Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’
Here’s a sobering thought: The older we get, the harder it is for us to learn, to question, to reimagine. This isn’t just habit hardening into dogma. It’s encoded into the way our brains change as we age. And it’s worsened by an intellectual and economic culture that prizes efficiency and dismisses play.
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where she runs the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab; she’s also the author of over 100 papers and half a dozen books, including “The Gardener and the Carpenter” and “The Philosophical Baby.” What I love about her work is she takes the minds of children seriously. The child’s mind is tuned to learn. They are, she writes, the R. & D. departments of the human race. But a mind tuned to learn works differently from a mind trying to exploit what it already knows.
Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Alison Gopnik
The April 16 episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.”
April 16, 2021, 9:05 a.m. ET
Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Alison Gopnik. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.
A Conversation About Human Minds, for Human MindsThe psychologist Alison Gopnik and Ezra Klein discuss what children can teach adults about learning, consciousness and play.
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A Conversation About Human Minds, for Human Minds