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Recorded at	October 12, 2010
Event	TEDxRainier
Duration (min:sec)	09:56
Video Type	TEDx Talk
Words per minute	186.04 fast
Readability (FK)	58.59 easy
Speaker	Patricia Kuhl


1	00:16	I want you to take a look at this baby.
2	00:19	What you're drawn to are her eyes and the skin you love to touch.
3	00:24	But today I'm going to talk to you about something you can't see.
4	00:27	What's going on up in that little brain of hers.
5	00:31	The modern tools of neuroscience are demonstrating to us
6	00:35	that what's going on up there is nothing short of rocket science.
7	00:39	And what we're learning is going to shed some light
8	00:43	on what the romantic writers and poets described as the "celestial openness"
9	00:49	of the child's mind.
10	00:52	What we see here is a mother in India,
11	00:55	and she's speaking Koro, which is a newly discovered language.
12	01:00	And she's talking to her baby.
13	01:02	What this mother --
14	01:03	and the 800 people who speak Koro in the world --
15	01:06	understands is that, to preserve this language,
16	01:10	they need to speak it to the babies.
17	01:12	And therein lies a critical puzzle.
18	01:15	Why is it that you can't preserve a language
19	01:17	by speaking to you and I, to the adults?
20	01:21	Well, it's got to do with your brain.
21	01:23	What we see here is that language has a critical period for learning.
22	01:28	The way to read this slide is to look at your age on the horizontal axis.
23	01:32	(Laughter)
24	01:34	And you'll see on the vertical your skill at acquiring a second language.
25	01:39	The babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven,
26	01:42	and then there's a systematic decline.
27	01:45	After puberty, we fall off the map.
28	01:48	No scientists dispute this curve,
29	01:50	but laboratories all over the world
30	01:52	are trying to figure out why it works this way.
31	01:55	Work in my lab is focused on the first critical period in development,
32	01:59	and that is the period in which babies
33	02:01	try to master which sounds are used in their language.
34	02:05	We think, by studying how the sounds are learned,
35	02:07	we'll have a model for the rest of language,
36	02:09	and perhaps for critical periods that may exist in childhood
37	02:12	for social, emotional and cognitive development.
38	02:16	So we've been studying the babies
39	02:18	using a technique that we're using all over the world
40	02:20	and the sounds of all languages.
41	02:22	The baby sits on a parent's lap,
42	02:24	and we train them to turn their heads when a sound changes --
43	02:27	like from "ah" to "ee."
44	02:28	If they do so at the appropriate time, the black box lights up
45	02:32	and a panda bear pounds a drum.
46	02:34	A six-monther adores the task.
47	02:37	What have we learned?
48	02:38	Well, babies all over the world
49	02:40	are what I like to describe as "citizens of the world."
50	02:44	They can discriminate all the sounds of all languages,
51	02:47	no matter what country we're testing and what language we're using,
52	02:51	and that's remarkable because you and I can't do that.
53	02:54	We're culture-bound listeners.
54	02:56	We can discriminate the sounds of our own language,
55	02:58	but not those of foreign languages.
56	03:00	So the question arises: When do those citizens of the world
57	03:03	turn into the language-bound listeners that we are?
58	03:06	And the answer: before their first birthdays.
59	03:09	What you see here is performance on that head-turn task
60	03:12	for babies tested in Tokyo and the United States,
61	03:15	here in Seattle,
62	03:16	as they listened to "ra" and "la" --
63	03:18	sounds important to English, but not to Japanese.
64	03:21	So at six to eight months, the babies are totally equivalent.
65	03:24	Two months later, something incredible occurs.
66	03:27	The babies in the United States are getting a lot better,
67	03:30	babies in Japan are getting a lot worse,
68	03:32	but both of those groups of babies are preparing for exactly the language
69	03:35	that they are going to learn.
70	03:37	So the question is: What's happening during this critical two-month period?
71	03:41	This is the critical period for sound development,
72	03:44	but what's going on up there?
73	03:45	So there are two things going on.
74	03:47	The first is that the babies are listening intently to us,
75	03:50	and they're taking statistics as they listen to us talk --
76	03:54	they're taking statistics.
77	03:56	So listen to two mothers speaking motherese --
78	03:58	the universal language we use when we talk to kids --
79	04:01	first in English and then in Japanese.
80	04:03	(Video) Ah, I love your big blue eyes --
81	04:07	so pretty and nice.
82	04:11	(Japanese)
83	04:17	Patricia Kuhl: During the production of speech, when babies listen,
84	04:21	what they're doing is taking statistics on the language that they hear.
85	04:26	And those distributions grow.
86	04:29	And what we've learned is that babies are sensitive to the statistics,
87	04:33	and the statistics of Japanese and English are very, very different.
88	04:37	English has a lot of Rs and Ls.
89	04:40	The distribution shows.
90	04:42	And the distribution of Japanese is totally different,
91	04:45	where we see a group of intermediate sounds,
92	04:48	which is known as the Japanese "R."
93	04:50	So babies absorb the statistics of the language
94	04:54	and it changes their brains;
95	04:56	it changes them from the citizens of the world
96	04:58	to the culture-bound listeners that we are.
97	05:01	But we as adults are no longer absorbing those statistics.
98	05:06	We are governed by the representations in memory
99	05:08	that were formed early in development.
100	05:11	So what we're seeing here
101	05:13	is changing our models of what the critical period is about.
102	05:16	We're arguing from a mathematical standpoint
103	05:19	that the learning of language material may slow down
104	05:22	when our distributions stabilize.
105	05:24	It's raising lots of questions about bilingual people.
106	05:28	Bilinguals must keep two sets of statistics in mind at once
107	05:32	and flip between them, one after the other,
108	05:35	depending on who they're speaking to.
109	05:36	So we asked ourselves,
110	05:38	can the babies take statistics on a brand new language?
111	05:41	And we tested this by exposing American babies
112	05:44	who'd never heard a second language
113	05:46	to Mandarin for the first time during the critical period.
114	05:49	We knew that, when monolinguals were tested in Taipei and Seattle
115	05:52	on the Mandarin sounds, they showed the same pattern.
116	05:55	Six to eight months, they're totally equivalent.
117	05:58	Two months later, something incredible happens.
118	06:00	But the Taiwanese babies are getting better, not the American babies.
119	06:04	What we did was expose American babies, during this period, to Mandarin.
120	06:09	It was like having Mandarin relatives come and visit for a month
121	06:12	and move into your house and talk to the babies for 12 sessions.
122	06:15	Here's what it looked like in the laboratory.
123	06:18	(Mandarin)
124	06:39	PK: So what have we done to their little brains?
125	06:42	(Laughter)
126	06:44	We had to run a control group to make sure
127	06:46	that coming into the laboratory didn't improve your Mandarin skills.
128	06:50	So a group of babies came in and listened to English.
129	06:52	And we can see from the graph
130	06:54	that exposure to English didn't improve their Mandarin.
131	06:56	But look at what happened to the babies exposed to Mandarin for 12 sessions.
132	07:00	They were as good as the babies in Taiwan
133	07:02	who'd been listening for 10 and a half months.
134	07:05	What it demonstrated is that babies take statistics on a new language.
135	07:09	Whatever you put in front of them, they'll take statistics on.
136	07:13	But we wondered what role
137	07:14	the human being played in this learning exercise.
138	07:19	So we ran another group of babies in which the kids got the same dosage,
139	07:23	the same 12 sessions, but over a television set.
140	07:26	And another group of babies who had just audio exposure
141	07:29	and looked at a teddy bear on the screen.
142	07:32	What did we do to their brains?
143	07:34	What you see here is the audio result --
144	07:38	no learning whatsoever --
145	07:39	and the video result --
146	07:42	no learning whatsoever.
147	07:44	It takes a human being for babies to take their statistics.
148	07:48	The social brain is controlling
149	07:51	when the babies are taking their statistics.
150	07:53	We want to get inside the brain and see this thing happening
151	07:56	as babies are in front of televisions, as opposed to in front of human beings.
152	08:00	Thankfully, we have a new machine, magnetoencephalography,
153	08:05	that allows us to do this.
154	08:06	It looks like a hair dryer from Mars.
155	08:09	But it's completely safe, completely noninvasive and silent.
156	08:13	We're looking at millimeter accuracy
157	08:16	with regard to spatial and millisecond accuracy
158	08:19	using 306 SQUIDs --
159	08:22	these are superconducting quantum interference devices --
160	08:25	to pick up the magnetic fields that change as we do our thinking.
161	08:29	We're the first in the world to record babies in an MEG machine
162	08:35	while they are learning.
163	08:37	So this is little Emma.
164	08:39	She's a six-monther.
165	08:41	And she's listening to various languages in the earphones that are in her ears.
166	08:46	You can see, she can move around.
167	08:48	We're tracking her head with little pellets in a cap,
168	08:52	so she's free to move completely unconstrained.
169	08:55	It's a technical tour de force.
170	08:57	What are we seeing?
171	08:59	We're seeing the baby brain.
172	09:01	As the baby hears a word in her language, the auditory areas light up,
173	09:06	and then subsequently areas surrounding it that we think are related to coherence,
174	09:11	getting the brain coordinated with its different areas, and causality,
175	09:15	one brain area causing another to activate.
176	09:18	We are embarking on a grand and golden age of knowledge
177	09:24	about child's brain development.
178	09:26	We're going to be able to see a child's brain
179	09:28	as they experience an emotion, as they learn to speak and read,
180	09:33	as they solve a math problem, as they have an idea.
181	09:36	And we're going to be able to invent brain-based interventions
182	09:40	for children who have difficulty learning.
183	09:42	Just as the poets and writers described,
184	09:45	we're going to be able to see, I think, that wondrous openness,
185	09:50	utter and complete openness, of the mind of a child.
186	09:54	In investigating the child's brain,
187	09:56	we're going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be human,
188	10:01	and in the process,
189	10:02	we may be able to help keep our own minds open to learning
190	10:05	for our entire lives.
191	10:06	Thank you.
192	10:08	(Applause)

Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies