Alison Gopnik Quotes

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.

Reading requires the brain to rearrange its original parts to learn something new.

Exciting discoveries in neuroscience are allowing us to fit educational methods to new understandings of how the brain develops.

Empty heads, cognitive science has taught us, learn nothing. The powerful cultural and personal flexibility of our species is owed at least in part to our starting off so well-informed; we are good learners because we know what to pay attention to and what questions are the right ones to ask.

We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously and effortlessly.

The brain is constantly adapting.

I work in a mix of areas and am informed by them all: child development, psycholinguistics, education, and most especially, cognitive neuroscience.

All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.

To find better means of fixing the brain, we first need to achieve something more fundamental. We must understand how it works.

Most of our brain cells are glial cells, once thought to be mere support cells, but now understood as having a critical role in brain function. Glial cells in the human brain are markedly different from glial cells in other brains, suggesting that they may be important in the evolution of brain function.

How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.

Experiences shape the brain, but the brain shapes the way we view experiences, too.

Children, in a way, are constant learners. Certainly sponge-like. Absorbing everything without careful analysis, even though, at the same time, they are certainly capable of incredible insights.

I think we're all fascinated and a little mystified by how the brain works. One of the most mysterious of the physical sciences is neurological science.

Neuroscience is now a very important research area in biology. We are now understanding a lot more about brains in babies, as well as children and adults.

The information age is first and foremost an education age in which education must start at birth and continue throughout a lifetime.

The human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.

We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.

As someone who was basically a software engineer for many years, I became fascinated with how the brain functions and is put together and works in such a different fashion than computers do.

When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.

I first got interested in the brain through computers.

As a programmer, you're working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.

None of us today know how to get computers to learn with the speed and flexibility of a child.

The thing you realize when you get into studying neuroscience, even a little bit, is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's as if the brain is trying to use everything at its disposal - what it is seeing, what it is hearing, what is the temperature, past experience.

As an ex-programmer, I'm still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens.