Speaking of psychology is taking a summer break, so we're rerunning one of our favorite episodes from the past year.

In February, I talked to University of California Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik about how children's amazing brains are optimized to explore the world,

and the implications that has for human evolution, how we parent our kids, the role of grandparents

in raising children, and more. I hope you enjoy this episode from the archives. Speaking of

psychology, we'll be back with a new episode next week. Thank you for listening.

As a species, we humans have an extra long childhood. Our closest primate relatives are more or less self-sufficient by about age seven,

nearly a decade before human kids are ready to face the world on their own.

And as any parent or caregiver knows, children are costly.

They take an extraordinary amount of time, energy, and resources to raise. Children are not simply messier and less sophisticated versions of adults either.

A baby's brain has unusual capabilities.

It's optimized to explore the world and seek new knowledge and experiences.

Knowing this has implications for how we think about the purpose of childhood, and how we raise and educate our children,

even how we might develop artificial intelligence inspired by children's remarkable learning abilities.

So why do we humans have such a long childhood? What's in it for us as a species?

What can we learn about our adult selves by looking at kids' brains?

And is there anything we adults can do to become more open, curious, and childlike in our thinking?

How might that be beneficial? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of

the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and

everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Allison Gopnik, a professor of psychology

and an affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies how

children learn and come to understand the world around them. Over her four-decade career, she's published more than 100 journal articles and many books,

including her most recent The Gardener and the Carpenter, what the new science of child

...