okay so we're going to talk about Piaget today and as I believe I mentioned to you before Piaget was perhaps the 20 20th centuries foremost developmental psychologists he didn't really regard himself as a psychologist however in fact a lot of the people who've been great psychologists have come in from outside the field it's often Engineers for example Engineers have helped us establish most of our statistics anyways Piaget I suppose would have regarded himself more as a biologist he called it called himself a genetic epistemologist and by genetic he didn't mean the genes that organize your cells and spin you up out of nothing he meant beginnings as in Genesis and and then an epistemologist was someone who was interested in how structures of knowledge emerge and how they were constituted so he actually thought of himself as a biological philosopher now you know one of the things that's kind of sad about learning about great theories is that you hardly ever learn about how peculiar the people who formulate them are because generally they're extraordinarily interesting people you know and that that in some ways that often they get sanitized in some way once they've become respectable and that's really quite unfortunate Piaget was really a genius um he was offered a position at a large Museum and and I remember I remember correctly it was perhaps it wasn't director but it was a position of approximately that stature he was offered that when he was 10 years old he'd written a paper on mollusk Behavior which was published and his parents told the museum people that he of course they didn't know he was 10. you know that he probably wasn't up for the job at that time so but that gives you some example some idea about the magnitude of his intellect and Piaget wrote a lot and you know usually what you hear about if you study Piaget in North America if you hear about Piaget you hear about his stages of development sensory motor Etc and uh that really wasn't what PSJA was all that interested in um there was something about the idea of countable stages that seem to appeal to North American developmental psychologist but PSJA didn't really regard that necessarily as either the central or the most important part of his theoretical edifice and you know part of what PSJA has been criticized for in recent years is that the stages don't necessarily occur either as he described or in the order that he described but in some ways he wouldn't have found that particularly distressing because it was more of an attempt to explain how the personality emerged out of nothing in some ways because in some ways you kind of emerge out of nothing you know and it's not that easy to figure out for Piaget in some ways you sort of booted up although he wouldn't have used that metaphor obviously having existed in the time before that was a commonly known phenomena so he also was concerned about high level metaphysical problems and so one of the things that really motivated Piaget was the contradiction between science and religion that was very painful for him and one of the things that he had set out to do as a Young Man was to bridge the gap between science and religion and in some ways you might think about that in relationship to the sorts of things we talked about last class is that he was attempting to bridge the gap between a description of the world and a prescriptive description of the world which means what the world is and how the world should be or what the world is and how you should act and I think that's the most straightforward way of thinking about the division between religion and science because you need to know how to act you can think about it as a division between morality and science or you can think about it as a division between behavioral wisdom and science which I think is even a better way of thinking about it because it it takes the specifically religious element out of it so but anyways Piaget wanted to devote his life to solving that problem and I would say that's what he did um he also identified an interesting stage that you also hear very little about but seems to be to be something worthy of note and also worthy of consideration he thought that many people in their late adolescence went through a Messianic stage and what he meant by that was that when late adolescents or young adults were trying to orient themselves in the world they were trying to figure out how they might plot their path forward in life so that they actually made a difference you know so they started to become concerned about the state of the world and about their role in determining that state and and getting interested in and perhaps involved in large-scale political or social movements and he was the only psychologist that I've ever seen who actually identified that as a stage but it's worth because it certainly is the case that many young people do pass through a stage that's something like that and it's interesting to speculate it on it as a you know standard part of human development now I think it's probably more characteristic of people with certain personality types so I suspect if you're more extroverted and you're more open um particularly more open which is the creativity dimension in the big five that you're more likely to be politically and socially compelled you know so we know for example that openness is a very good predictor of things like political liberalism and uh you know certainly a lot of the Millennial movements and the religious like movements that you see on campus that have what would arguably now be a political base seem to be associated with high openness so maybe that stage doesn't occur in everyone's life but it certainly seems to occur in many people's lives Okay so now you might ask yourself well what was Piaget up to and well he wanted to figure out a lot of things and he was interested in very very fundamental issues so for example his theories dealt with things like number and space you probably can't see that very well it doesn't matter I'll tell you what it says time and speed permanent objects how did how did a person develop the notion of what constituted a permanent object how do you know when one thing is the same when it changes into something different so for example if you pour one bit of liquid from one container into another how do you know that the amount of liquid is the same how do children develop their ideas of chance and causality how do they develop their concerns about morality and their moral knowledge what what are they doing when they're playing and I think actually Piaget's most fundamental contribution as far as I'm concerned came in his studies and Analysis of play and also to some degree his his analysis of dreams and he also spent a a lot of time giving serious consideration to the role that imitation played in in the scaffolding of the human personality and so um some of the so a PSJA believed that oh I think this is the easiest way to talk about it actually we'll use this little diagram here so oh fire it took me a long time to construct this diagram so not because it's all that technically difficult but it took a while to think it up so I want to give you a little bit about background to it so imagine that one of the things that distinguishes a human being from a computational device say or at least the standard sort of computational devices that our primary cognitive problem is how to perceive the world so that we can act in it so that we can get what we need to have or want okay so all three of those things are roughly of equivalent importance right you have to be able to perceive and you have to be able to act because if you can't act then you can't get what you need and if you can't get what you need then of course there isn't and you and so we're trying to always solve those problems simultaneously and we're also trying to do it in a way that's sustainable now what that means in part is that the knowledge structures of human beings are organized or or they're organized along those three dimensions and those three dimensions also constitute the problem space in some sense that has to be addressed for a solution to be useful so not only do you have to be able to perceive in some accurate manner but the accuracy is determined in part on in terms of whether or not the way that you're perceiving helps you pursue something that you want to pursue and then the utility of wanting to pursue something is dependent to some degree on the relationship between the utility of that and the things that you need to continue to survive now some psychologists have addressed that by thinking about such things as fundamental drives you know and and that was mostly a behavioral idea in some ways and a drive might be hunger and the idea of a drive would be that hunger is a motivator that helps you put together strings of motor behaviors that are sort of run out in automatic sequence so that you can you can get the end that you want and continue on perhaps to fulfill another Drive but the idea of Drive is a little bit on the oversimplified side although it has its place I think that you can conceptualize the relationship between all of these by thinking in the following manner so imagine first of all that people are after something generally speaking now if you look at us you can kind of tell that we're the sorts of creatures that are after things and the way that you can tell that is first of all that we can move and and do so frequently so we're always on a voyage of some sort of a journey of some sort from point one to point two or from point A to point B I would say as well that that's also the um Hallmark of a simple story if you're telling someone a story generally what you do is you tell them about a time that you were somewhere and then you did some things and you went somewhere else it's a very very simple story now the advantage of thinking about it as a story is that it helps you understand that the entire cognitive structure can't be reduced to necessarily anything that's for example that's drive like you have to think about it as more personality like and so you want something you Orient yourself towards it now the way you do that generally speaking is with your sensory and your conceptual systems right so for example if you want to walk towards the door then you turn your head and you make yourself a model of the door and that model has to um be bounded by its relevance to your actions so you know the things that are going to be relevant to you about the door for example might be whether or not it's tall enough for you to walk through or whether or not the door is open or closed so that you can as you're walking towards it you can organize your body so that you can interact with the object as you see fit now you pick your goals in all for all sorts of different reasons and some of those reasons are more fundamental than others so for example fundamental by fundamental I would mean likely what I mean by fundamental is something like evolutionarily ancient you know so the the older the necessity or the older the system that's evolved to to allow you to pursue the necessity the more fundamental it is and there's there's ways of identifying what constitutes the fundamental elements of goal seeking behavior and you can do that in part by comparing yourself to other animals you know and so mammals for example all seem to gen to experience something that you might regard as anger or at least defensive aggression they're all hungry you know they all have the the they all act as if they're they're they're uh they highly value sexual behavior and so forth and so those you can't really think of those things as specifically human they're lower level than that now so at a fundamental level you have biological systems that are setting forth what might constitute a goal and you can think about that you can think that what the system is doing is setting the goal or you can think that the system is driving behavior but a better way of thinking about it is that the fundamental motivation motivational system sets up a framework that's like a personality that then acts in the world and so this personality has something in mind that it wants it has a collection of perceptions that organize itself around that thing that it wants and then it has a plan or Associated motor behaviors that it can lay out in the world that will take it from the point where it is to the point that it wants to be okay now so once you know that then you can start to think about these plans or these goals or these stories or these Frameworks I think those are all you can even think about them as games in some ways you can think about them at different levels of complexity now what Piaget was trying to do in part was to describe how a framework of this sort or a sub a sub element of Personality might develop itself in complexity over time so so the the diagram I have here before you shows these little oval like figures and in the bottom left-hand corner there's a box that says what is and in the top right hand corner there's a box that says what should be and then there's some arrows showing a planned sequence of behavior and the idea is that you have a sense of where you are and you have a sense of where you're going and that constitutes the framework within which you're looking at the world and then within that framework there's different things that you can do with your body in order to advance from the first point to the second point now it's it's important to understand that this sort of thing is grounded in behavior and not in conception because it helps you also understand the nature of these fundamental elements of personality the fundamental elements of Personality are not descriptions of the world they're tools for acting in the world including the associated behaviors now whether they're Behavioral or conceptual to some degree depends on their level of abstraction so so here's how you how to think about that so imagine that you say that someone's a good person and you might say well that's a description of them and that and when you think about description you tend to think about description the way that you would describe an object in the world like a scientific description but when you talk about someone as a good person you're actually not describing them as an object in the world you wouldn't even describe yourself as an object in the world that way what you're doing is using a shorthand to represent a higher the hierarchical arrangement of their personality and you can get away with it because when you say good person to someone they already have an understanding of good person and they know what that hierarchy is and so you don't have to explain the whole thing to them and you can understand each other without even necessarily knowing exactly the details of what you're talking about but I'm going to tell you now what I think you mean when you say that sort of thing so imagine that a good person is a description at the very at the top end of a hierarchy okay because good the good is a very high level philosophical abstraction it's a high level value be good okay so what does that mean if you decompose it well we'll do it in a relatively straightforward manner one that isn't really it's more observational than philosophical so let's say you take you take someone who's uh 40 year old mother for the sake of argument and who will say she also has a job so if she's a good person and she's a mother you might think that's one sub element of her personality if she's a good person is being a good parent right and I think you put person above parent in the hierarchy because to be a good person you can be a good parent without being a good person but it's hard to see how you could be a good person without being a good parent so and maybe if you're a good person you're more than a good parent you know you're probably a good partner and maybe you're good at your job and like there are there are large domains of activity that you're good at or good in and if you sum your behavior across that or average your behavior across that or something like that then you end up reasonably being described as a good person maybe you're a good friend as well and so good person has levels of hierarchy underneath it and then each of those things that have levels of hierarchy each of those entities at the level of hierarchy right underneath good persons can also be decomposed so we're going to decompose them and we're going to see what happens because partly what happens is if you decompose them you get right to the bottom it's not an infinite decomposition and so I also think this is one way that you can think about the relationship between the mind and the body because the relationship between the mind and the body is a very tricky thing because the mind seems to be made of stuff that's other than the body and I think there's some truth to that partly because we don't really understand Consciousness but there are but that's a complex problem and I think you can get a fair ways in addressing the mind-body problem without having to drag in the problem of Consciousness so okay so we could say well good person sub element of that is good parent then you might think well what is it that you need to be doing to be a good parent and we might say well um you have to have a good job maybe that's one up in the hierarchy but whatever you have to have a good job because otherwise you can't provide for your children and you have to be able to to care for the children you might say well someone's good at caring for children and then you might ask them well what does it mean to be good at caring for children and then you have to sort of think of the sub elements that would go into caring for children and so one of them here is uh you have to know how to cook a meal or complete a meal and then you also have to know how to play with the baby so we could concentrate on playing with the baby and so what do you do when you're playing with a baby you might play peekaboo you might tickle the baby and you might clean the baby okay now you start thinking well obviously once you're starting to get down to that level of detail so that's a high resolution model right you're you're starting to move from a low resolution model good person to a high resolution model which are what are precisely the multitude of elements that make up being a good person well if you're playing peekaboo with a baby for example all of a sudden you're doing something that's not exactly conceptual being a good person is conceptual but playing peekaboo isn't conceptual and the reason it's not conceptual is because you actually have to move your hands to do it so if you get to a high enough level of resolution in the description of a personality what you start describing are patterns of Behavior now they have Associated you know they have an Associated motivational framework and a Viewpoint that goes along with them so that I would say well even while you're playing peek-a-boo with the baby the the element of you that's playing peekaboo is best described as a sub personality it's a playful sub personality and then it's the sub personality that specifically knows how and is motivated to play peekaboo but what is composed of is no longer a sub personality it's starting to be composed of actual movements so and then underneath that if you go to higher resolution like okay what's the movement composed of well obviously you start to have to talk about musculature and then if you go below that it's molecular movements and so on but but once you're down below voluntary movement there's really no you there anymore right you sort of Fade Into unconsciousness because you know how to go like this but you don't exactly know how to move the specific muscles that enable you to go like that or even if you do you don't know how to Twitch the muscle fibers or something like that right there's some let you don't know how to operate the cells there's some level of resolution underneath the voluntary motor control that that basically runs on automatic and to some degree you're capable of like steering it but you're not really capable of you're certainly not capable of being conscious of it so the the abstract moral conception which is also a description good person hits the world at the level of motor output now and a lot like even your sensory movement a lot of that's motor output right because a lot of what you're doing with your eyes is moving them so all right now what does that have to do with Piaget well one of the ways of understanding Piaget is that he built he was really interested in understanding how that entire system came to be and his theory is a bottom-up theory he says okay yeah this is this this is he hasn't said this but it's a very useful way of thinking about it because Piaget believed that you started with small elements of what he called reflexive behavior and then you learn to chain them together in increasingly complex structures and then you chain those complex structures into more and more complex structures and so on and so forth until you built up the entire hierarchy but you tended to start from the bottom so Piaget was particularly interested in what the minimum conditions were for something to emerge into the world so that it could build itself out of nothing and that's really what he was interested in when he was starting to talk about infant development and so Piaget's hypothesis was something like this um well Kilt babies are born very very immature you might even say that they're born premature so um a human baby if you took a mammal of about human size and you said well what's its average gestation period across the animal kingdom you'd find out that for a Manimal of our size we should have a gestation period a pregnancy period of two years so we don't we have a gestation period of nine months and so you might ask well why is that and the answer is complicated obviously but here's some of the reasons as far as people can tell um we have big heads and they've really been expanding rapidly over particularly over the last two million years but let's say since we split off from chimps that's about six million years we have very very large heads and you know if you look at a baby a baby's head is pretty damn disproportionately large compared to its body like that a baby's like a third head and so even when the baby's little nine months old well nine months after conception and maybe a year and three months before it's supposed to be born its head is already extremely big now you think well what's the problem with that and the problem with that is well the bigger your head is the harder it is to be born and you might say well why haven't the pelvic areas of human beings adjusted females in particular adjusted so that they could handle the birth with a larger head and the answer to that is well they have to some degree which is why women have wider hips than men do but the problem is is evolution is a conservative business and it can only in some sense Tinker with what it's already got and so if you look at the basic bought your basic body plan your basic body plan at most in its most fundamental levels was established some some tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years ago and then the basic mammalian body plan was established say 60 million years ago and so if you go I went to the Smithsonian once and they have a skeleton museum at the Smithsonian it's sort of like a zoo for for skeletons and it's really interesting place to go because you can see much more how alike mammals are when you see their skeletons so for example if you see a bat skeleton it looks just like a human skeleton except the fingers are really really long but it's the rest of it's like yeah that's basically the same skeleton as a human being it's just that the pieces have blown up in size or shrunk or or contorted or something like that but it's exactly the same damn structure so as as the brain was growing and the skull was getting larger and women women's bodies had to adapt to that while there was parameters within which the body had to work and it turns out that if you make the hips any wider and you make the hole in the middle of them any bigger then the hips start to lose structural integrity and the other thing that starts to happen is the woman can't run so there's this weird you imagine that Evolution takes place within this set of constraints and so what's happened is the baby gets born way earlier the women's hips are wider with a larger pelvic hole but not so wide they can't run and not so wide they're not strong and the baby's head is collapsible roughly because the bones aren't completely fused at Birth and so generally especially if it's larger maybe if it's born when it when it emerges just after birth its head is quite compressed cone-shaped even so and that's hard on the baby but it's not nearly as hard on the baby or the mother as not being born at all so anyways babies are born pretty premature and you know that puts a tremendous burden on human parents because of course the child is you know can't even walk for the first year whereas you take a deer when a deer is born or an animal like that you know it's three minutes later it's wobbling around on its feet and then it's running away from Lions the next morning it's like that's that's not us you think why not it's well we're born very very premature and very very vulnerable and you know it's a major load on the on the parents anyways one question Piaget was interested in is well what exactly is a baby born with and he thought well they're born with a couple of things one is here's three things in a sense you might think they're born with a couple of reflexes and what you might think of a as a reflex is that it's a built-in module of sensory motor capability and maybe it it and you know maybe there's a motivational element to it as well so I would say it's a built-in sub personality that's a very narrow sub personality has a very narrow task and so one thing's one thing babies can do is root so if you touch them on the side of their cheek then they root and basically what that means is that they use their mouth and their head to search for something to latch onto with their mouth and that would generally be a nipple so they come pre-wired to be able to use their mouth and their tongue and certain muscles of their head in order to figure out how to feed and that's actually a very complicated behavior and so one of the things you see with babies is that their mouth and their tongue is all quite wired up already so if you're looking at a newborn baby the intelligent part of the baby in some sense like the part It's Already There is very much oriented towards its mouth and its tongue and that's sort of like Freud's idea of an oral stage in some sense although you know you could debate that but that's partly why Freud thought that way he knew that people these were very mouth-oriented and once they can start using their hands and they can pick up objects what do they do with objects they put them in their mouth right why well because that's what babies do partly but that's not the only reason is like if you look at the okay so back in the 50s 40s maybe even earlier than that there was a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield who worked at the Montreal Neurological Institute and he was one of the people who first did surgery for example for epilepsy so if you have epilepsy what happens is generally you kind of have a short circuit there's a malfunctioning set of neurons usually in the hippocampus and they produce like a positive feedback electrical circuit and it's like a little electrical storm and it'll start in damaged tissue and then spread across the whole brain and one of the things the early neurosurgeons were doing was dividing the brain in two to stop the hemisphere that had the damage from being able to spread pathological electricity across the entire brain now when you're doing brain surgery you don't want to take out anything that isn't absolutely necessary and so one of the things the brain surgeons do and still do did and still do is that they do brain surgery when you're conscious which is quite a horrifying thought really because you know your head is stuck in this little machine that doesn't let it move and then they're poking around in your brain and you have to tell them what's going on while you're doing it and if you stop being able to respond then I presume they assume that they've made a mistake and you know tough luck for you but anyways Penfield was interested not only in you know conducting his surgery properly but also in mapping out the brain to figure out well what parts of it could you use and you know what do you have to keep in what parts can you maybe get rid of and part of that was because there was an idea for a long time among neurologists called equal potentiality which meant that the the cortex was an undifferentiated massive tissue and you could take out parts of it without really much loss of function at all um which that turned out not to be exactly right although it wasn't as stupid as an idea as it might seem because the cortex is less differentiated than other parts of the brain but it turns out that if you take out parts of it like the prefrontal cortex the damage that it does is not immediately evident but if you watch the person for any length of time well usually their lives fall apart if their prefrontal protest is being damaged enough anyway so Penfield was trying to figure out what the brain does and so he was using electrodes to touch the surface and what he found if you imagine that this is the frontal part of your brain here and it's called that because it's at the front right and so there's a the back part of it has to do more with sensory uh processing and then there's a fissure down the middle and on the front side of the fissure there's an area that's roughly triangle shaped on the back of the fissure there's another area that's roughly triangle shaped and the front part if you touch it with a with an electrode like of the right current obviously then people will report feeling something on different parts of their body and then if you touch the part that's behind the fissure so roughly about here so then they'll they'll be inclined to move or feel the impulse to move and so what what Penfield did was draw a little map of what parts of the brain were connected to what sensory Sensations in the body and what parts of the brain were content connected to what motor Sensations and he he built this thing called a homunculus it's a little it's a little picture and the picture is of this creature that's laid out on the cortex it's sort of like a dismembered body in some sense and the size of each part corresponds to the amount of tissue that's devoted to processing that brain or that bodily area and what you see is very very interesting because if you look there's a sensory homunculus that's how your body looks to your brain from a sensory perspective and there's a motor homunculus which is how your body looks to your brain from the perspective of being able to operate it what you see for example is with both the sensory and the motor cortex the hand is as big as the whole body and the thumb is as big as the rest of the hand and then the mouth and the tongue are also that big and so is the face so you've got this little itty bitty body because what are you what are you going to do with your back you know you you can't pick up anything with your back and you're also not very good really your your sensory perception on your back is not very high resolution so if I had one of you stand up and I put three fingers on your back this far apart and I said how many fingers were there you wouldn't be able to tell you'd say one probably but you can't tell even if you space them out quite a bit if you push simultaneously whereas on the surface of the hand you can tell immediately because this is a high resolution part of your body and of course you know you can really move your little tentacle appendages here and they're highly wired up to the brain as well and very very sensitive but the reason I told you all that because it's also particularly true with the mouth and the and the lips and the tongue and then also the entire face that's because your face is extraordinarily mobile and you know you broadcast emotion with it and so it's a it's a communication device of the highest order and so it has to be really wired up you have so much neural control over your face that you can actually teach yourself to fire single neurons in the tissue underneath your eye so which you certainly are not going to be able to do with your back and then of course well why would you anyways so now so what I I'm telling you that in part so that you get some more understanding of how the child is wired up because that mouth tongue uh lip sort of arrangement that that that the baby is born with is a very very powerful learning circuit and it's established quite nicely right at Birth and so then the baby can start exploring the world using parts of it that are already there and a big chunk of that is the mouth so and you know you know how this works some of you have recently had dental surgery of one form or another or at least you can remember when you had it maybe you had a tooth pulled or a filling or you had braces put in or something so one of the things you'll notice you lose a tooth is it your damn tongue is in there where the tooth was for the next six months right fiddling around and you can do it consciously which you will sometimes but even if you're not attending to it your tongue will be in there checking out every tiny little crack and crevice in the new area and what it's doing is updating your map of the map of your body because your mouth wants to know what part of it's you and what part of it isn't because first of all you're not supposed to chew the parts that are you and second of all if there's any foreign body in the mouth obviously you want to get that out of there for for endless numbers of reasons so you can detect surface variation with your lips and tongue with tremendous accuracy and of course you know there's all sorts of uses that people put that ability to it's also one of the ways that people uh test each other out for sexual compatibility right because that's all mouth and tongue work rough not all of it obviously but at least some reasonable proportion of it and so that's also a part of exploratory Behavior so you're testing for things like Health with with with kissing and with smell so anyways it's a major part of you you know and not only is it a part that you that you explore the world with so that you can figure out what to eat and what not to eat which is a big problem for omnivores right because we can eat damn near anything and that's a complex cognitive problem but you also can use it as a tool for exploring the Contours of the world now animals really do that with smell right because your typical animal is a smell-based creature whereas human beings aren't really so much that probably because we became upright and for a bunch of other reasons but smell is a tremendously powerful um modality and it's pretty much fully there at Birth as well and you know mothers report that they can distinguish their baby by smell virtually you know a day or two after they're born they know the smell and babies can certainly smell their mothers and their fathers as well it doesn't take very long at all so anyways the baby's got its mouth and so it can start getting somewhere with that and then it's also got basic reflexes you know and now what a baby does in some sense is it's it's it starts developing from the middle and the top downward and outward so the mouth and the nose are all wired up the eyes start to get wired up fairly quickly they're not much to begin with because a baby will move its eyes independently and it's not very good at focusing although it's focal length is actually it's natural focal length is pretty much exactly the distance from breast to Mother's eye which makes perfect sense right because the baby wants to be able to communicate extraordinarily well to produce a bond with the mother and that happens most frequently with during breastfeeding which is also extremely good for the baby because the baby gets touched and babies really really really really need to be touched they if you don't touch them they die so even if you feed them and shelter them and all those sorts of things they have to be touched and it's it's very good for the baby's development so anyways the baby starts out with it's it's uh its ability to explore with its mouth and its tongue and its and its ability to smell and then it starts to develop its eyes but it does that in concert with developing other parts of its body you know and so the baby if you put the baby on its stomach then it starts to exercise its ability to lift up its head and so it kind of gets that going and it starts to learn how to use its arms and its legs and um so one thing you can do for a baby for example to help it get going so let's say the baby's in its crib it's laying face upward okay you can give it a mobile now if you go into a baby store and you look at mobiles what you'll see is maybe the top part is like two coat hangers right it's like a cross and then there's things hanging from it and the things will be I don't know maybe they're cute who knows Hello Kitty things are some damn thing like that you know and they're facing you well that's a stupid mobile because you aren't the person who's supposed to be looking at the Hello Kitty things the baby's supposed to be looking at it so those should be facing down and they never are they're always facing sideways so when the baby looks up all it sees is a bunch of horizontal lines but so let's assume that you're reasonably bright and you get one that the baby can see and then maybe it should be black and white or at least really really bright primary colors because it's easier for a baby to detect that black and White's really good because baby's pretty good at detecting edges and so that thing will move around the baby will lay there and watch it you know and babies they I think they kind of look like they're Stoned on LSD you know and I actually think that's technically correct because one of the things that hallucinogens do is reduce the um inhibiting Power of memory on perception and of course babies have no inhibiting power of memory on perception because they have no memory so they're pretty much you know completely overwhelmed by the world all the time so they're laying there watching this mobile and you know you can shake it and maybe they'll have a little reflex at that or or you can interact with some way and the baby will start checking that out it'll watch it and watch and watch it and it'll watch partly so that it can get its eyes organized and it does that in concert to some degree with its motor ability you know because you might say imagine your cross-eyed a little bit like a baby and you're looking at that thing and there's two of them and you might think well how do you know there's not two of them and the answer to that is well you have to whack it with your hand as soon as you walk it with your hand you're going to find out if it's one thing or two things once you figure out whether that's one arm or two arms you know and so the baby is starting to to whack itself against the world and watch the consequences to help it start to build up its ability to interact with the world and its ability to model the world and so one of the things you'll watch for example if you put a baby in a crib and it's got a mobile there you want to kind of move the mobile down so that it's close enough so that the baby might be able to bump it because babies if you if you don't swaddle them they lay there in their hands and legs sort of float in space like this and it's because they're not really very well connected to them and that's why a baby will poke itself in the eye now and then with its thumb and it's rather amusing to watch in a kind of clique manner so a baby will lay there and it'll poke itself it'll go like that and what it's just discovered is that there's some relationship between that random movement and that sensation okay now okay so let's say it's laying there and it's floating around in space and it's fortunate enough so that its leg comes into contact with an element of the mobile well that'll make the mobile do something interesting and novel and when the main when the mobile does something interesting and novel that triggers a reflex in the baby and the reflexes that the baby will Orient towards it and look and so for Piaget that was the circuit that was the beginning of the baby's ability to sort of start bootstrapping it up in the world and he thought what you needed was the ability to move a little bit at least so that'd be the reflex say or even Randomness and then you needed the ability to refine that movement so that you needed to be able to practice it and you needed to be able to improve with practice and you needed to be able to imitate and one of the things that Piaget thought which I think is so smart it's so smart is that what a lot of what babies did was imitate themselves so for example maybe they're they're laying in in bed and they're starting to get some sense of of the connection between of how their arms and legs work and so they can maybe make start to make sort of broad gestures and that's it but now and then they they're lucky and they're sort of flinging their arms around and they hit the mobile and they get a little reflex out of that it's a startle and an indication of interest and then they'll sit there and practice how to whack that thing with their hand and so then what so what they're doing is they kind of accidentally produced a phenomena of Interest and they noted the consequence and then what they do is try to reduplicate the phenomenon of Interest so basically what they're doing is manifesting different patterns of quasi-voluntarily reflex quasi-voluntary reflexive behavior and then if that produces something of note they'll practice imitating it so when my daughter was about 18 months maybe not even that old 13 14 months maybe old enough to sit up anyways and old enough to start to do some things by herself we bought her these books they were Disney books hardcover cardboard books you know five pages long or something each of the pages was quite thick because it was made out of cardboard and they four of them would come in a little box which is about four inches high and about an inch and a half wide and if you were really careful you could take out the books and then you could put all of them back in it wasn't that easy because the first one wasn't too hard but they got consid you know consistently more difficult as you kept putting each of them in because the parameters of the exercise changed and she must have spent I don't know 150 hours dumping those out picking them up putting them in and you might say well what was she doing and you know you'd say well she was putting books in a box that's not what she was doing first of all they weren't books to her and it wasn't a box because she didn't know what a box was what she was doing was practicing going like this you know and matching the size of something to a to the size of something else and that's very complicated and maybe you know so there's a a jar of apple juice okay so you might say well pick that up okay well you can pick it up like this you can pick it up like this you can pick it up like this you can pick it up like this like there's a lot of things to practice and each of those movements is a different sensory motor capacity that has an incredibly wide range of potential applications so a child will sit there and Fiddle about with their hands and their arms and the rest of their body for Untold hours because what they're doing is building up these basic sensory motor systems from the bottom up so that they can you know so so they practice them in one domain where there's some Challenge and then they're starting to build new exploratory tools that they can go out and practice on the rest of the world so you know once you can grip uh let's say once you can grip a mobile and you can let go which is something babies actually have a hard time doing because they have a grip reflex and they're quite strong when they're first born if you put your fingers in their hands you can lift them right off the ground they'll cling to you and that's probably old chimpanzee gripping Behavior because chimps grab to their mother's fur and then they're like carried around like that for about three years now since you don't have much fur it's kind of useless for the baby although they're pretty good at getting your hair and your glasses and your nose and so and you got to get them to let go so anyways they'll sit there and practice all these little subroutines and so you'll see this too if you have a baby you've got your baby in the high chair maybe it's nine months old and you're trying to feed the baby which is often very uh challenging because babies are very curious and annoying and Troublesome and tough and ornery and exploratory and and misbehaving and provocative and all those things because they need that to learn about the world and they'll they'll do something like maybe they'll eat and they'll drop the spoon and a mass will go on the floor and they think wow gravity that's interesting so then you'll give them their spoon again and the first thing they'll do is take their food and put it on the floor and then they'll do that launch because they're kind of interested in this hole twisting the spoon and having Things fall on the floor phenomena and so it's part of the reason why it's often hard to feed babies is because even if they're hungry you feed them three things and then they're not starving and then they're so hyper curious that they're gonna you know try to do something else so but what they're doing is they're they're continually utilizing their basic reflexive behavior and building more and more complex structures up on the basis of that and with each time they do that it opens up a new toolbox for them and they you know expand outward and start to interact with the world and so that's one way also of understanding where a baby's personality comes from now this is complicated because there are things about babies that are sort of they're parameters of Personality are somewhat determined at Birth so I'll tell you how I've I've conceptualized this it's it's how you might conceptualize the relationship between nature and nurture I don't know if this is a good metaphor or not it's not the most elegant metaphor in the world but it's worked for me so imagine for example that a baby at three months of age can be a calm baby or a nervous baby now that is the case we we know that even right at Birth you could kind of figure out whether a baby is a calm baby or a nervous baby that's neuroticism that's the fundamental dimension of negative emotion so you might say that one baby's nervous Behavior might have this range and another baby's nervous Behavior might have this range and another baby's nervous Behavior might have this range and most of the time it's sort of in the middle of that range and now and then it'll manifest behaviors that are associated with what's extreme for it so even if you have a calm baby sometimes it'll get upset and even if you have a baby that's always upset sometimes it will be calm so then you might ask yourself well to what degree can you modulate the baby's nervous Behavior so let's say you want to have more calm baby and so you're going to do some things to make that baby calm the question is how much transformation can you make and the answer to that to some degree is it depends on how much effort you make so changes that are close to the average of the baby's natural curve of responses are fairly easy to make so you can shift the baby a little bit towards being more calm without too much work but if you want to shift it more towards being calm then that's going to take more work and if you're going to shift it more to be calm that's going to take more work and it's not linear so what happens is at some point you kind of reach a practical limit you're not going to make your baby more calm than you know maybe you could move it one standard deviation or two standard deviations from its its natural resting place when it was first when it first emerged as a creature but if you're going to move it three to three standard deviations like from the fifth percentile to the 95th percentile you're going to be working up you're not going to be doing anything else with the baby so you can sort of conceptualize the relationship between nature and nurture as a cost relationship so for example IQ is quite stable but you can move IQ but it's really expensive so there's a practical limit to it so I think if you take twins that are adopted out at Birth in order to get a 15 Point difference in IQ between the Twins by the time they become adult one twin has to be at the 95th percentile for wealth in their family and the other twin has to be at the fifth percentile for wealth so that's a massive difference right it's huge and so it's such a big difference you're not going to produce that with any degree of ease in the real world but so environmental transformations of biological parameters cost that's a very useful way of thinking about it so so anyways back to the baby now the baby is starting to organize itself from the bottom up and so here's here's kind of a way to think about how that works Piaget pointed out that and this is quite well known in the development literature that babies that are younger than three don't really play well with others and it's complicated because they can play some things with others so for example you can play peekaboo quite well with the nine month old you know so there's some sorts of simple games that that babies can play with you pretty much as soon as they get their eyes focused and one of the funny things about babies when they're very young even below nine months is that they already have a sense of humor which is something I've never been able to figure out so they can play little comical games with you as soon as you're smart enough to figure out what the baby's up to roughly speaking because they they appreciate humor absurdly early and it's very difficult to understand why look anyways it doesn't matter the piagetian idea was in some sense that what the baby does to begin with is first plays games with itself so it's exploring you know and then it produces some phenomenon of interest and then it replicates that until it Masters it and then you know it just keeps doing that and it gets to be more and more and more complex and then by the time it's about three it's complex enough so that all of its little Microsystems are kind of integrated into one thing you know so it's got a set of routines for being hungry it's got a set of routines for being anxious it's got a set of routines for being exploratory it's got a set of routines for seeking um attention from its parent and so on and then it's starting to build some overarching Unity among all of those micro processes so that it can segue smoothly between them and you can really see this starting to happen at two because you know you've heard of the terrible twos and what happens in the terrible twos is that the child's still fairly unintegrated and so they'll go they're quite a riot to be around because they're staggeringly emotional you know they'll go from giddy beyond belief to crying outrageously to so angry that if you ever saw an adult that angry you'd immediately run away and call the police and they can do that like in 15 minutes they just cycle through these things very very rapidly so and and weirdly enough adults will notice behaviors or they'll see behaviors in children that would be absolutely outrageous in adults and they don't even really it doesn't phase them at all it shows you how well adapted we are to children because you know a child who's having a tantrum if the child's good at it you know they'll fling themselves onto the floor which you rarely see an adult do and then they'll pound and kick and scream and then if they're really good at it some of them get really amazingly good at it they'll hold their breath until they turn blue and pass out it's like try that one night when you're you know when you don't have anything to do and you're and the power is off you know just see if you can kick and scream on the floor for a while and then hold your breath till you turn blue and pass out you can't and that just shows you how you know committed to the Tantrum a child can be so it's easy to stop that sort of behavior by the way um so if your child throws a tantrum it's at home just go away and then eventually the child will turn blue and you know pass out then they'll come too and there isn't anyone there and that's not really an exciting outcome so if you do that two or three times the child usually figures out that it's really not worth the hassle if you want the child to continue wait until they turn blue and pass out and then really freak out especially if you can do that randomly a few times man you'll get that child just having Tantrums turning blue and passing out pretty much everywhere yeah so don't don't do that that's a bad idea so all right now so the piagetian ID in some sense is the child builds up these little reflexes and these little we'll call them sub personalities because it's a better way of thinking about it and it starts to build them around modern psychologists would think more that it starts to build them around motivational systems Piaget wouldn't have necessarily said that but and then at some point the child starts to enter the social world now it's simple in some ways to think of the child before three as not social and then the child after three is social but it's not really accurate right because if you think about it the child is being social right from the beginning of its development because first of all it has to figure out for example how to feed even if it's not being breastfed it has to figure out how to participate in a playful and social manner around feeding and that's particularly the case if the child has to breastfeed because breastfeeding is very complex process first of all you have to get the mother to cooperate and you can't bite her for example and so there's all sorts of rules about breastfeeding that the baby has to follow and so the baby's actually entering into fairly complex social relationships and games right from the beginning and that's especially true if it also has siblings because if you know if you have a baby and maybe you have a two-year-old the two-year-old and the baby are playing right off the bat and their two-year-olds are amazingly good at playing with new horns it's quite staggering to watch them and so if you're thinking about having children I also recommend not just having one because one child is way more work than three because you have to amuse one child all the time whereas if you have three you can ignore them completely and they'll just raise each other it's actually much better for the children you know as long as you're there not to make sure they don't light each other on fire and that sort of thing which is you're basically your job so okay but we'll act for the time being as if the child isn't social till three because that's a simplification but it's a useful one so PSJA was also extremely interested in how the child became social and I think apart from his ideas about you know the the self-generation of the baby from the bottom upward using its own reflexes and its own capacity to explore the other thing that Piaget was extraordinarily good at laying out and and remarkable at discovering was the role of games and so Piaget was the first psychologist I would say who discovered just how important it is to have kids play now the problem with play is that it's fun and so utilitarian people especially ones that are really conscientious have this idea that if it's fun it can't really be good for you and so because of that the role of play in children was not and still isn't appreciated in the full dimensions of its importance so for example you know we take little kids that are in grade one they're like six you know and what do we do with them we put them in chairs like the ones you're in you've been in that damn chair for like 16 years you know it's like we take those little characters and we put them in chairs and we expect them to sit there and listen to adults for six hours a day well it's it's so idiotic that it it's beyond comprehension it's no wonder the little blighters are hyperactive you know that just means they're alive they should be taken out into the schoolyard and supervised while playing until they're completely exhausted then they should have a little nap then maybe you could teach them something for a while but stopping them from playing and or or not facilitating play among them is absolutely crazy because that's exactly how children come to become social in the world and the reason for that is that the game's children play are analogs of the activities that adults engage in well it's not that hard to figure it out figure that out if you think about it I mean think about playing Monopoly or you're a teenager you play Monopoly how many people have played Monopoly great everybody's played Monopoly well what are you doing it's like evil capitalist Pig game right so and you know if you're gonna grow up to be an evil capitalist Pig then you can get a good practice good good practice going by playing Monopoly and you can you can become part of the one percent which is what you have to do to win right you need to have all the hotels and so no one else has any hotels and you know you play that and it's fun it's fun so it's an analog of real life now it's an analog of real life in many ways because most of the things that you do with other people involve adhering to a set of shared rules and most of the things that you do with other people involve cooperating and competing with them so if you're playing Monopoly are you cooperating or competing how many people think competing okay how many people think cooperating okay you're cooperating are you playing the same rules are you playing by the same rules well yes unless you're cheating if you're cheating you're not playing Monopoly right you're cheating that's a different game so to play a monopoly you have to cooperate because you have to all agree to sit in the same place you have to agree not to steal the money you have to agree that the stupid rules which are completely arbitrary are the ones that are going to govern your life for the next you know two hours you have to agree to try you have to agree to try to have fun you have to agree to try to be like a good player which means you don't get all snively and whiny when someone when you land on someone's boardwalk and they completely bankrupt you you know so you're cooperating like mad and another thing Piaget pointed out which is absolutely lovely is that you can't have a game without cooperation and competition at the same time so there's no such thing as Cooperative games you have to have for it to be a game it has to be competition within cooperation or it can be cooperation within competition within cooperation you know these things are very complexity nested so if you're playing hockey for example is is hockey an aggressive game or a com or a Cooperative game well you have to play by the rules so both teams agree to that you're on the ice at the same time you don't bring a basketball you don't bring a chess game you're there to play hockey are you cooperating or competing with your teammates well both right you're cooperating with them because you want everyone to win plus you want everybody to get better at playing across time but you're competing with them because maybe you could be the star of the game and everybody's happy about that and then with the other team well are you cooperating or competing with them well as long as you're playing by the rules you're cooperating but there's obviously an element of competition now almost every human activity has those elements there's a body of rules underneath it or if they're not rules they're at least social conventions right they're things that people understand are allowed and not allowed and then there's a competitive and a Cooperative element all right so that's what children start to become particularly exposed to when they're about three how Piaget pointed out that there were in some sense two classes of children's games there was the games that have a really clearly defined aim and that'd be the goal and that'd be like you know in the little circles that we were talking about that's where you're trying to go now the thing about it being a game is that all of you have to be trying to go there at the same time and so what Piaget realized was that just as the child is trying to integrate all their little micro games inside them into some sort of unified thing which would be the child a stable personality across time and capable of weathering the storms of life when a group of children get together they build another one of those routines but it it includes all of them and so the kids might say well let's play um hide and go seek that's a good one and everyone knows the rules to hide and go seek and you can win or lose at height and go seek but what you're trying to do is you have to bring your sub personalities all the way up to their integrated State underneath a meta structure that's organized by the collection of children so the child would say well do you want to play hide and go seek and you're supposed to say you're either supposed to say Yes or perhaps pause it another game you're not supposed to freak out or get angry or say that that's a stupid game or run back to your mom because then you're not going to be very popular and you're not going to get to play and if you don't get to play well then you're you're ruined because if you don't learn how to play with others between two and four you never learn and then you're some poor Outcast and maybe you end up in jail or at least you end up like isolated and and awkward and and poorly socially integrated and that's not good because if you don't get into the kids games at three all of them start moving ahead and you don't and the farther they've moved ahead past you the less likely it is that they're going to play with you so one of the things that's really worth thinking about if you're going to have kids is you have a job as a parent and your job as a parent is to make your child socially acceptable especially to other children by the time they're three and if you don't do that well that's not very good you'll pay for it and so were your child and you know there's been lots of long-term follow-ups on this sort of thing and it seems pretty evident that if the kid isn't socialized by four then good luck there's no evidence at all from the developmental literature which is quite a dismal literature that you can fix that so anyways all right so the children all get together and they say well here's what we're going to do and everyone says yes and so they Orient their personalities towards that goal and then they interact in a cooperative and competitive way in pursuing the goal and that's a game and what they're doing is practicing being social human beings and so and they do that with all sorts of different games and then you might say well here's something really worth thinking about what does it mean to be a functional human being it to me it means to be the sort of human being that can be a good player across multiple games so you might think for example you tell your kid I'll tell you the story about a hockey game that I saw once Harkey parents say 10 of them should just be jailed as soon as they enter the arena so when my kid played call it a level high level hockey for a while when he was a kid anyways he was a good he's a good hockey player but it was really unbearable so we didn't do it for very long for a variety of reasons but anyways on his way to learning how to play hockey he was in one of these uh local leagues we had a Arena just around the corner fortunately enough and he wasn't the best player on the team there was a another kid on the team who was who was better I would say and uh he uh he was in a championship game at one point he hadn't been in very many championship games because his teams often weren't very good but anyways it was the local championship and we went and watched and it was a really fun game you know like it was really close I think it I think it was 3-3 till the final 15 or 20 seconds and then some kid from the other team scored a really good goal you know it was wasn't one of those things where they accidentally kicked the puck into the net or something it was a really nice play and so it was a tight game the teams were well matched the local League had made sure like they'd set up teams together and then if one team kept winning too consistently or one losing too consistently they'd sort of revamped the team so they were roughly equal which I really like because you know all the kids got a reasonably equal shot at it and everybody got to develop so anyways we were watching that it was pretty fun and uh the the star kid he was skating around out there and the game ended and he went off the ice and he smashed his hockey stick onto the cement because he was all irritated and you know which was pretty pathetic and then his father came running up to him and said oh you got robbed it was really terrible um you know the reffing was bad and you played very well and you should have won the game and he didn't say you know stop being a little rat and smashing your hockey stick onto the cement like your three which is what he should have said he he basically rewarded his child for narcissistic uh immature misbehavior so it was pretty pathetic it was child abuse as far as I'm concerned sort of up the side really man that's stupid what are you gonna do you're gonna train your child to be a narcissist it's like that of course that's child abuse it's moronic of course it was due to his own foolishness but I don't know if that's criminal right but it was really pathetic so but no but think about this now for a minute so you might think well what did that kid do wrong it's like well he wanted to win so that's okay you should want to win if you're playing a game I mean you're not any fun if you're playing a game and you're not trying to win and there's nothing more miserable than playing a game with someone at the end they say well you won because I wasn't really trying it's like you know you're not gonna play with them again if they do that and that's kind of interesting because it means they've done something wrong you know and even a kid can figure that out and so you might tell your kid be a good sport and it doesn't matter whether you win or not it matters how you play the game now what the hell a kid doesn't know how to what to make of that and you hardly even believe it right you think yeah it does matter if you win so I don't know what this means but you'll tell the child that and so then you might think well what does it mean to be a good sport and and that and that how you play the game is more important than whether you win or lose okay so think about it this way what's your goal well you might say to win the hockey game but that implies you're only going to play one hockey game but if you can play a hundred hockey games and then forget about that what if you're going to play a hundred hockey games in 200 basketball games and 50 chess games and you're gonna have a bunch of jobs and you're gonna have a bunch of friends and you're gonna have a bunch of relationships and all of those have a game-like structure and let's say that you're a real son of a when you play hockey and so no one ever invites you to do any of those other things it's like well you win the game but you lose the meta game and the metagame is the game that's made up of all the games you're ever going to play and what a parent means when they say doesn't matter whether you win or lose it matters how you play the game is that the metagame is more important than the game and you should learn how to play games so that whether or not you win or lose people really want to play with you because if they want to play with you man you're set right so here's here's a cool game so okay you two are gonna play this game are you ready okay so here's the deal I'm Gonna Give You twenty dollars you have to give some of that to him you want to get the offer once if he rejects it neither of you get anything okay how much you gonna give them 10. would you take that okay okay what why first is better than nothing exactly yeah it's fair right yeah yeah so here's this experiment is being done all over the world and so basically what they find is that people pretty much offer 50 50. now here's something cool let's say you go play this game and use 20 bucks and you're playing it with a really poor people and so you you set the game up so you say look offer him two bucks he's poor he'll take it so you offer him two bucks what does he do tells you to screw off right and he's more likely to do that if he's poorer so that's pretty interesting because like a classical Economist would say look what you should have done was offered him a dollar it's like you get 19. you get 19. he gets a dollar he's going to take the damn dollar because it's better than nothing but that isn't what people are like it's like you give them a dollar and you get 19 they want to punch you right they're not going to take that and that's because they don't want to play the game that way they want to play the game so that it's fair across multiple games now you might say let's say you're playing that in front of a whole bunch of people like we were now and let's say all these people are going to be able to invite you to play the same game and so maybe you're going to be able to make 400 in the next hour so then you might say well what should I do if I wanted everybody to invite me to play this game as much as possible then how much would you offer 15 exactly that's cool so that means actually you lost the game the one game right because you only get fifteen five and he gets 15. but like everyone's thinking hey I'm going to play an escape with her well that's that's what it means when you tell someone to play the game properly you say act as if while you're playing a specific game that there's a higher order moral principle that has to do with the total number of games that you're going to play across your entire life and play that game properly yeah well that's the evolution of higher moral thinking in part from a piagetian perspective it's bloody brilliant so all right we'll see you Tuesday [Applause]