Alison GopnikThe Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

Several chapters of this book were required reading in a cognitive development class I took as a PhD student. I ended up reading the rest of the book while I was pregnant a year later. I love the authors, as I feel they write well and are some of the leaders in their field. The book is a little repetitive, but their style keeps it from sounding like a textbook, and conveys the wonder and appreciation the researchers have for their work.Several people gave this book one star, complaining essentially that it wasn't a how-to book to tell them how to make their babies smarter. Besides the obvious advice of paying attention to your children and reading them a book now and then, what this research shows is that what we do as parents has been wired into us for the maximal development of our children. There aren't any books out there that you can read which give you a plan for making your child smarter, and if they're telling you that, they're wrong.I feel this book establishes a good frame of reference for understanding where an infant's brain starts out in its development from a fussing ball of arms and legs to something that approximates a human adult in logic and emotion. Many people doubtless still believe that infants come into the world a blank slate, with no knowledge or strategies for learning, and the research presented in this book shows us that's just not so. I recommend this book to any of my pregnant friends who I feel might be interested in gaining a glimpse of the amazing development that's happening inside their baby's brain.

As the father of a nine month old boy, I have been enthralled with this book. It is not a "how to" book on helping your child learn, but rather is a readable introduction to the current state of the study of cognitive development of babies. If you don't believe that it is possible to know what a baby is thinking, you will be fascinated at the clever experiments that have been constructed to tease out information from a baby's brain. It is surprising who much we can find out about how babies' brains work, and how much that can teach us about the adult human brain.The tone of the book is chatty, but the content is substantial. The authors discuss the philosophers as well as the scientists who are working in this area. I don't suppose that the average new parent is interested in wading into Chomsky, Ryle or Descartes, but this book actually makes it interesting and compelling.The book is broken down into the acquisition of particular mental skills. The authors thesis is that babies learn using, more or less, the scientific method, forming hypotheses and then testing them emperically. (The title of the book is a clever word play, referring to this theory, while simultaneously demonstrating what adult scientists are learning from their empirical studies.) While this may seem pretensious, the authors actually make a pretty good case for this theory.The acquisition of language deviates somewhat from this general theoretical method, but the authors have some fascinating experimental data to illustrate the way babies actually learn language.In short, this book is highly recommended, not just to new parents, but also to anyone interested in childhood cognitive development or what can be known about the workings of the human brain.

This book presents the latest research concerning child development, but does so in an accessible and friendly way. This is not a how-to book, rather containing information about how children learn and develop over time. Chapters include: What Children Learn About People; What Children Learn About Things; What Children Learn About Language; What Scientists Have Learned About Children's Minds; What Scientists Have Learned About Children's Brains.To a small extent the book suffers from the usual dilutory effects of having multiple authors. They also try to be a bit too cute sometimes, but this does not overly detract from the book's success as a layman-friendly introduction to child development research.There is a very useful Notes section, References, and a good Index.My advice, for all it's worth: If you are going to get one book about child development research, get Lise Eliot's 'What's Going On In There?', which is less precious, more extensive, and better organized. If you are going to get two books, add this to your list. I find myself referring back to the former book fairly often, but I do browse through this one occasionally as well.

This book is definitely not the most well-formulated book I've ever read, but parts of it are really worth the time to read. The first half gives information from research they do with babies, which was absolutely fascinating. In the second half, the chapter on babies' brains was interesting, but the rest of it was kind of a waste of paper, especially the last chapter.The authors are obsessed with scientists (they continuously refer to them as though they are the gods of earth basically), sex (they have pointless sex comments throughout the first half of the book), and evolution (it seems as though after they wrote each chapter, they went back and said, "Where are four places we can comment about evolution in this chapter?"). Those aspects of the book distract from the focus of learning about how babies and young children think.Overall, I think this is a definite book to at least check out from the library if you're a parent of a young child or if you work with young children.

Very likely the most informative and entertaining book ever written on this subject. By the way, the "scientist" in the crib is the infant, not some Ph.D. bent over the crib observing!

Good read,

Love all the anecdotes that exemplify the different stages of development. I recommend this book to any new or soon to be new parent.

Arrived as described. Thank you.

I bought this book for my friend, a new dad. The book was perfect for explaining development in an accessible way. He really liked the explanations and the simple developmental tests he could try at home as his baby grew.