The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind,   ISBN:9780688177881

Customer Rating: 

This book is a fascinating look at early childhood development. It overthrows many earlier, unresearched notions about children, especially infants, having simplistic minds, and instead explores the amazing complexity of their minds.

The book explores many earlier theories, and then explains how various experiments have shown them to be incorrect, and what instead is most likely occurring within the infant or toddler's mind.

It covers topics such as language development and aural differentiation, the impact of nurture and the critical need for loving attention during the early childhood years, stages of tool learning, imagination, and even things such as why we don't have memories from when we were two.

Throughout it is told with historical fact, examples, and high level results of experiments, making the book interesting, engaging and one filled with information.

I highly recommend it.

Customer Rating: 

Ms. Gopnik is one of our best researchers and also a truly gifted writer. This is a book that continually delights. Reading it, I found myself alternately grinning from ear to ear and experiencing shocks of recognition. When I grow up, I want to be just like the children that Gopnik and her colleagues describe! Treat yourself to this profound and beautiful work. It's one of those books that reverberates after you've read it--casting everything you experience in a new and lovely light.

Customer Rating: 

This book wasn't as interesting as I hoped it would be, but I loved the chapter on language. It was fascinating to read that when babies initially begin to babble, they are able to differentiate all spoken sounds. Then the culture they are living in exerts its influence.

"Once babies reach the babbling milestone, the universal phase of language production ends. Babies from different cultures, learning different languages, start to make the distinctive noises of their own community sometime between a year and a year and a half. The Chinese baby starts to babble in a way that sounds Chinese. She uses very rapid pitch changes just like adult Chinese speakers. Swedish babies babble in a way that sounds distinctly Swedish, using the rising intonation patterns typical of adult speakers of Swedish."

The research described in this book gave good reasons why I am constantly amazed every time I spend time with my grandsons.

Customer Rating: 

An extremely readable overview of infant developmental psychology, this book provides fascinating details of the last thirty years of research on infant minds. The basic organization around three classic problems in epistemology (Other Minds, External Objects, and Language) will particularly appeal to those who took a few philosophy classes in college, but no background in either philosophy or science is necessary to understand and appreciate the work. Much of the book is devoted to summarizing various experiments, with the typical structure being: "If you show a three-month old X, she will do Y, but if you show a six-month-old the same X, he will do Z. Therefore we know that babies learn Z during this time period."

Several other reviewers have compared The Scientist in the Crib to Lise Eliot's What's Going On In There?, and having read both, I would characterize the difference as follows: The Scientist in the Crib is easily accessible to all readers but does not give much biological information about the brain. What's Going On In There? offers much more detail about neurology, but requires substantially more effort on the reader's part.

Customer Rating: 

This book is definitely not the most well-formulated book I've ever read, but parts of it are really worth the time to read. The first half gives information from research they do with babies, which was absolutely fascinating. In the second half, the chapter on babies' brains was interesting, but the rest of it was kind of a waste of paper, especially the last chapter.

The authors are obsessed with scientists (they continuously refer to them as though they are the gods of earth basically), sex (they have pointless sex comments throughout the first half of the book), and evolution (it seems as though after they wrote each chapter, they went back and said, "Where are four places we can comment about evolution in this chapter?"). Those aspects of the book distract from the focus of learning about how babies and young children think.

Overall, I think this is a definite book to at least check out from the library if you're a parent of a young child or if you work with young children.