there's a lot of research on the importance of Storytelling stories

00:07:50 telling stories reading stories talking about stories discussing stories in terms of the development of reflective thinking in the mind and that children learn a lot from their encounter with stories and even part of their imaginative play is involved in making sense of how the mind works and other people particularly other people's minds you know we all have privy to our own minds but it's other people's minds that are Troublesome and uh stories and telling stories seems to be a really important

00:08:22 component of child development for that reason is that different from from adult be patterns the importance of stories you know stories seem to be the way advertising agencies glom on to people's you know wish to buy things every everything it gets better when it's attached to it it is it is I think we're all drawn to stories because we can personally relate but theoretically a person an adult's mind should be developed by now and the child's mind is actually developing in

00:08:54 relationship and how they will discuss stories and what the points are that you're that they're able to comprehend will be different it's just a developing but there there was a neat study published a couple of years ago I think it was done here in New York and they got the adult subjects to read fiction and after this brief dose of fiction they tested them on various psychological insights and the people who'd read fiction I mean George Elliot as opposed

00:09:25 to John Grisham say did better on these psychological Insight so even adults have room to to grow under these circumstances and certainly one of the most important functions of stories are stories about ourselves and about our families and about the people in our families and it's through those stories largely that children come to establish that sense of self that sense of self as as separate from but related to others in the family and those those stories

00:09:57 form the core of our autobiographical or personal memories that obviously are very important to us and that we hold most dear so Patricia can I ask you a bit more about that because you've done so much research on infantile Amnesia and the sort of recovery from it so to speak recovery from it actually I refer to thank you I refer to it as the um the onset of childhood Amnesia we often think about childhood Amnesia that as adults we have difficulty remembering

00:10:27 the early years of Our Lives and often that's talked about as the as we when we start to have autobiographical memories as the offset of childhood Amnesia I actually think conceptualized the other way that it's the offset when we begin to retain those stories we're always or th those stories those events those memories we're always forming them even infants we were talking about your 10-month-old grandchild your 10-month-old grandchild is forming memories um and retaining them for in

00:11:00 short periods of time um and it's as we become able to retain those memories over longer periods of time that we see the offset um of that childhood or excuse me the onset of that childhood Amnesia um and that's one of the um centers of study in autobiographical memories why that even though children are forming memories that we as adults have difficulty retaining them uh it's one of the great mysteries of in the memory research literature so can we

00:11:31 probe the mystery absolutely um I I suppose if we look back at the last 20 years of research on infants um there's been dramatic evidence of how smart toddlers are I mean 9month olds 12-month olds you give them a social scene they can work in kind to whom who's been nasty to whom and they prefer the person who's kind and so forth so in some sense they have all the intellectual or cognitive equipment to lay down a little narrative

00:12:03 in their in their growing brain so that makes it all the more mysterious that in fact virtually none of us have memories from our first of life or even our second year of life right there's growing evidence that a what we what a the this Amnesia is accelerated forget so as you say very are forming memories they're able to uh create a representational trace they're able to

00:12:35 use the same brain structures that we as adults use to form those memories but the immediate experience cognitive work has to be done to turn an immediate experience into an enduring memory trace and the neural structures that are responsible for that transformation are very slow to develop and I talk about this um kind of a leaky Civ um that as infants certainly they're forming memories but a lot of the information

00:13:08 that makes up a memory representation kind of leaks out and it leaks out more rapidly than it does for adults and there's actually um the there's a growing body of literature demonstrating that it forgetting that we think is therefore accounting for the loss of those memories that are formed and are held on and retained for some period of time but then ultimately become the victim they

00:13:38 fall victim to theia so what is it that ultimately clogs that c and makes sure the that the holes get about this as the colander memory that um if you have lasagna noodles and you have a colander with big holes in it and you dump your lasagna noodles in the water rushes out but the lasagna noodles stay in but memories aren't like lasagna noodles they're like orzo those little tiny bits of pasta um and if you're going to make

00:14:09 orzo and successfully hold on to it you can't pour it into a colander with big holes you have to pour it into one of those fine mesh Nets um and what happens over the course of the development is that with neural U neural changes we trade in essentially our holy colanders for Nets hold the so the way the way you're saying it there it's it's suggesting that it's the container that is changing over time but

00:14:41 is it that the Oro is changing over time the way I cook it it gets more sticky and it doesn't go through there you go I I actually think we're developing cheese sauce or something of that nature so you know the the elements of Oro it's we infants are encoding the same bits and pieces of information maybe not as many as a lab orated and they don't have as much of the sticky stuff to hold it together this I wonder if this goes back to the point about the stories yes is indeed normally as as adults we're good at making a story out of our experiences

00:15:12 we can connect all of the different things going on life isn't as inherently structured as story gives you is something which has the narrative made more explicitly and it has all those connections built in at an is it the at the earli stage is it the case that the piece of the memories are there but because it lacks the connections between them because it lacks The Narrative that means that the individual pieces are more fragile and I think that's we have beautiful data to speak to exactly that that the more coherent that story is the longer that

00:15:46 memory tends to live on uh and less coherent memories that aren't where very well connected to each other those are the ones that fall prey to forgetting particularly rapidly and and particularly they're particularly vulnerable to that kind of forgetting so the the the story is the cheese sauce the story is the starch um in the pasta grains and that really does play a very critical role in maintenance of those events and stories of language though so I mean by

00:16:18 the time the child is 2 two and a half they're starting to tell these little stories which is a kind of rehearsal which is a kind of strengthening right yes umen can certainly speak to that in terms of development yes the children have you know they can tell you who did what to whom uh but that kind of reflection on the significance or the importance of that experience so the fact that you know this actor a did something to actor be can be encoded in a very Elemental way or it can be

00:16:49 encoded with respect to how that impacted you as an individual and the impact it had on um on the actors and and the meaning that that has for the child's life and I think that that's what's critically missing in many respects um in very young children right children are quite PR in their development of the form of language but in understanding the uses that we put it to that tends to be much more delayed so they will say things that we we meaning into than they may do themselves um you

00:17:22 know I think also there's a big part of this that has to do with learning or memory for what what's the purpose and the purpose of the infant if I could put it that way is to learn how to attach to that person who's going to be the reliable source of safety Comfort soothing not just food but the whole emotional social interaction it's the very first purpose I say of what's going on comes into the world really skilled at knowing how to

00:17:55 do that as long as there's an environment that engages the child in that way right so what you need to know and keep in memory is really only ultimately what's relevant to your life and what isn't so relevant should be forgotten I call it forgettery there's memory and forgettery and you need to forget it's a good thing to forget what's not relevant and because the brain while it can hold on to millions of pieces of information

00:18:26 billions of pieces of information it's still a lied place and particularly conscious memory how do we though at the moment it's only sometimes in reflection um in in thinking back that you see the relevance well that that's actually was yes exactly that's a really good point we don't know in the beginning what's relevant which is children are much at least my understanding of it is children are much more good at learning kind of generalities and later on they learn

00:18:58 more specifics and so they need to hold on to those generalities to see what's going apply in a specific situation and you don't know you have to be open-ended and there's many potential specific fairly quickly after all by the time they're 10 or 11 months they're attached to a particular person 10 or 11 months you're talking about so you talking about up until that point they're more into generalities yes and I think in general it takes a long time

00:19:30 for a child to learn you know there's a there's the furry animal you know first they learn furry animal before they learn Kitty sheep bunny that's what I mean and that there are categories of experience that apply in a very general way which is I think one of the things children are kind of learning and playing with um so they can say open-ended yeah but one thing we know is that memories are not necessarily accurate that's true and that memories

00:20:02 change as they're needed or not needed so clinically if we can get one story from a child about and told with great detail and specificity excuse me specificity about an event when we talk to the parents they say it actually didn't happen that way and one of most Freud's most moving and I think important papers was on screen memories I don't know if you're familiar with that which is the the of a childhood event which has a

00:20:32 very specific quality of being very very clear and often the person who's remembering this doesn't remember seeing it through his own eyes but remembers observing it as though he were watching something else happen and what makes the paper so moving is he talks about his own memory of an important event in childhood and what it what it means for his adult experience um but I think clinically we see this all the time with kids I think part of what they remember

00:21:03 is what's useful in explaining something right now um I made a mistake I was mistreated um I didn't get something that other kids got and might not have happened but it's remembered with absolute Clarity I think that one of the things that we find challenging is finding the expert who actually does really remember the event um and in our longit itudinal studies with children we also involve typically their mothers um because their

00:21:34 mothers are bringing them into the laboratory each time and are willing to participate as a longitudinal participant and one of the things that's very striking is that is the fragility of adults memories as well so sometimes I think we overestimate the extent to which the adult has the right answer or the right perspective on the event and sometimes it's the the child who me may be more of a rical I was going to ask what is it you really mean by

00:22:05 memory I as the question because is it a kind limited entity or is it something that a to experience is expressed in variety of ways not just I I think your mic phone isn't is not on mine certainly is you'll understand Point well that's that's a a beautiful question what do we mean by a

00:22:37 memory and what do we mean by an event um my weekend trip to New York to participate in this wonderful discussion um is the event picking up this bottle and taking a drink out of it right um you know to what extent where we parse the events is also something that is we know very little actually about how we parse events and what's the beginning the middle of an end of an event and again as you sometimes reflect back it's

00:23:07 it's the beginning of that relationship uh you know here I encounter on the Subway or something you right but that it turns out that that was the beginning of of of a and we don't always know well with children that is a key part of what develops their mind those experiences those events or what is helping develop the mind of that particular child absolutely it must be it can't be just limited entities that we can bring out

00:23:39 of them well I think the thing that is important is we know I mean even adults talk about memory of an event as if an event happened or there was a specific event or that everybody would see the event in the same way and one of the signs of maturity and we're going to talk about children I mean one of the I like to think of it this way one of the purposes of childhood is to learn how to become an adult and so as an adult probably the greatest sign of maturity

00:24:11 of the adult mind is the capacity to realize everything is perspectival I like to say beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so is everything else that everything is perspective and the capacity to realize that your perspective is really only one perspective and there's always somebody else's perspective I mean in this panel we could take the same water bottle I'm sure and have you know whatever number of people there are here different perspective or even the whole this is

00:24:41 one of the things we're really teaching children aren't we is about mind a theory of mind thank you yes I want I I just feel like telling this the thing about a memory that I had myself um that was sort of like Freud's screen memory I guess that I I was uh uh I was read reading a Babar book to my then very young daughter and uh came to a page it was a page with a monkeyville where all the monkeys were climbing rope ladders and

00:25:11 living little houses in the trees and I suddenly remembered this same page from when I was very young it's not a memory that I remember going over and over again it wasn't part of my life it wasn't really an important thing but I suddenly was seeing this thing that I had seen as a kid and boy was it different I was seeing almost a double exposure of two different pictures on the same page I was really very disappointed with the the current

00:25:43 one there was so much detail and imagery in the other one so um you know the the memory even memory of an image I it's a creative act it must have been important to you in some way you didn't realize thing wasn't wasn't so great but to just take an ordinary example that everyone has been through a kid will say he was screamed at by a teacher yes and he still hears the reverberating screaming if you actually

00:26:14 hang around the school I mean the teacher won't tell the truth obviously so you can't ask but if there's somebody else who happened to have been in the room they can say the teacher was angry but wasn't screaming or when it happens in your own house house we all know as parents we never scream but uh kids what kids remember is screaming they remember horrible violence where there was none um and I think this has to do with their conscience it's not necessarily A C about cognitive structure it's that in

00:26:46 ear in what we call Early latency from say 7 to 10 years old kids have a very primitive conscience they they're very afraid of doing something wrong and getting hurt and being in trouble trouble and they perceive the world so that every time they do something wrong you know mom's going to kill me now and on some level they actually mean kill yeah and they might remember it that way and remember that for the rest of their lives so we have to be very suspicious of reports that we

00:27:17 get of course this is true with adults as well but it's more true in different ways at different phases of child development that the what preoccupies a kid at a certain certain stage in life is going to influence what he or she actually experiences we all know that if we're in a terrible mood if something horrible just happened to us receive what someone else said um but it's much more true in kids because they have so much less uh structure what about the reverse I have

00:27:50 a lot of who have the opposite happened where they're very upset about what happened to the kid in school you know wasn't fair what the teacher did and you and you the kids vantage point they don't care about it so much it wasn't so bad I assume you have that where the parent is more anxious in a sense than even the child is is that K said it happens all the time yeah not a big deal yeah yeah yeah exactly not a big deal you could also argue though that as we get older we gain these

00:28:21 structures and if anything um those structures render us adults to distort distorting incoming information or at the very least um I don't think we're in some sense moving toward a steady state of objectivity so you could imagine for example the same people listening to the same speech but they have different political perspectives I'm pretty sure they will have different memories of the speech

00:28:52 whereas if we would took younger children who were less politically biased they would probably be more UniFi form so I don't think it's you disagree go ahead I I think you never get to a stage of objectivity there's no such thing right but I think kids are more limited because they have more limited Minds well I'm saying are the richness of our intellectual abilities can be seen as an advantage but it can as a handicap because it it it leads us to assimilate

00:29:25 distort and reconstruct in ways that a child will be incapable of So to that extent um I I wouldn't I wouldn't celebrate adulthood for for greater objectivity far from it I give me a child anytime in terms of objectivity well one I mean I I you you probably know more about this than I do about language but one I had been in this very large interdisciplinary group that met every week in my office for

00:29:55 about 20 years a group of like people like this group talked about stuff like this and there was a linguist there they were telling me was that one of the reasons that children can learn language so much better than adults is because their minds are different and kids are really into what's you know where's Waldo basically um children tuned into what doesn't fit what's different because their brains are constantly preoccupied

00:30:25 with regularities that's why they like to repeat things over and over and over over again they're very tuned into to what's different and they're more likely to be able to walk into a room and notice that something is different and I think that may have something to do with why they may be more accurate we've had so many experiences that our brains fill in things that they haven't had those experiences so we are less accurate often because our minds just fill in we

00:30:55 scan the room and we don't pay that much attention and if uh you know we might not see that you know your wife had a new haircut or whatever um whereas a child will hone in on it because that's what that's what Temple gron talks about autistic people and animals having yes yes yes yes yes yes well that I think that that's something to keep in mind is it's that's probably as much an individual difference as it is a developmental one there's actually a reasonably large body

00:31:26 of literature on children's memory for the atypical action or for something that in a room or have order um as usual and they're they they are quite able to detect those aberant or those discrepant um events and experiences so it may be that um that bringing up uh um Temple as a is is a very good example that it is probably as much an individual difference as it is a developmental one

00:31:57 might we also be talking about the discrepancies between the cognitive capacities and the interpretations that either the adult or Childs based on emotion oh can you so can you repeat that just saying that you know perhaps we're talking about the difference between the cognitive dimensions and the emotional ones in terms of the child's perceptual abilities but what interpretations the child into that

00:32:28 based on their so it's back to the story back to the story yes yes indeed I think what BR is saying CES to your point where you say you prefer the child's but the child's interpretation at the age of two of something the the child's interpretation of something may have no relationship to the actual occurrence so when when you say you will

00:32:58 trust that more I'm not sure yeah I me you say this from your point of view of course yeah of course I'm being slightly provocative but um just slightly must but it it does seem to me I I would still like to defend the point that we shouldn't assume that there's a steady progress toward objectivity even if we never meet it or get there I would say there may a steady progress away from

00:33:29 objectivity as we as we gradually erect these elaborate ideologies and which which through which we filter what people are telling us I think we we see this when we're looking across cultures so as adults when we're encountering situations from another culture it's very hard for us to interpret it in the way that people steeped in that culture will interpret it that's something we see all the time even within you know slightly different cultures that speak nominally the same language you'll have

00:34:00 the same expression will be un taken to mean different things by different people and it's very hard to overcome that and so consistent with what Paul's saying children are less Bound by that but they may not be able to make they're probably missing an awful lot that adults are putting in in different ways but the reason they're missing an awful lot is they don't understand a lot you know anyone who's studying cognitive development in children comes up with the same findings that there's a steady

00:34:33 change from uh fantasy understanding of the world where there's no cause and effect there's no sense of time and the world revolves around me to beginning to understand that there's a difference between wishing something is going to happen and having it happen having a thought versus acting and fantasy you no I think what what you see in C development these days is when you're looking at all the different individual pieces yeah the the evidence that all of

00:35:04 those pieces are there you can see that very very early and children are quite precocious but the hard thing is putting them together into this narrative to from a much more complex situations what are the different motives going on what what are the different agents doing the different the different pieces are all there very early that's that's my read of but what about the phenomenon that children will insist that something thing is true because they want it to be true and it can't be you know which we we don't consider kids who say that to

00:35:34 be Liars you know lying you can only lie if you know the difference between what's true and what isn't so at that point we say the child said something that isn't true or the child took something that didn't belong to him they have to be older before we can say the kid is a liar and a thief right and I I don't quite know how to concep iiz this but um and I don't I don't know how to sum up but as Colin is saying all of the the laboratory

00:36:06 research the empirical literature on infant development um is really quite of one voice that children have what will be referred to as or infants have what will be referred to as a very sophisticated understanding of causality know that in order for this to cause this to move they have to actually make contact with one another and if this just comes and stops and then this starts on its own that's not a cause so they they have these understandings uh

00:36:37 Paul referred earlier to the the the perception of the helper versus the Hinderer um in small in these these um Elemental visual events that are staged for infants so there's something between that infant perception and the child Declaration of how they're using those bits and pieces of information but the basic cognitive elements the basic raw materials are there are evident very

00:37:09 early in infancy and whether it's the together or the contextualization of them in the real world complicated interactions that people have both but I I I think it's based on the empirical literature I don't think it's um the best characterization to say that it's lacking it's there in some form but what's your understanding about why it can't be used until later with it that's that's the really hard thing

00:37:42 so there's there's a a very clear contrast so take famous findings about children's difficulties in reasoning about false beliefs for example yeah it's very robust and very clear that even through age four you're going to have trouble with that and that's as true as it ever was what makes it all the more interesting is that now you can demonstrate that is it was it 8mon old 12 month it's all in the first year yeah some late in the first year of life you can show that there are key elements of that place that doesn't

00:38:12 change the fact that the four-year-olds are still as hapless as they ever were right and so it's something about putting that into use which and in more complex situations which is the real challenge well I think that's true throughout develop it's not just in infancy I mean you see teenagers you can measure teenagers reflective function and it's as high as adult just they can't use it or they choose not to they choose not to but but they're but and it's

00:38:43 considered to be somewhat related to brain connectivity because the brain does until we're in our mid 20s and so having a capacity and being able to use it in the appropriate context um is different and I think maybe that's a little bit like what you're what you're talking about absolutely yeah and that's why kids need so much scaffolding because the parent provides help with the context of how and when to use whatever those skills are that they

00:39:15 right being able to rec that that this is a situation where rule one applies and then being able to execute rule one both of those are important steps that kids aren't always taking children's books there's for as long as there's been kind of an industry of children's books there's been a controversy with with one side saying children should be exposed to the real world and things that are you know like their life and other side saying there should be fantasy and beautiful wonderful things and there are these two uh um arguments

00:39:46 that don't ever you know have a meeting point but uh you know I saw a quote that eie white who wrote um this was I think about when he wrote um Stuart Little about little mouse who was born to human parents on 14th Street and uh and he said something like uh Little Children uh jump over the fence that separates uh reality from Make Believe like little spring box he said a the the fence that will throw a librarian is has nothing to

00:40:17 nothing to that's a great that's that's that's lovely well I'm sympathetic with stevenh though because this in reality is what you see in kids and whatever the discrepancy is between the research and the actuality because this is really so much a part of what well certainly analysts are teaching kids when who have real troubles with this but I mean obviously this is also the role of the parent is to help the child make those distinctions and to well one of the

00:40:48 things we talk about is the difference between hot cognition and cold cognition um so hot cognition is in the moment when your sibling is stealing your soy or or or you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar you got caught lying right and and that that we may be we may reason differently in that kind of a hot situation than we do in the laboratory where everything else every other possible source of variance is is taken

00:41:18 out the the room is draped in a black cloth so that the infant won't be turning her over here looking at the stimulus right the sound is controlled everything is controlled and so part of it is that embeddedness in this Rich World in which we live and the complications that arise when you're not the only actor when there are other actors and each one of them is contributing something um and I think it makes it that that alone makes it more challenging to bring out those pure

00:41:49 rules know or that reasoning right so that in that way those types of experiments they're like stories So Stories stories strip away a lot of the irrelevant stuff what makes mystery movies hard is that they deliberately throw in lots of irrelevant stuff to throw you off and life is more like that um and and an experiment with a very young child like a story is something that pulls out all the distracting stuff MH absolutely can I ask a a broader

00:42:21 question the two uh psychiatrist psychoanalysts so um I mean if I look back over the last 20 or 30 years in developmental psychology and to some extent developmental psycholinguistics you see a a an increasing acknowledgment as we've been saying of the the really competent uh the competence of the infant whether it's with respect to the understanding of cause and effect or social relationships or even good and evil um

00:42:53 and so the the sort of classic picture of the child are being egocentric confused about fantasy and reality U and only in the course of the preschool years conquering that naivity I mean I think we've moved away from that somewhat negative portrait now having said that there are all these complications about well how to reconcile child's Behavior under these circumstances with the child's Behavior under these other

00:43:24 circumstances but okay but nevertheless there's been a pretty big Revolution and we're much more we're dazzled by what Young infants and preschoolers can do are you saying to me that in psychoanalysis or in psychiatric Theory nothing much has changed you still you still assume that there are these deep irrationalities these deep naivi these deep Tendencies to deny

00:43:54 reality well I would say this is back to the question of why is there such a difference between what's found in basic research and what we experience in real life and in clinical work we deal with the kids the way they present themselves we don't have the opportunity to study their capacities so for example if there's a study that shows that teenagers have the same reason as adults do nobody would want to live in a world run by teenagers right because something else gets in the

00:44:24 way I don't run by adults let alone te that's hard enough and it's it's an idealized version of adults because most adults don't function on that level either but there are other there are other issues that gradually change right the kind of self-centered impulsiveness and fear of ones um that characterize teenagers softens and changes it might not change 100% but it gets a little better as people get

00:44:55 older and more tired right but we also see in adolescence people committing themselves to all sorts of ideologies extreme political movements we don't see young children doing that well I I actually I think psychoanalysis fortunately has embraced all of this science in fact psychoanalysis I mean you know Ed nessian is the uh you know best one of the best examples of this and that psychoanalysts are embracing Neuroscience child development all these

00:45:27 all these factors in the you know in the environment of real parents helping real kids um you discover that you know children have these just really different ways of thinking about the world and they need help with it they support you know when a child thinks you know the teacher hates him and that the teacher actually really does hate him if that's the child's experience that child actually really needs a supportive environment to help

00:45:59 them see it differently does it change the way in which you react to the children's needs so if if there's a difference between the capacity not being there and the capacity needing some help to right make its way through all the other obstacles does that does that have any impact on what you do to help the children or does it in the end not make a difference it's a good question I I haven't I haven't had that question before so but I would hope it would I would hope it would I mean you know we now know that children are have this incredible capacity for

00:46:32 empathy even you know we was something we didn't think about before and so I do think it has influenced um how we raise children uh understand that what what the discussion is going in the direction of that in a way we've been underestimating how much kid kids children little children infants uh I don't know if the word is understand or are capable of or are

00:47:03 but how much is different in other words what's the other side of that because obviously children are not the same are not thinking the same at the age of two as they will at the age of 12 so what is different what changes or the direction of towards adulthood we could all retire if we knew the answer to that I think um you know

00:47:34 certainly one of the things that's changing this is this is not to say that this is the only thing that's changing right but one of the things that's changing is that children is with development we become experts in more and more areas we learn more content and things that we can't underestimate the extent to which children have in some cases some very maybe Soph sophisticated looking reasoning abilities but they have much less content over which to use and apply

00:48:05 those reasoning abilities they have many fewer experiences they don't have the political indoctrination um and therefore they don't know the way the political beliefs hold together politics maybe is way too way too old but even the politics of the schoolyard they have a they have less understanding of relationships they have less con content over which to apply some of these fundamental cognitive operations and as I said that that's certainly not the only thing that's changing but it is one

00:48:37 of the things and we do see that when children are experts in a domain their reasoning looks more adultlike um than when they are the novice in the domain and that's even when the adult may be the novice and the child is the expert and what you'll see is in that particular domain that children actually can outperform the adults you take them out of that and they look just like a kid again but within that expertise they're able to use some of these um higher

00:49:11 level higher order cognitive processes the other thing is executive function I would imagine would have to play some role in this that you know you can have an ability but if you can't control your impulses enough to be able to display that ability then right I would assume that has some so I I think maybe you are correcting a misconception of mine I took my grandson number of years ago when he was around 4 years old on the

00:49:43 subway and so we went to the subway and I said we are going to take and he couldn't figure out what's the difference between the subway and the express so if I understand you correctly if I had prior to taking him there explained to him that the subway is a train and it has one level it's local and then you go down and it's Express that if Iain to him he would have understood and would not have asked that question whereas I thought he didn't yet

00:50:15 have the ability to conceptualize the notion that a Subway can be Express or local I think that's a very that's a very good example um and it would we could we could actually do that experiment that would be a you know an easy experiment to do but I think that's exactly right um that we we make a lot of assumptions about what other people in our world know and most of the time we're pretty accurate about that um and it's when we misunderstand what someone

00:50:46 knows that communication becomes very challenging I find actually when you know I I do things for little kids and uh and I also go to school and I talk to them sometimes and uh and my wife is a retired teacher she was for a long time not a retired teacher but a teacher and uh and she would help me out a lot of times on um if I was going to say this or had done something in a book or or with kids and she'd say well you said this but they thought that and and it

00:51:18 was the most difficult and interesting thing for me to learn what was imp what I wasn't thinking through what I was assuming that that kids just didn't have the content knowledge to know about but uh and and that's sort of one of the most difficult things of about or specialize maybe things about being an adult dealing with children is realizing what it is that you should know they don't know how they're going to misinterpret obvious things that you say in some creative way this sort of thing happens all the time so I can give just

00:51:49 one example this is something I happened in at home yesterday um so when there lots of verbs that talk about different things we do um and you know you you can you know hit the table or you can um read a book um and you know eat is also a transitive verb you can say I ate right but when you say I ate it doesn't just mean you ate something right it means you ate something appropriate to a Meal Time

00:52:19 right so yester yesterday my my daughter who's 13 came home from playing with her friends and um my wife said um did you eat yet and she said um predators and I was very impressed with that because what that showed is the understanding that to say yes to that would imply the Declaration that she had eaten an appropriate to a meal and she recognized that pretzels wasn't and in that dialogue you know that showed the kind of sophistication that we normally take for granted but things like that

00:52:51 are buried in everything we do it's a great example did you ask her when she left when she if she took a shower two weeks ago but and it also shows a sophisticated level of reflective thinking because it implies that your your wife understood what she meant by pretzel yeah and that she knew her mother would understand so in that brief

00:53:21 communication they had an amazing amount of understanding of how the other person would perceive what they're doing and that's what makes things so hard for younger children so yes understanding literally what was expressed there wouldn't get you anywhere yes and a lot of the problem that you have with young children is they can in some ways they're very sophisticated in terms of what they know about what are possible things to say but all the additional things that go into understanding the motives of what is said and what is not said that's the sort of thing which

00:53:52 where kids seem not to be that precocious and because good to know that that I think that that helps some of this discrepancy they don't understand the motives they're a lot more literal that comes step by step there are different parts of it you can show again you can show that some of those abilities are there um if you put people in the kids in the appropriate setting but we do this all the time very quickly without even realizing what we're doing and that's where there's huge opportunities of misunderstanding

00:54:22 so a related example of this which is that from time to time when my children's friends have come over I've I've indulged onic remarks since you and I are English we know we are tempted to do this from time to time and uh my younger Sons turned to their friends and said oh you he's just don't worry he's trying to be funny just trying to be ironic so yes but you know the feeling is mutual um I didn't know

00:54:54 what the structure of this round table was going to be so I've been collecting children's jokes for the last few weeks in a in a very scientific way interrupting sessions and making it seem like it was part of the session to say what's your favorite joke and I made a long list of these children at different ages and they're very different and they're very predictable at which ages certain things are very funny and they change over time I'm not going to tell any of them because none of them are funny to an adult but these kids some of the more youthful Among Us May well the idea that

00:55:27 that there could be a premise that there's somebody named hahaa standing next to his friend who whose name is O shut up and another friend saying who cares and a policeman just happens to interview them is not something that I would ever tell at a cocktail I think it's funny there we go yeah uh sure what about language what well what about

00:55:59 it it's it's it's very rich um a lot of things happen very quickly um children have figured out by the by the time they're 12 months of age they've figured out the sound system of their language they they're very good at distinguishing languages they they're acquiring a vocabulary by the time they're age three they' figured out most of the world order properties of the language they have a vocabulary in the hundreds in their age five they're doing they're outperforming technologies that Google and apple have spent billions on

00:56:30 um and yet putting that to use in complex interactive situations that's the thing that's hard so what we find it's it's interesting what often when you look kids who are delayed um the the children's language development seems to be ahead of much to the rest of their cognitive development in the sense that a lot of the things

00:57:00 that count as cognitively sophisticated develop later than things that count as linguistically sophisticated um so you can look at um some populations so um uh rare but um very interesting cases the uh syndrome known as William syndrome right which for a long time they were thought to be severely cognitive impaired precocious um it turns out that's not really true

00:57:31 on closer inspection really there language is more or less consistent with their the rest of their cognitive development in most respects it's just that language development is so accelerated that if you put it in the context of cognitive delay you still look linguistically quite good although going back to what you saying earlier um is it fair to say that even if the grammar and the semantics is Rich

00:58:02 and complicated the pragmatics is yes takes a lot longer to be mastered I think I think that's that's the a clear consensus on what where things are right now is the the things which involve relatively formal routines children have got that quite very well things involving building a large vocabulary things inv involved in building literal interpretations they're great but the pragmatics which play such a role in what we do most of the time that takes a long while because in order to

00:58:34 learn the pragmatics you need an awful lot of other things you can learn a lot about language without being that cognitively developed but to get the rest of it you need the rest of the structure to be in place right so but back to young babies again I've been recently really impressed by some work a lot of it going on again in New York where uh there are two there's there's an infant watching two adults or it could be two cartoon figures but at any

00:59:06 rate um the in merely a spectator and the infant sees this person um for example showing for a particular object in front of her um and uh it it might be Out Of Reach and this person then vocalizes uh uh and the child watches as the other person either responds

00:59:37 appropriately by handing her the object she prefers or responds inappropriately by handing her as it were the wrong object but what's amazing about these studies is that these these 10 11-month-old in seem to grasp that how communication works even at that age so they don't the they don't necessarily have any words themselves um it can be indeed a nonsense word that this speaker utters

01:00:07 so I'm I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about the extent to which so I guess my put it this way my working assumption for a long time children gradually work out what communication is for in so far as they engage in it they dis they discover what what a handy tool it is so to speak but here we see these infants sitting back being a spectator a third party and yet grasping the the cognitive consequences of the you know

01:00:37 the information the the audience has received or the interlocutor received right yeah so I I think this this is another situation where we're seeing that when strips down to the bare minimum the Capa there's a capacity that's there so maybe it's even at the pragmatic level where kids are most delayed the ingredients of that are in place um I think we need to be a little bit cautious about how we interpret some of these findings about the young babies 10 to 12 months of age

01:01:10 because what is generally shown there is there is some degree of sensitivity in this carefully designed task so they're not behaving randomly so there's something there the way that then gets presented is kids can do this right and that's a little bit of an of extens and then as we know from people who are you know dealing with kids in real situations now kids really can't do it and they can't do it for much longer so domain even there some of the things that they need are already in place but making effective use of those tools is

01:01:42 such a knowledge intensive task that it's going to be very hard to do that in Practical situations for a long while after and I think where we what we haven't got to in the science is so much working on how do we take those basic skills and then working work towards scaling them up to other things a lot a lot of the action has been in showing wow kids can do these amazing things a lot of people have built careers on showing kids a Geniuses um and that there was a nice piece in the onion five

01:02:13 or six years ago which headline you know you know news flash baby um and it's it's sort of very informative cuz I mean yes we know that babies are limited but there's you know you're not to get say by the way babies aren't very smart um but how to go how to go from these sort of pieces of uh genius that they have to putting that to use in Practical situation which is where we are now um and that's going to be a long hard and one of the problems

01:02:44 that we have is that tend to be at least in the scientific literature there are people who study infants and there are people who study children and that transition you know as as the the infant becomes a language user as the infant becomes able to direct her own action and to be to locomote independently and all of those accomplishments we we have a dir of information on what happens in the second and third year of Life basically you have the infant studies

01:03:15 where the baby will sit and watch right and then you have the verbal studies where the child can actually be counted upon to listen to an instruction and respond appropriately or not right but at least they can listen to the instruction and make a verbal response and there's that territory in between that is really still not well researched and therein is going to lie some of the answer to this these paradoxes of this early competence and later lack of

01:03:45 performance essentially ask about the nonverbal I mean the baby is mostly non-verbal and so what what influences do you think that plays on the development or how the infant is experiencing the world because I'm thinking about your example and I'm thinking of you know like all the nonverbal cues that would cue into uh what's going on in that

01:04:18 situation the baby only has the non-verbal but we go pretty far in our communication with people with non-verbal so I'm just wondering how much information can be gleaned in that kind of a situation from non-verbal versus verbal and one of the ways that people have come about that attacking that very question is through comparative um research where you ask whether capuchin monkey or whether a Reese's monkey or a chimpanzee or a dog uh the the in in

01:04:51 increasingly we're seeing the literature on um on dogs as comparative subjects and that's one of the favored ways that we go about addressing those questions because there you don't have even that latent capacity for language um that you're considering um and some of these abilities I don't actually don't know if the helper Hinderer has been done with a non-human primate do you know Paul neither me neither yeah I don't know if it's been done um but my my guess is

01:05:23 that people's family pets in some cases might you know be able to solve some of these problems based on exactly you know some of that sensitivity to U where people are looking you know dogs do um joint reference where um if I look at this and then look at you right sharing that reference and people's pets dogs will do will solve that task and that's obviously critical for understanding these kinds of interpersonal situations

01:05:55 of what the person wants or is trying to accomplish um if you don't have that component ability of being able to understand that this is the object for both of us um you're not going to be able to solve that problem so I I actually don't know what the comparative literature says but that's one way that tried to those questions yeah yeah so pursuing that theme then the comparative evidence I think is

01:06:25 certainly setting aside dogs since they're a somewhat special case they you know they they've lived in human society and been selected within Human Society for a long time so if we take chimpanzees I mean one of the differences I think important differences between chimpanzees and human beings is that chimpanzees don't really yeah um and um point I mean in some sense you could argue that pointing is the very first stepping stone to some

01:06:57 ordinary communication among human beings because yeah you can as you were saying use pointing to converge on the same object or to call somebody's attention to something or even sometimes to ask a kind of question I mean you can point to Something in an in an interrogative fashion yeah I think it's the beginning of at least whether the baby has the capacity before pointing or not but at least the first demonstration that the baby shows up that they have some baby points what

01:07:28 sorry just the baby points the baby points the mother points but that they are each pointing about something that's in their mind they have an intention they've seen something and then they have an intention to share what they've seen I mean that's my understanding it's the simplest story it's the simplest story okay it's it's it's organizing The Experience that's around you and saying okay it's about this yes it's about this right and but and I want want you to pay attention to what the aboutness is for

01:07:58 me I mean I think that's the joint The Joint part yeah so there's some fascinating work published recently on cross-cultural variation in pointing so they did a study in China the Netherlands and an amayan community in in South America and um all they did was to ask um the adult to carry the toddler into a room with various interesting things hanging to look at so to speak um and

01:08:30 they looked at the frequency with which the infant pointed to these items or indeed the caregiver pointed to these items and um the most active pointers were the Chinese caregivers followed by the Dutch followed by the Mayans so at I don't know whether these were these were dedicated grandparents with one particular grandchild to focus all their attention on but at any rate they were they were up and running so to

01:09:01 speak uh earlier than than than the Dutch and than the mine group does it correspond to any observable difference in how the children develop well it does so there's good evidence that early pointers build their vocabulary more rapidly so there's a headline there excuse me there's a headline there there yeah the Chinese are ahead of us right point point to your infant oh God or that early vocabulary developers are better pointers or that early vocabul are better pointers although so we'll

01:09:32 know soon because a colleague of ours is is carrying out an intervention study um where she's encouraging mothers to point more and so we'll see whether that has a knock on effect with respect to later language development yeah so little books for very very young children are of uh wordless books are supposed to be for the youngest children which I it just seems to be appropriate to this discussion um you don't get

01:10:04 wordless books for older people very much and yet I mean there is language in the stories they tell I mean maybe these books are designed so that people will you know use language to read the books to children but they do go through them and find thing thing thing and and and also the um very youngest board books that are made for children um they they tend to discourage there being too much story in them and often they're just this thing then this thing then this thing maybe the final thing

01:10:34 has some ironic relation to the rest of them probably so that the parent can have some relief at the end of this of these seven eight things but I just thought maybe that's something to to throw in there interesting yeah can children do they tell the stories without the picture I without words without words yeah well although if this this research on you know spotting helpers and hinderers is correct the is that you could have a

01:11:05 little figure uh pushing somebody up the mountain on one page and uh having a SM you know a smile of on the next page and in some sense the implication is the infant would be understanding it and then youly you could have a a villain who comes along and pushes them both back down again and so anyway these it's it's possible that these Publishers are underestimating the story comprehending

01:11:36 capacities of one-year-olds I don't know we all understand facial expressions from very early don't we yes yes but what we know is that babies differentiate facial expressions it's actually been very difficult to get evidence that they actually understand them um um so from a very young age babies will look preferentially at a happy face as opposed to a frowning face or an angry face um but it's really not

01:12:09 necessarily clear that they understand the implication behind that you're saying that that it may be that it's likely that they don't or that we just can't figure out a way to talk to them so that they can explain it we very clever about asking the questions and I think we still don't know that they really understand the implications of those emotions until they are about 9 months of age there it's very very clear that they're understanding a wary look on an adult's face or a happy smiling face they'll approach things you know a novel object um if I smile at the baby

01:12:43 the baby will come and approach that if I do this and look very afraid the um approach the object or across the room or or this can also be done with other people so if I make a you know an angry face at you or something and there's a baby then she will not befriend you uh whereas if I but at 9 months it's very clear earlier than that it's uh it's much less clear but even this evidence is sort of black and white I mean black and white in the sense that the baby

01:13:14 thinks oh this is a an approachable person or an approachable object or let me stay away so so it's not very differentiated this emotional lexicon right that's true right right of course there are some people who never learned to do that well that's true there and that's there are clinic and they don't recognize facial expressions or they don't know how to interpret them and then verbally how to figure it out and so so that raises an interesting question because if you look

01:13:44 at a lot of emotion research in Psychology it's been hung up on facial expressions in my opinion rather too narrowly so I could imagine a person who did have that that facial problem so to speak but nevertheless um setting had a pretty good conceptual understanding of what particular emotions were like their consequences and so on and so forth or is that not the case that you have to have that decoding ability in order to build up

01:14:14 the conceptual understanding it might be an intellectual understanding but it can't be used in real life and they have to be taught how to use it which is something that going back to over and over again in this discussion that the the capacities can be identified but then the question is why aren't they put to use more naturally there are there are kids and adults who always get it wrong and it's a very dangerous thing if you don't know whether someone's angry at you or whether someone's cheating you right can they pick up pick it up through other cues they have to be

01:14:45 taught it doesn't come naturally but is it that they can they be taught to get it through faces people people try to do it I don't know how successful it is did these Expressions appear on their faces somebody they have facial expressions so but they can't read just can't remember the association even on their own no it's a disability it's it's it's true of many autistic children well this this is where that whole maruron system kind of becomes relevant that we have the system

01:15:17 matching uh we match the particularly facial expressions but we match behaviors and it's and the matching system happens right from birth pretty much where you know when the mother makes a a kind of pursing of her lips the baby will match that and this expands and uh you know to facial expressions but what happens is our own body is connected to our whole body physiology so my facial expression is

01:15:49 just the outward manifestation of some emotion I'm feeling unless I'm de deceiving you and so that body physiology is connected to that facial expression and the Brain seems to be wired to match those facial expressions in others so theoretically at least you're having some physiologic inner experience when you have that facial expression and when my body matches that in you it starts to activate my body physiology and that's how you transmit to me in some way that

01:16:22 you're having that feeling then I know you're having that feeling and it's is the beginning of learning about the connection between the face and the body and the emotion and the feeling and people with we know people with Autism have some kind of impairments in their miror neuron they lack some of that linkage and other disabilities as well and other disabilities it's not just autism but autism is the sort of clearest example of that when my first son was born being a developmental psychologist he was I Within minutes I

01:16:55 tried a little experiment which was to stick out my tongue yeah and he thought about it and but then he did stick out his tongue but then I panicked cuz he wouldn't put his tongue back in again you've broken him psycho analysis would cure it EV did you have any other kids later he eventually did I may say but go I mean going back to your point I'm not I would hesitate to say that we always figure out the meaning of

01:17:30 somebody's facial expression by resonating in some sense to it it seems to me we could also have I mean I I would be tempted to say we we would want to understand that somebody was angry without feeling some minimal anger ourselves our ourselves or or ditto for sadness or or fears and I so let's so here's actually here's some good evidence so we were talking about empathy a moment ago and you do see in

01:18:03 the second year of Life uh toddlers being quite empathic so if even a parent or a sibling is in distress they will sometimes go over and Pat and hug um but you don't necessarily see them showing distress themselves it's as if they recognize what the distress is but it doesn't require some kind of mirror of the distress in order for them to behave appropriately I I think the excitement about this notion of Mur has in some

01:18:33 ways been an impediment because I think one thing that is important is understanding connections between things you're seeing out in the world how that relates to things that you do that's obviously very very important people went crazy with the idea that there are these little cells that solve the problem and and the message that I think we've got through all of this discussion is making all these connections is much more complicated and putting the blame

01:19:04 on just that you know there's there's some you know little tiny piece that suddenly solves that trivializes the problem I I think and probably stands in the way of figuring out all the complicated things you actually have to do to do this successfully um that's the harder part I mean the the notion that you have things that are shared between or speaking and understanding right well we we've known about that for thousands of years that's called words right word is something which is the the link between things you

01:19:34 say and things you understand and what we're talking about in all these other domains is you know you need to understand the connection between things you experience and things you do and it's and it's kind of hard um and it's there's there's not a single single piece solution so if it's okay with you I'll ask the audience for questions [Music] you have to go to I think my voice is loud enough that I won't for record won't record I'm

01:20:14 Sor it's going to turn out not to be worthy of having come up here to use the microphone so I'd better think of something really significant to say now that I'm standing here uh I've been a teacher for 52 years in the same school so students have memories of me that go back more than half a century and I'm often stopped in the deli or on the subway by a student who will say to me I'll never forget the day that you and I stop them and I say before you recall

01:20:45 this memory to me was I crazy that day or did I say something significant only once did a student say I'll never forget the day that you stood me up in front of the class and embarrassed me and that was a student of 52 years ago and she'd been waiting 52 years to see most of the other times I've come out pretty good but I have occasion to to speak to teachers especially graduate students in in schools of education and I tell them you get a group of students in your room

01:21:17 they close the door they let you alone with them for 40 minutes and you are creating memories that can live a lifetime and you will forget those exp but you'll be amazed at how many times you will be reminded of something you said or did that you've forgotten decades ago but have lived on in the memory of somebody else scary the other thing I want to say about um the kid who goes home and says the teacher yelled at me and threw me out of the room when the

01:21:47 teacher reprimanded that student in a mild voice and then just opened the door and said I think you'd better go out because you're disturbing the class isn't it to the students the child's Advantage not so much to remember the experience that way but to relate it with that exaggeration because it then Paints the picture of the student as an innocent victim of a a crazy monster of a teacher and takes the emphasis off what the kid did to I'm the victim of this brutal monster and since I have the

01:22:19 microphone there's one more thing I want to say you talk so much about Amnesia and I wonder if we're living through a different age now because every parent and grandparent has a cell phone which is a highquality video camera and it's constantly recorded recording every second of a child's in my day I'm sure that there are so many people in this room of a certain age who have very few snapshots of themselves as children let alone videos and if the

01:22:51 videos were on 8mm film they were black and white and silent but now everything is being recorded constantly so more than at any time in the history of humanity so does that take the place of the need for memory do you really have to remember anything if anything is if everything is recorded and instantly play back aable right and then when you see it years later it's not so much that you remember being there and doing that and saying that as that you

01:23:23 have concrete proof that it happened because you're watching the recording of it so that's what I have to say I actually thank you so much uh for that I actually think that we are creating a society a probably a world of people who are going to have fewer memories for exactly this reason it's going to be more and more difficult to be able to separate what is your memory what is your internal recollection and your internal representation of that event relative to the thing that you saw

01:23:55 on this disembodied this little rectangle um that you carry around I actually think it's going to have yes I think we're destroying our culture frankly with I you know with all this but but uh I think it's going to be more and more difficult to separate what is my memory from what is an external representation of that event but when people started writing letters couldn't there been similar form of anxiety about the extent to which you know narrating some experience to your family members interfered with the

01:24:27 pristine memory you had had before you started writing the I think Poss the difference there is that that's your output so when I'm writing a letter I'm writing about my own internal representation as opposed to looking at something that is physically separate from me and then there are these actors in it and one of those actors is me I think that's I think it's a different I think it's a different representation and therefore I think it will have different implications but it's a great question I mean the the opportunities to

01:24:58 rewrite what happened are so great when you can manipul when you photoshop I don't remember exactly but I I remember hearing a reading about that exact anxiety when writing came into existence that it would destroy you know Homer you know you would memorize the entire Odyssey uh and now you don't have to anymore and culture will you know crumble and maybe it did but I I do think that that was brought up I think memory has an important emotional

01:25:30 function you know almost every parent who comes to me with a child who's having trouble says I never ever spoke that way to my parents I'm not so sure they didn't and I had occasion a few years ago to see some old home movies of my Early Childhood with my sisters and I think the three of us would things that we saw in that film could never have happened I certainly never treated my sisters the way these fake movies should be

01:26:03 treat interesting that's great thank you very whoops okay thank you very much uh I'm getting back to early childhood education myself at a time where people my age would be retiring so I've been struggling to try to figure out you know how an adult functions you know for a lifetime cuz I was taught to be infantilized you know that's the secret to success but anyway I just like to share first of all I have a little video on YouTube called no

01:26:34 adults Left Behind where I have 5-year-olds who live on 200 street who talk about life with more understanding than adults what makes you happy sad why do people lie cheat and fight but the 5-year-olds answered you know and I asked him if you what was your gift to the world be 5-year-olds were able to say my gift of the world be everybody should share people should help each other be friends get Bel together little girl look very sad everybody should stop fighting so 5-year-olds can manage to put it together it's the emperor new clothes a child is the father of the man things like that also creating a my

01:27:06 educational launch it's called eye openers and mind openers to help kids with attention learning disabilities build their ability to focus and pay attention Naturally by doing vision-based eye exercises so this other thing the developing brain which is still new to you know the father's compulsory education and all of that like for instance Oliver Sachs you know in his book seeing voices it's all about children who are brought up a lot of Def parents have normal hearing children but they learn sign language first which is

01:27:36 a more natural way our ancestors learn sign language before we learn to talk so when children have been developed trained that way he says it's also laying down the neural Pathways with which language it syntax is based in your head and four-year-olds are outperforming high school students in spatial Rel relationship tests so it's the natural way the brain is put together then somebody you know like you know who Alice Miller is right she said emotion attaches meaning to experience the drama of the gifted child without an

01:28:07 emotion nothing means anything so hardly anything was saying that you canot literally create any meaning or sense without adding emotion to the situation and with the I just let and with the vision based work that I'm doing believe it or not in a state of of nature our brains evolve you can't see without moving your eyes so a human brain is capable of being aware of seven streams of awareness simultaneously because ironically when we read and write all our lives we lock up our eyes on static

01:28:38 letters don't move our eyes and we like dumb down our awareness by almost 6 to 700% so seven when you hear some of these things that we're talking about a seven-point awareness and that this Focus on reading and writing because Aran you know had no idea what the brain was capable of doing I mean they cart literally thought the brain was a place in your head where sperm was stored I mean that's the father of

01:29:08 Enlightenment how but anyway when you hear some of these things about human potentiality this four-year-olds outperforming high school students seven-point awareness and maybe a uh a responsibility that people like you who know understanding might have a certain responsibility to bring some of these ideas into compulsory everyday education besides stem and steam and core you know okay but I'm just when you hear

01:29:41 these things about human potentiality these greater awarenesses I'm just curious how do you respond with a child is developing it and has it naturally and so much of education is about how to eliminate it because we're following a you know a 200y old model of okay thank you thank you well I actually think um we I work with schools a lot and I have to say I think some of these ideas are really getting incorporated into schools maybe not some of the struggling Public Schools so much but there's a lot of

01:30:13 private schools charter schools are popping up all over in Los Angeles anyhow and um are incorporating that children have an enormous capacity for learning um if you let if you follow their lead if you let them learn what interests them and the other thing that really seems to enhance learning is being able to actively participate in the learning process so instead of just I think some of this is even happening in the public schools in Los Angeles instead of just teaching chemistry the kids are really

01:30:44 engaging in active learning and so I think a lot of the ideas about what is enhancing learning for kids is actually being Incorporated I don't think we're as stuck as you are presenting it I think Financial limitations are what keeping people stuck rather than any kind of philosopical or may more than financial limitations which is old farts are getting in the way as well because farts you you can have children learn those things successfully and learn how to be effective learners but then when

01:31:15 people come along and say well tell me what tell me which things you know and finding that you know children who are effective Learners they're they're equipped to acquire new information effectively to discover new things throughout life if they don't meet certain expectations that were established like tests like facts right um like things you can Google then they deemed to be failing yeah yeah

01:31:48 right hi um I'm making a movie about what Parents Ought To Be doing for their kids right now to um have them ready to respond to the World of Tomorrow particularly Visa climate change um and we sort of have taken as our premise that the world's going to be changing fast and that kids have to adapt to things that they can't necessarily see or observe in very sort of altruistic and synthetic and complicated ways involving working with other human beings um so my question to you guys

01:32:19 would be what do you think parents and grandparents ought to be doing with their kids right now to help them develop those kinds of skills what do you do with your kids to help them ready to get ready for the World of Tomorrow basically if you could really know depend on on your ability to inculcate you know values and know ideas that will last past adolescence and past

01:32:50 the point where politics enters into and and they all everybody changes it becomes horrible as adults that would be great maybe and I I'm afraid of of too much terrifying children with the the destruction of the world to come and the fact the idea that they have would have any responsibility for it and that if the idea that you should do something to fix it uh may be very nice but part of that is the idea that if you don't do it it won't get fixed then you're responsible for it

01:33:20 that that's the the element of of this whole uh bringing um we must fix climate change to children I I think it's so much an issue for the adults who are in control of the world to fix uh and that it's outside of the power of children to actually do something about it and when you have them do small things that make them feel like they're doing something about it that might be nice but to me that doesn't really answer it you know it's a really good question because I

01:33:52 parent cares about um whether it be what religion I'd like my child to have or for me it was wanting my children to read be good readers and this is a value I think the best thing for parents to do is be that way themselves I don't think we can teach someone else what to believe belief is so personal you you're going to really fail if you try to teach someone too much what what to believe if you put up too much emphasis on it but if you portray

01:34:22 the belief yourself yourself as a an adult and show the values you have as a person in your actions and how you interact with the world children are they you know absorb and internalize a lot of these things and I think that's the best way rather than try to inculate be it yourself be authentically that way yourself I think that would be the most successful way um for adults to do the things that adults can do to adults can do and right and the children are participating in

01:34:53 that family if I could just ask you to bear with me for one more second though you talked about hot cognition and cold cognition so let's say you've inculcated these values moral courage standing up for things that you believe in working with other people Etc um are there particular things that help people in moments of hot cognition Keep Their Heads particular psychological skills oh interesting well one of the ones that was um that it's a great question and one of the things that was alluded to earlier was executive function U which is this ability to stop and think

01:35:24 inhibit an action that you were maybe just going to reach out right and stopping and thinking about the consequences of your action and reflecting on that action and although famously adolescence is the period of time during which we quote develop executive function those skills are developing beginning in infancy uh deferring gratification right U being able to wait a minute to get a bigger treat uh as opposed to taking a small treat immediately that's developing very early on and that's a very powerful um

01:35:56 cognitive skill that applies in social situations in cognitive situations in school settings in all kinds of interpersonal um situations and that ability is something that we can help children uh develop and appreciate um and to be more reflective and that may be something that um and that that works even in the even in these hot cognition U domains absolutely I just going back to your comment

01:36:27 I I I think this is an area where I would like to stop and think that's to say part of me wants to say yes you're right that childhood is a kind of protected space and of adult that adults may have created for future Generations shouldn't weigh too heavily upon them but part of me also wants to say that yeah maybe we could sometimes

01:36:57 underestimate children that way that's to say they you you can educate their thinking about the long-term future and indeed the Deep past we don't need to we don't need to assume that they live so to speak in the here and now all the time I I think we would under but but I'm torn because I can see that it would be it it could be burdensome but in some ways it could also be liberating if if one were to give children the sense that you know there's

01:37:30 a we're part of a species I mean put it this way children growing up in the United States will be exposed to a considerable amount of American history and it's not a very comprehensive history at that it's mostly a history of heroism well you could argue that a a broader picture both looking backwards and looking forwards would actually be

01:38:00 more valuable than than that particular curriculum so anyway all that to say I have some sympathy with the idea that we might think about just how um how much we could expand the child's Horizon temporally I think a lot of that's already being done I mean if you I don't think that American history now is just about heroism and about how we are always saving the world and better than everyone else in the schools my kids have gone to

01:38:32 they're taught that when Columbus discovered America it wasn't such a good thing for the people here and there's a lot of discussion about that and I think it's the same thing with climate change you know my father the world wasn't a kid he grew up in the 1930s right um there have always been terrible problems and we try to teach kids what they're ready to absorb it has to be different at every stage of development so I think the easiest thing is to to live what you

01:39:02 believe in and kids will pick up what they can but it every child is going to have to deal with sex sooner or later and we don't teach them we don't give sex education in kindergarten and we don't wait till they're in high school I mean it's they're taught at their own capacity to take in what they can take in and I think it's whether it's it's sex or racism or the nuclear threat or you know kids have to learn at a certain age the reason I say how to pay

01:39:32 your taxes is because I had a kid come in and his chief complaint was he was something like seven or eight years old and he didn't know how to drive a car or pay pay his taxes yet and the idea that that can come later that he shouldn't worry that he doesn't know how to do it now was foreign to him so I don't think we should be scaring kids with things that they are not ready to absorb but that doesn't mean we can't adjust what we talk about to where they are cognitively and emotionally I think this circles back to the origins of our

01:40:03 discussion about storytelling because it's in and retelling of the childhood stories that children gain a capacity for uh trial action and understanding the world you know I when you were talking about Stuart Little I was thinking back to my encounter with it and how much it meant to me when I was a little boy that here was this little mouse who couldn't be like a big adult and yet

01:40:33 was able eventually to go out into the world in his toy car and you know this is this is this is what stories for children help them a a future so you know I don't know that we necessarily have to be doctrinaire about the kinds of stories but we if we tell enough stories it covers a lot of ground in anticipation will form whether whether you try to tell them or not they will form everything can become a

01:41:08 story I do have a question first uh when you were talking about stories without words you know the cartoons without words I think probably most of you know this very beautiful wordless video for very young children called the Snowman that a child of one and a half can already fully appreciate and um the other thing is the historical thing about about reading and writing and worries about memory of course people were worried about it and rightfully worried I mean I think it's

01:41:40 been shown or at least I've read that in non-literate cultures people do have much better memories anyway my question is is really to you about about Amnesia um um some of you talked about Amnesia in the first two years of life and it could be even longer but is it full Amnesia I mean are you talking about event memory or representational memory or are you talking about emotional memory well that's that's a very interesting question because we don't have amnesia for everything in the first

01:42:11 years of Our Lives we learn to talk we learn to walk we learn to recognize our caregivers right we and to and to care about our caregivers we remember a great deal from the early years of Life what characterizes the prototypical case of childhood Amnesia or infantile Amnesia is that we do not have any memories that of of ourselves of personally relevant or significant events so they're really event memories and the way it's been defined in the literature is unfortunate

01:42:42 in many respects because the question will be an event that happened at one time in one place that you can absolutely identify the age at which that event occurred and of course most for most of us our lives are repetitive we we don't have singular events unique events every day and in fact a lot of us if we reflect on our autobiographies who we are what made us who we are it's those Sunday dinner at Grandma's right

01:43:15 it's every summer my family took a vacation it's not the one-time event it it's those those the the the fabric of our lives are these repeated events of the same people over and over and I I actually think autobiographical memories this kind of odd man out um but yet that's where a lot of the literature has focused and when we talk about childhood Amnesia that's really what people are talking about I I just one thing could

01:43:46 you get closer to the thing that comes to mind is um I W I witnessed this once a child who was separated from a nanny at the age of one after a very long lapse of time when the nanny returned not only recognized the nanny but pushed his mother away to be with an nny so that's a very strong emotional memory and that was formed by the age of one right there it's it's interesting that it this this childhood Amnesia is very very well documented phenomenon um in an

01:44:16 audience of this size we absolutely would replicate the finding that the average age of earliest memory is between three and four what we would also replicate is that at least one person would have an event from at least the second year of life and at least one person would say my ear isn't until I'm eight or nine years old so we have this enormous individual difference and I think it's one of the few areas in which we have such a pronounced individual

01:44:47 difference is it related to the age at which uh language you know which language develops you know thus far not proven to be the case and I think that's because language always if you're a typically developing child language develops between 1 and three years of age so there's not enough variability it is related to a lot of interesting things it's related to birth status individuals who were first born tend to have earliest memories women tend to have memories from earlier in life than

01:45:19 men is another cultural differences Western cultures we tend to have memories from earlier in life than Eastern cultures so there are all kinds of really interesting individual differences I have a daughter who my daughter was started uh speaking with a little bit of an impediment and and you couldn't understand anything she says she says she remembers this trying to communicate with that's it's so interesting was obviously something that was and that happened more than once right you know that was a that was an ongoing event ongoing struggle um for

01:45:52 her yeah that's really interesting there wasn't there sort of was language but it wasn't our language but it's not your language yeah that's really interesting you've given me a lot of ideas a lot of questions including what is memory which you ask and then you left it's like what is me what is a memory thank you for mentioning this at the the um alumni resar my mom got a birthday card it was eight panels there's a little baby girl in a birthday hat the next one she's a little girl in

01:46:22 a birthday bir hat and she's a teenager in a birthday hat she's a young adult in a birthday hat and an adult in a birthday hat and she's a woman in a birthday hat she's a senior then she's old and the last panel says well that sucked oh you made me think that there might be a reason to make wordless stories for adults thank you and it just uh this panel it just reminded me of a lot of things I can't say that I remember

01:46:54 anything you said I'm thinking about my own memory if I call home and somebody asks I'll say well this what had Rosie cheeks he talked about Stuart Little this guy didn't tell us the joke he didn't tell us the other jokes she had a scarf he had a warm voice he's the illustr it's all being videoed you'll be fine you don't have to remember a thing I'm just talk I'm talking about the limits of my own memory I'm staring at this orange chair and when I close my eyes I don't have any orange chair in my mind and maybe

01:47:24 you do you're an illustrator it just makes me wonder what memories are and when you talk about the stories that people tell I think that they do preserve our lives but I also think they pickle Our Lives people tell the stories in the same way and maybe it happened differently or there's some other part of it that you didn't see or it and then you keep hearing the story the same way and I think it might obliterate some of the truth of what happened happened and

01:47:55 so when kids are telling when kids are closing their eyes or when kids are are remembering things or when kids are thinking things that's tremendously exciting and I don't spend a lot of time around kids but what I know about kids is that their minds are near adult Minds a lot right it's not that the kids just have their life and I wish that as a kid other people I think you said so take advantage of the way a kid thinks and the and the way a

01:48:25 kid's mind works rather than trying to turn it in you know make it work a different way to be in school I that if I had been in school and anybody been trying to teach me something and i' been able to sit on a bouncy ball and learn it that I could have learned it better because I am and or with music or with dancing or with play acting or improvisation and I just told hope that that there are opportunities for

01:48:57 you know we're not just studying kids minds but they were open to the the magnificence of what's possible and not just trying to train it up to be something smaller and and more uniform thank you thank you I I love the little description that stories can pickle people's lives yes it's great hi um so I have two what

01:49:28 I hope to be concise questions for you um the the first question is in terms of um Amnesia of autobiographical memory is there any evidence that that manifests in dreams um in in dreams in dreams I I personally just find that sometimes I have dreams of um you know sort of you know what I what I could see very conceivably you know being you know in in the you know the body of an infant and

01:49:59 you know and and sort of operating Paradigm and so so that's question number one um and uh question number two is in terms of uh you talking about the interpretation of facial expression and I wonder about the other side of that is there any research in you know essentially does a deficiency in in the ability to make facial expression exist and and if not if that's considered to be sort of an innately human thing then

01:50:32 what are the implications for that for communication for the development of communication yeah I don't know I I think our experts um are are here well in terms of Amnesia I me I'm thinking that uh you you know what what Pat already Patricia already said was that we do retain certain aspects of memory it may not be specific events in time but it could be things like just

01:51:06 your sense of your body I I could imagine something like that that you could retain something like that um so I think and if they're in the [Music] dreams how are we you know that's that's I think dreams are very very significant but I think of them more in terms of being what it means to you about the dream rather than it being a rep a rep representation or replica of something that literally happened I I guess my my

01:51:38 question is sort of the distinction between being able to sort of call upon at will a narrative of something that's happened as opposed to having that be embedded s sort of implicitly in the subconscious in a way that would would manifest in a dream but not in in real life I I I I actually think that is what this what Patricia was trying to distinguish between this episodic explicit kind of memory versus more implicit forms of memory that have more

01:52:08 to do with emotion and behavior and non-verbal experience yeah I'd also say a dream is is just a thought you have when you're asleep and it's it's not you know people throughout history starting certainly with the Bible and Joseph have like to believe that that dreams are special Communications and what makes dreams different from ordinary Daydreams or thoughts that you have or fantasies that you have is that you're asleep when you have them so the kind of thinking that

01:52:39 you do when you're asleep is different from the kind of thinking you do when you're awake it's more visual um things don't always make sense things happen that aren't real and all of those things can happen in a daydream too but you're pretty clear that that's going on while you're doing it so I think we have no way of knowing if you dream something in which you're imagining yourself as a child whether that's because that's a real memory of when you were a child or whether you're having a a fantasy of

01:53:09 what I wish my childhood were really had been like or thank God my childhood wasn't like what I'm just thinking about right now I mean dreams have motives to them but I don't think we should ever assume that we know in advance what the mechanism is any more than we would you know if you're just sitting by yourself bored and having a Daydream it doesn't necessarily you don't know where where it comes from just by that did that answer both of your questions well my second question was

01:53:40 about does does a deficiency in the formation of facial expressions exist and if it if it doesn't really it does I think so there's a condition a condition I mean everything's on a spectrum like Patricia was saying everything's on a bell-shaped curve you know normal is you know a wide range but yes I think there are people who um are not as much in tune with their emotional life and I think it's reflected in they have less affective

01:54:11 expression in their faces yes I think there are people like that I think I've seen them mhm and and does that then manifest in also sort of miror neur problems like you know they they cannot manifest ex Expressions to mirror other people therefore they have you know less of of a conception I don't think anyone has actually studied that but one of the um you know we're a lot of what we have to understand about ourselves as people is the impact we have on other

01:54:42 people so if someone is not expressing very much they're going to have a different impact on someone else than if they're very expressive and unless they know that life will be very confusing um and so whereas someone who's very expressive like me you know has a different impact and sometimes it's a little too much for people and I have to you know contain myself and so I have to know about that impact and so it's just the range and I think it's uh

01:55:13 but I'm nervous about assuming that some of you is not so expressive lacks some inner emotional life I mean the British are worried about that say that I didn't say that I people who who are not in touch are are maybe less expressive on their I think they demon not always I mean we have different but I'm ENT she asked if there's a category of people and I think there is a cat I don't not mean that as

01:55:43 a broad generalization no but I'm just entertaining the thought that there could be a certain type of person who's deeply in touch with their emotional life but for whatever reason masks it they've been yes so much irony well so yes well I think you know one of the things that I understand about children is and that is unique to the human species unlike other animals is we are raised to with the with the social cultural norms of the society we're

01:56:15 raised in which means you can take a child born in Russia you know carry them to you know Patagonia and they're going to do just fine because the way of life is something you learn from the adults around you and so if you grow up in Britain you're you are you're perfectly well socialized to behave in a particular way that to a New Yorker would seem you know cold right but it isn't you said

01:56:49 it my husband's from Iowa and I'm from New York and I live in Los Angeles and when he first came to New York he said oh now I get it everyone yells at each other I thought he thought it was just me but there's there's something of an emotional two-way street isn't there you if you spend your day smiling just the fact that your smile muscles are turned on yes does have from what I've read not that I do it but you know so I presume that if if you if your muscles don't

01:57:21 work and your face won't Express maybe you would have a harder time emotionally um feeling the things that you would otherwise but two observations from the talk that I I wonder if you guys would comment on uh the first is uh um essentially I guess you've been talking about declarative memory and have not really been that explicit about that during the discussion um and declarative memory is

01:57:51 about conscious you know recollection as opposed to all the other kinds of memory which have been kind of mixed in having to do with skill acquisition stuff like that which is not necessarily conscious and Consciousness is very selective you know so for the most part Consciousness serves uh in in terms of expectation and when we see situations which are beyond our expectation we switch from our habit system to a more conscious system

01:58:25 because we're attempting to uh adjust our model to these surprising circumstances and and update our model and integrate this new experience so I I wonder if maybe you guys could comment on that the other issue was uh the thing about hot and cold cognition um and uh so there were some interesting discussions about you know how adolescents don't switch that on and

01:58:55 so you know I I always recall this 12-year-old that sat next to me in a bus and she said excuse me sir is this seat not taken and she spoke to me like an adult and I I just had to ask her a whole bunch of questions and she lived in a cattle ranch in Northern California where she had learned to ride when she was seven and she had her own horses her father took her out uh hunting she learned how to shoot a gun by the age of nine she was a sharpshooter and she told

01:59:26 me about one time when she had to stay in the woods because a cougar was circling around and she climbed a tree and fell asleep and what I'm trying to say is that you know there hasn't been much of a discussion of other cultures and other cultures have a lot of Demands you know and and when we were you know a couple hundred years ago you know by the time you were 12 14 you you you had a lot of expectations put on you and your brain

01:59:57 had done that flip from being mostly you know reflexive and imitative to starting to be more prefrontal and being able to you know adjust to those expectations and demands so cultural issues as well as biological insues work together in turning that that system those systems on and I wonder if you might comment on those SE that that's a a great observation of course you know what those of us who study brain development

02:00:28 we often we we do it from a brain entric perspective right we talk about the impact of brain development on Behavior but of course the environment and the be and behavior impact brain development so your observation about um you know over evolutionary time um it's entirely likely that we have somewhat slowed down the development of uh the maturation and the the the development of the prefrontal cortex because we aren't making those demands on our adolescence

02:00:58 we have this extended period of adolescence so it's not a m you know it's not a coincidence but it does work both ways and you're absolutely right to point that out um that it we we can't just talk about brain development and its impact on Behavior we also have to think about the demands and the situations in which the individual and the culture right places the individuals and that does impact the the extent to which um or the speed at which and the extent to which um we are seeing development so um that's that's a an

02:01:30 excellent observation the issue of declarative or the the explicit conscious um memory that's what we can bring into the laboratory uh that's what we can bring into the um session except through other probing techniques that that you can study but certainly from the standpoint of laboratory science that's the that's the focus and when we think about autobiographical or personal memories defin in turn these consciously accessible memories so the category is

02:02:01 limited uh to that 5% of our of Our Lives that we spent being consciously aware most of our behavior is determined um outside of our awareness so they're both very good observations though for people in my world almost everything we're studying is things that people are not consciously aware of so you use language all the time you're not conscious how you're doing it and it's it's almost declarative is the last thing we deal with okay well one more I want comment

02:02:33 on uh two things that I recall uh reading somewhere was uh something in one of the Malcolm Gladwell books about um I think a fellow by the name of Erikson who had categorized all the muscles in the face to uh talk about their what they were thinking emotionally and in fact I remember one thing that he said in there was when uh I think Erikson was or whoever it was was watching the Democratic Convention and he saw Clinton and he said PC's bad

02:03:06 boy just from the muscular Expressions so I wonder if you could comment about that and secondly something I remember reading a long time ago sometimes where we can't articulate a feeling it might be something that we absorbed as an infant where we couldn't speak but yet we still had that feeling so just either I'd like to hear eert is the is the is Eckman thank you emman Paul Ekman three

02:03:37 brains there we go that's right locally stupid units right you know we we we managed Paul Eckman and he it is an Exquisite um categorization scheme that um is 277 points I think on the face I don't know the scheme so I um I've never labored to learn it but absolutely where you can characterize every muscle in the face and those that are associated with positive Expressions negative Expressions um and the like so and I I won't comment about Clinton he does I

02:04:09 mean uh just a cautious word about emman he's in part sold this research as a way of analyzing the extent to which people are misleading you and so the security agencies in the United States for example have funded quite a lot of his research on the ground that it will help them figure out who is telling the truth and who is lying and I think a psychologist experimental psychologist would be much more nervous about the

02:04:40 claim that he tends to make which is that he can distinguish truth tellers from Liars it turns out to be very difficult he claims a certain success but anyway I'm just I just want to insert a a question mark there into that yeah absolutely our last question okay uh my question is about like the stories that children are told like and especially like fairy tales I mean it seems to me that like you know the Walt Disney version of say Snow White or

02:05:13 Cinderella is very different from like the Grims you know Grims fairy tales you know and how that kind of affects even even like in the story of like Cinderella well now you have like a more feminist kind of perspective on what like you know Cinderella or Snow White is so how kind of cultur evolves and I guess I I should respond that's

02:05:45 yours well for one one thing the a very pragmatic thing is the Walt Disney movies take what 45 minutes or an hour and a half or something and and a fairy tale you read in five minutes so they add a lot of things but clearly there there's a lot of uh values being looked at and thought about and taught and and uh commercial values especially I think in the case of Hollywood Studios so the the fairy

02:06:15 tales are not necessarily really the um uh ways to Plum the depths of of the social mind that the Grims brothers and claimed because there's a lot of actual literary uh content to those by you know by artist writers who are writing things but but it's it's a matter of of different values basically I I think that U um I prefer the the Grims and a lot of people grow up prefer I I was

02:06:46 under the impression that those fairy tales were not necessarily specifically for children when they were originally no they were they were collect and and I sort of believe it is that the Grim brothers were involved in the program to collect stories that would define the German nationality and create a German culture that didn't really exist as as one thing and that was what they know they were also linguists creating a German a dictionary of atmology so so this was kind of the same

02:07:17 thing in terms of stories and and that was what they were doing but as soon as it came out out in 1815 they published their first collection and people all over the place bought it and gave it to their children and they had to go back and uh sort of rewrite their preface this things changed they they started changing the way they told these stories and even they as they went on Through The Years re and making different additions they changed the stories to make them in their case they they made them more appropriate for children as

02:07:47 they saw it because they got more vicious and the punishments were worse and simpler in the in the morality that they were telling because there were a lot of things at the first edition that were very morally weird and funny and and great in a ways because they because they got them in some cases straight from the storytellers who were having a good time so okay well please join me in thanking our participants for providing such a fascinating discussion today [Applause]

02:08:33 so col are you you able to come to dinner yes oh good yes good nice is your are you here alone or is your wife here alone yeah just took the train up this morning okay oh yes otherwise the whole that's