Alison Gopnik

“The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.”

“What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.”

“We decided to become development psychologists and study children because there aren't any Martians. These brilliant beings with the little bodies and big heads are the closest we can get to a truly alien intelligence (even if we may occasionally suspect that they are bent on making us their slaves.)”

“We have lots of evidence that putting investments in early childhood education, even evidence from very hard-nosed economists, is one of the very best investments that the society can possibly make. And yet we still don't have public support for things like preschools.”

“Samuel Johnson called it the vanity of human wishes, and Buddhists talk about the endless cycle of desire. Social psychologists say we get trapped on a hedonic treadmill. What they all mean is that we wish, plan and work for things that we think will make us happy, but when we finally get them, we aren't nearly as happy as we thought we'd be.”

“Overall, female scientists have fewer resources than male scientists, just as poor people have less access to health care. But if you compare male and female scientists with identical resources, you find that the women are just as likely to be successful.”

“Our babies are like penguins; penguin babies can't exist unless more than one person is taking care of them. They just can't keep going.”

“The brain knows the real secret of seduction, more effective than even music and martinis. Just keep whispering, 'Gee, you are really special' to that sack of water and protein that is a body, and you can get it to do practically anything.”

“The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.”

“From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.”

“Even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real, whether in books or movies or in their own pretend play. Children with the most elaborate and beloved imaginary friends will gently remind overenthusiastic adults that these companions are, after all, just pretend.”

“Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.”

“What makes knowledge automatic is what gets you to Carnegie Hall - practice, practice, practice.”

“Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.”

“What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.”

“The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.”

“Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.”

“As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.”

“One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.”

“Siblings are the guarantors that the private childhood world - so unlike the adult world that scientists are only just beginning to understand it - is a fully shared and objective one.”