Little Minds, Big Ideas

Psychological research has told us much about the mental worlds of babies and small children. In this talk, Charles Fernyhough explores how the study of young children’s minds can shed light on some profound ideas about what it means to be human.

Decades of psychological research have told us much about the mental worlds of babies and small children. In this talk, Dr Fernyhough will explore how the study of young children’s minds can shed light on some profound ideas about what it means to be human. He will ask what observations of children’s memory and story-telling can tell us about the nature of human identity; what we can learn about our powers of reason by listening to children thinking out loud; and how our capacities to love are shaped by our early relationships with our parents. He will show how babies’ brains shed light on the nature of consciousness, and how being a newborn baby must be a strange place to be. Finally, he will ask what children’s reasoning about the afterlife can tell us about God. The most marvellous finding is that these distinctive human capacities all take shape in the first three or so years of life, showing us that the careful study of children’s minds is anything but child’s play.

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