How many times as a parent do we think, “if I could only read my baby’s mind”? I know I certainly have during our long, sleepless night as of late. A new book, The Philosophical Baby, by Alison Gopnik, probes this question to its deepest depths, according to a review on the online magazine Slate.

It’s generally believed that babies, because they have no preconceived cognitive structure to filter their perceptions, experience the world as raw sensation.

“The baby just is,” states reviewer Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale.

And because young children don’t know the way the world should be, it frees them to imagine an infinite number of ways the world could be.

Gopnik argues, “Children are the R&D department of the human species—the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing. They [children] think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and we take the three or four good one and make them real.”

I haven’t read the book but it suggests to me an interesting correlation to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” (which I read during the endless, blissful nursing sessions of my first baby’s first weeks). It explores the dual operating systems that control our behavior, one intentional and rational, the other unconscious and spontaneous. Interestingly, he notes that sometimes we erroneously allow the former to interfere with the latter when we let misguided reason override our gut. The book also shows, however, how we come up with rational explanations to justify actions that are essentially controlled by our primitive, intuitive brains. (He describes some fascinating research on married couples in which a researcher, based on brief observations, was able to predict with 95 percent accuracy which couples would still be together after 15 years. And it often wasn’t the couples you would think).

Personally, I find watching my children’s unchained imaginations wander in the world is one of the most wonderous parts of being a parent. It reminds me what an amazing world we live in and inspires me to plumb my own creative capacity, so easily neglected in the rat race that is adulthood.

Tags: Books, development

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