Why the World Is More Vivid for Babies

This is the second entry in a dialogue about Alison Gopnik's new book, The Philosophical Baby, between Gopnik and Annie Paul. Read the first entry here.

Dear Annie,

First of all, I’m jealous—it’s been a long time since I could walk into the next room to see a baby transfixed by a ceiling fan. There’s a theory that human beings live on past menopause because we need all those grandmothers to help with our hyper-dependent children. I keep hoping that phase will kick in soon. And, of course, I need to remember that I can also decide to sleep in or make love or go to a movie at a moment’s notice. For me, at least, having my children leave the nest meant the end of one of the most intellectually interesting, sensually satisfying and morally profound parts of my life, but on the other hand, the house is clean and you can sleep in and read blogs—and funnily enough that trade-off doesn’t seem too bad.

In answer to your question, I think there are several circumstances in which adults put their brains in the same state as children do, and have the same kinds of experience. If you read William Wordsworth’s poems, or even better Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, you can find beautiful descriptions of that exalted and open state: “The hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.” The Romantics recognized that this state was childlike and they were among the first thinkers to value childhood for just that reason. (I have a weakness for the Romantic poets, even though, like babies, they did have a tendency to rely on other people, especially women, to take care of practical life for them. There is something to be said for adult responsibility, too.)

More mundanely, you can feel something like a childlike state when you travel, especially to an exotic place. Travelling puts you in the same situation as a baby, with a great deal of new information to take in all at once. And you seem to become hyper-conscious at the same time that you fall apart, practically speaking. You remember more from those three days in Beijing than from months of zombie working and commuting and meeting-attending at home. Falling in love seems to have the same effect, making the whole world vivid. I’m told that hunting can do this too, not that I’ve tried it. The science suggests that for babies, every day is like first love in Paris (or maybe I should say, since Double X has male readers, too, like a Hemingway safari).

One of the most interesting examples, for me, is meditation, the kind of “open awareness” meditation in which you simply open your mind to experience rather than focusing on a single object. In fact, I’ve argued that many of the details of meditative practice—tea, upright posture, stillness, counting breaths—are really techniques that put your brain back in its baby lantern state, very aware but not focused on the particulars of action and planning.

Of course, for adults, travel and hunting and meditation and maybe even falling in love require the sort of planning and focus that babies can do without. We are forced to focus on being unfocused and to intentionally try to stop intentionally trying.

And this brings me back to baby Gus and the ceiling fan. Caring for children requires an enormous amount of focus and effort and responsibility and attention, from an evolutionary point of view it’s literally one of the most characteristically adult things we do. (It drives me crazy when people react to conversation about babies at dinner parties by saying let’s talk about something adult, like real estate or sports.) But at the same time it gives you a chance to see the world through a child’s eyes. I realized that when I began to take my first child to the corner store with me. I had never really seen the three blocks that I walked past every day. Where I might have registered “three ordinary city blocks” my son saw a wilderness of swinging gates, yapping dogs, enthralling ledges to balance on. And I could too, just as you got a new glimpse of the fan.