FREAKONOMICS RADIO
1
CHILDLIKE THINKING
THE MAGIC SHOW The magician’s name is Alex Stone. And the audience is kids – a bunch of middle schoolers from Brooklyn.
With the thumb of his right hand, Stone stuffs the handkerchief into his left hand.
Then... it disappears!
But then he reaches behind one kid’s ear and pulls out the handkerchief.
“ I FEEL LIKE THEIR BRAINS ARE ALWAYS AWAKE WHEN THEY’RE WATCHING IT ” Now they try to figure out the trick.
ADULT: Palming it?
DUBNER: Anybody have any guesses?
STONE: That’s the dumbest theory I ever heard, so stupid, go home. None of this was surprising to Stone.
KID: Something involves your thumb? Stone reaches into his right front pants pocket and pulls out … a fake thumb. Now, we had also invited some adults to see this magic show. How well did they figure out the trick? ADULT: I was wondering if it could be related to the ring at all.
STONE: There’s a sense that when a kid watches a trick. They’re asking a question at every second. They’re really approaching it with this sort of constant sense of curiosity and constant sense of trying to understand what’s going on. And I feel like their brains are just always awake when they’re watching it.
“IS IT POSSIB WOULD ALL OFF IF WE C THINK LIKE A
BLE WE BE BETTER COULD A CHILD?”
2 TRAITS OF CHILDLIKE THINKING
“ SOMETIMES DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY AND SIMPLY AND WITH JOY AND TRIVIALITY LEADS YOU TO A REALLY SPECIAL PLACE THAT AS AN ADULT YOU DON’T GET TO GO TO VERY OFTEN ” DUBNER: Let’s talk about some of what we label the characteristics of thinking like a child, like the good characteristics that adults might want to smuggle into adulthood because they are productive. LEVITT: I think the beauty of thinking like a child is that sometimes doing things differently and simply and with a kind of joy and triviality leads you to a really special place that as an adult you don’t get to go to very often.
IMPORTANCE OF HAVING FUN
DUBNER: So Levitt, kids spend a lot of their time playing and otherwise having fun. Adults out of duty and necessity spend considerably less, at least most adults. What is the advantage of keeping your eye on fun or injecting fun in your work? Why is fun something that is underutilized or could be utilized better? LEVITT: I think fun is so much more
important than people realize. Enjoying what you do, loving what you do is such a completely unfair advantage to anyone you are competing with who does it for a job. People who love it they go to bed at night thinking about the solutions. They wake up in the middle of the night, and they jot down ideas, they work weekends. And people who love things work and work and work at it. Because it’s not work — its fun.
POWER OF ACKNOWLEDGING THE OBVIOUS “ IT’S THE THING THAT ONCE YOU STEP BACK AND LOOK AT IT THROUGH LENS OF IN THIS CASE A CHILDLIKE IGNORANCE IT OPENS YOU UP TO SEEING WHAT THE TRUTH IS ” DUBNER: Something else that kids do is they will state facts, or describe something that’s pretty obvious. Whereas adults, we tend to think it indicates that we are not thinking hard. talk about power of acknowledging the obvious. LEVITT: The best examples I’ve seen about stating the obvious have all
come in a business context. And a lot of time it is embarrassing because it is such an obvious or dumb question, but every once in a while it turns out that that obvious question is the absolute breakthrough. It’s the thing that once you step back and look at it through lens of in this case a childlike ignorance it opens you up to seeing what the truth is.
“PEOPLE WH THEIR THING AND WORK A AT IT. BECA NOT WORK —
HO LOVE GS WORK AND WORK AUSE IT’S — ITS FUN”
PAYING ATTENTION TO MANY THINGS
DUBNER: And what else can we learn from that magic show? STONE: Kids are better at paying attention to more than one thing. Their attention is more diffuse. Adults are really good at focusing on one thing and ignoring peripheral distractions, whereas kids are really good at sort of shot gunning their attention all over the place. Which is a good way to learn. It’s good when you’re first learning how things work, when you’re first exploring the world. But in magic, you want the person to focus on one thing. I think it’s also that they’re approaching it with this curiosity and it’s this sponge-like desire. I don’t feel like adults are like that. I sort of feel like they watch it and they’re waiting for the
punchline, and then they sort of see it, and then they maybe go back and think about it. With kids, you get this sense that at every step of the way they’re trying to understand it. From the second they see it, they’re always coming up with theories. And they come up with theories that adults just aren’t doing that. GOPNIK: You’re much more likely to be able to manipulate adult attention than you are to be able to manipulate children They’re not very good at just focusing on one thing. They get distracted incredibly easily. They notice anything that’s interesting or that changes or that they might learn from in their environment. And that makes them worse subjects of magic.
3 ENGAGING CHILDLIKE TRAITS AS AN ADULT
MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT CHILDREN
“ LITTLE BABIES ARE CAPABLE OF MAKING LOGICAL DEDUCTIONS ” DUBNER: Can you summarize what we’ve learned and a little bit about how we’ve learned it about how children think, and especially establish things like causal understandings? GOPNIK: People used to think that children were illogical. And what we’ve discovered, is that even little babies are capable of making logical deductions.
Let me give you one more example. The conventional wisdom has been that children are egocentric and they can’t take the perspective of other people. And one of the really dramatic things we’ve discovered is that, again, even infants are capable of figuring out what’s going on in someone else’s mind, and figuring out how they think and feel about the world.
CHILD VS. ADULT
DUBNER: I believe that children have these traits in maybe a different shape or dimension than the traits I have, but I think it’s probably hard for most adults to think about the idea that there are traits that are valued in adults that children may actually be better at than adults. Are there some that would fit that category? GOPNIK: Part of the reason why we adults are really good at learning
things quickly, is because we already know a lot about the world. So when you look at how adults learn, the way that we typically learn is, we take all those things we’ve already learned and we already know—and they weigh really, really heavily in our decisionmaking and in the kinds of solutions that we’re going to consider—and then we maybe have a little new evidence. But most of the time, we sort of ignore it. Or we might just tweak a little bit
what we already think. But you know, mostly the way our brains are is, they’re not broke, so we don’t want to fix them. They’re working just fine. We’ll just leave them the way they are. DUBNER: Implicit in that is while we have this strong set of priors, right, prior beliefs that we act on. And also we have a lot of shortcuts that we’ve learned work well enough, and so we do them always.
GOPNIK: Exactly. I think the general picture, when you talk about risks as adults, when we’re trying to decide on a course of action, we’re always balancing the risks and utilities. Whether that’s a risk to my reputation or my ego or my future interactions with other people or just a risk to my profit margin. And kids aren’t in that world of risk and utility calculations. That liberates them.
WHERE DID THESE TRAITS GO? “ IT’S JUST A MATTER OF AS WE GET TO KNOW MORE AND BECOME MORE EFFICIENT, WE LOSE THE CAPACITY FOR FLEXIBILITY ”
DUBNER: Where do all these wonderful and productive childlike traits go? GOPNIK: One thing that could happen is, we all have the same brains but as we accumulate more information that some of the pathways get strengthened and become more efficient and then other pathways just are, what’s called ‘pruned.’ They just disappear. So it could be that it’s just a matter of as we get to know more and become more efficient, we lose the capacity for flexibility. But it could also be that there is something about being a child, about having that particular childlike mind and brain, that is the thing that’s letting you explore more and, in some sense, be more creative. And that there are things that we could do even as adults that put us back into that kind of state.
ENGAGING CHILD LIKE TRAITS DUBNER: So I’m curious if your observation that kids are more perceptive when it comes to magic has led you to consciously try to kind of engage or magnify any kid-like traits in your life as an adult? STONE: Absolutely. DUBNER: Like what? Name some. STONE: Like I love listening to the Bach Lute Suites. Try listening to the lute suites and always focus on the bass. [MUSIC: John Williams, “JS Bach Lute Suite No. 4 in E Major, BWV 1006a: VI. Gigue” (from The Four Lute Suites)] STONE: Because the bass is always less, you’re less conscious of the bass.
“ IT ALLOWS YOU TO KIND OF DIVIDE YOUR ATTENTION SO THAT YOU’RE EXPERIENCING THE PIECE AS A WHOLE ”
Because the higher frequency notes are always the lead notes. It’s like when you’re listening to a song and there’s a singer singing high, you’re drawn to that. So when you force yourself to sort of focus on the bass, it kind of levels out everything else. It kind of turns down the sort of middle voice and high voice. And you end up hearing everything simultaneously. And it allows you to kind of divide your attention so that you’re experiencing the piece as a whole. You’re hearing all the voices more clearly. But if you kind of train yourself to do it, I think it brings out a richness in the music that’s amazing, because you start to hear everything at once. And that’s kind of the same idea as focusing on the hand that’s not doing so much in the magic trick.
“HAVING CH MIND AND B IS THE THING LETTING YO AND, IN SOM MORE CREAT
HILDLIKE BRAIN, THAT G THAT’S U EXPLORE ME SENSE BE TIVE”
This book is created by Sung Sub Kim on December 9, 2014 at Washington University in St.Louis. RockoUltraFLF and DIN for typography. It is designed based on Think Like a Child (5/22/14), a podcast episode from Freakonomics Radio. Executive Producer: Suzie Lechtenberg Hosts: Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner Special Guest: Alex Stone & Alison Gopnik