Today’s idea: Far from needful bundles of reflexes that just eat and cry, babies are in some ways more conscious than adults, research suggests. Adults might be better off thinking like them.

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Neuroscience | Descartes saw the baby mind as merely a sensory jumble. And there was a time, only a few decades ago, when newborns underwent surgery without anesthesia on the assumption that they were less conscious than adults. But the latest brain research affirms just how off such assumptions were, Jonah Lehrer writes in the Boston Globe.

Scientists have found that babies have more brain cells and fewer inhibitory neurotranmitters, which help explain why they’re “capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time.” And so, the article suggests, adults should be so lucky to have a “developmental shortcoming” like a baby’s inability to focus attention: “When we need to sort through a lot of seemingly irrelevant information or create something completely new, thinking like a baby is our best option.”

The research is the subject of “The Philosophical Baby,” a new book by Alison Gopnik, a Berkeley psychologist who in the Week in Review has questioned whether infant minds really need Baby Einstein-type learning aids. In a separate interview in Seed, she describes an evolutionary advantage to babies being “useless on purpose” with their tabula rasa brains. Children are “like the R&D department of the human species,” she says. [Boston Globe, Seed]

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