The Kids Are Right

“How come everybody over ten years old is frowning?” — Vic Chestnutt

We adults¹ like to believe a lot of things to make us feel better about where we’re at. We wax nostalgic about the lessons we know at thirty that may have served us at twenty. We tend to view wherever we are currently as the sum and outcome of a lifetime of learning. We associate “growing up” with gaining intelligence, but that assumption seems narrowly based on a specific type of intelligence. I find myself more and more thinking lately about the type of intelligence that’s a birthright that we lose, which might have to do with the scope of our experience.

We probably have a hard time remembering, but the consciousness we had as a child was wildly different than the kind we use to interact with the world as an adult. UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik uses the perfect language to highlight these differences:

“I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults. Adult attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight. Our consciousness of that thing that we’re attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different. (They) seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. So babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing, but they’re very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once. And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they’re flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good (at) inducing learning and plasticity. And the inhibitory parts haven’t come on yet.”

“Consciousness narrows as we get older. Adults have congealed in their beliefs and are hard to shift…children are more fluid and consequently more willing to entertain new ideas. If you want to understand what an expanded consciousness looks like, all you have to do is have tea with a four-year-old.”

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Children aren’t smarter than adults. But perhaps they’re wiser. They certainly are more curious. More open. They have what Gopnik called “expanded consciousness.” Curiosity and openness are a kind of wisdom in that they lead to a more fulfilling moment to moment experience that knowledge is not guaranteed to do. A lack of certainty is not necessarily a crippling confusion, it can be a power.

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.” — Albert Einstein

I brought my four year old nephew kayaking on Lake Superior. At one point he turned to me and said, “I wonder who made this.” When I asked what he was talking about he told me “the lake” in a tone that suggested he thought it was obvious he meant the lake.

For many adults there is a temptation to view all naïveté dismissively. They’d argue that his life will be better, more full, once he knows a scientific explanation of how the lake formed. Probably not. Probably the wheels turning and the mysteries not yet shut out give a wider view, and a wider view seems in some way wiser — indicative of a more full experience.

With specialization and with a stronger ability to deconstruct the world into parts we get a brighter spotlight. We find more elaborate ways to convince ourselves that what’s in the spotlight is what matters and what’s outside of it is not relevant. We end up feeling better about our big brains and all our big brains can do!

But this is something that’s learned. Or rather, the positive potential of thinking free of the rigid models of adulthood is something that’s unlearned. This rigidity is referred to by neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris as “entropy suppression”:

“Thus, the proposal that normal waking consciousness in healthy, adult, modern humans depends on entropy suppression implies that there was a state relatively proximal to this (e.g., in archaic homo-sapiens and in infants) in which entropy was relatively elevated, as it is in primary states. The point is that the brain of adult modern-humans is in a settling rather than expanding phase.”

There are no solutions. Only trade offs. It’s likely necessary that we develop this “settling phase” for a reason. It’s likely beneficial for our chances of survival to develop a mind that can make more specific observations and build complex understandings of the world around us.

But we, seated in our arrogance at the church of progress and science and technology, undervalue what it means to defy what Aldous Huxley called the “reducing valve of consciousness.” A child’s reducing valve has not yet seized control.² We undervalue the positive thing lost and so we don’t seek ways to cultivate it in our adult lives, though it may guide us to a richer experience.³

“Man is a thinking reed. But his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. Childlikeness has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained man thinks yet he does not think.” — D. T. Suzuki

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Up until age 4 or 5 most children haven’t fully developed what we call theory of mind, part of which includes the knowledge that one’s own mental states might be different from others’ mental states. A child without fully formed theory of mind might fail to understand why someone who left the room for part of a game would misunderstand a rule change that occurred in their absence. It’s as if, in a sense, they think that “knowledge” is a real thing that one can be tuned in to or not tuned in to but that “my knowledge” is not a separate experience. They are not hung up on the thing that we eventually identify as our self.

“Children very often don’t want unnecessary comments on their life. Because it’s objectifying. When children are playing by themselves it’s manifest that there is a self-forgetfulness in that. There is a giving of themselves into the game. That’s a very good model for us for our lives. Not to start from a fixed position, but to allow the reception of the world to take us out of ourselves towards the world. It is self-isolation, as an entity…which is the root of all our difficulties.” — James Low

There is wisdom in this submission to the whole. To not thinking of the self as a separate entity. We have successful adults who strain and study very, very hard to try to cultivate a sort of self-forgetfulness the optimizers call flow state. Children call it living. Wisdom isn’t about accumulating the best data. It’s about becoming closer to the true nature of experience — which is open, mysterious, selfless.

“When the Lord says you must “become as one of these little ones,” I take him to mean you must be stripped of all the accretions of smugness and pretense and triviality.” — Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

It seems like every time you see a clip of a 90 year old being asked the secret to life they say something simple. Something that is knowable directly. Something a child would understand and a proud 27 year old would scoff at. They never start raving about their optimization tools or their productivity hacks or their fad diets. Their learned wisdom wouldn’t allow it. They tend to encourage us to not take ourselves too seriously and to remember to laugh. To enjoy a moment just as it is. To restore childlikeness. To become as of the little ones. It’s like we come back to this profound thing after a lifetime of thinking we can outsmart what was already ours to begin with.

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“Adults, in their dealing with children, are insane. And children know it too. Adults lay down rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet they expect children to obey the rules, believe the truths, and admire and respect their parents for this nonsense. Children must be very wise and secret to tolerate adults at all. And the greatest nonsense of all that adults expect children to believe is that people learn by experience. No greater lie was ever revered. And its falseness is immediately discerned by children since their parents obviously have not learned anything by experience. Far from learning, adults simply become set in a maze of prejudices and dreams and sets of rules whose origins they do not know and would not dare inspect for fear the whole structure might topple over on them. I think children instinctively know this. Intelligent children learn to conceal their knowledge and keep free of this howling mania.” — Ed Rickets

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1 — Anyone who knows me knows the sheer pain it induces for me to put the word “we” in front of the word “adults.”

2 — Gopnik speculates that a four year old’s sensory experience might be more like an adult’s hallucinatory state than it is like a sober one, “The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.”

3 — The implication is we should try to get exposure to higher entropy states.