Quotes by Alison Gopnik

About Alison Gopnik:

Alison Gopnik is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others. Her body of work also includes four books and over 100 journal articles. She has frequently appeared on TV and radio including The Charlie Rose Show and The Colbert Report. Slate writes of Gopnik, "One of the most prominent researchers in the field, Gopnik is also one of the finest writers, with a special gift for relating scientific research to the questions that parents and others most want answered. This is where to go if you want to get into the head of a baby." Gopnik is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, sharing the Mind & Matter column with Robert Sapolsky on alternating Saturdays.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Alison Gopnik

Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It's just they are equally interested in exploring both.

Alison Gopnik

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise.

Alison Gopnik

Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would ge...

Alison Gopnik

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.

Alison Gopnik

For better or worse, we live in possible worlds as much as actual ones. We are cursed by that characteristically human guilt and regret about what might have been in the past. But that may be the cost for our ability to hope and plan for what might b...

Alison Gopnik

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

Alison Gopnik

What we want in students is creativity and a willingness to fail. I always say to students, 'If you've never at some point stayed up all night talking to your new boyfriend about the meaning of life instead of preparing for the test, then you're not ...

Alison Gopnik

I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.

Alison Gopnik

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.

Alison Gopnik

What, of course, we want in a university is for people to learn the skills they're going to need outside the classroom. So, having a system that had more emphasis on inquiry and exploration but also on learning and practising specific skills would fi...

Alison Gopnik

Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: 'How should this society work? How should relationships among people work?' The e...

Alison Gopnik

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.

Alison Gopnik

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

Alison Gopnik

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

Alison Gopnik

One of the things I say is, 'You want to know what it's like to be a baby? It's like being in love for the first time in Paris after four double espressos.' And boy, you are alive and conscious.

Alison Gopnik

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.

Alison Gopnik

Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.

Alison Gopnik

I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by look...

Alison Gopnik

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

Alison Gopnik

The thing that is most important is having people who are involved and engaged with the kids and also are not stressed and can be involved with them. And that's actually not boring and banal. That actually takes a lot of work to make that happen, and...

Alison Gopnik

Author Bio

  • NameAlison Gopnik
  • DescriptionAmerican psychologists
  • BornJune 16, 1955
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPsychologist; Author