Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

330 | HOW THE MIND WORKSthink a thought in the ordinary way, or we wouldn't be able to learn thatJohn believes in unicorns without believing in them ourselves. We haveto take a thought, set it aside in mental quotation marks, and think,"That is what John thinks" (or wants, or hopes for, or guesses). Moreover,anything we can think is also something we can think that someone elsethinks (Mary knows that John thinks that there are unicorns . . .). Theseonionlike thoughts-inside-thoughts need a special computational architecture(see Chapter 2) and, when we communicate them to others, therecursive grammar proposed by Chomsky and explained in The LanguageInstinct.We mortals can't read other people's minds directly. But we makegood guesses from what they say, what we read between the lines, whatthey show in their face and eyes, and what best explains their behavior. Itis our species' most remarkable talent. After reading the chapter onvision you might be amazed that people can recognize a dog. Now thinkabout what it takes to recognize the dog in a pantomime of walking one.But somehow children do it. The skills behind mind reading are firstexercised in the crib. Two-month-olds stare at eyes; six-month-olds knowwhen they're staring back; one-year-olds look at what a parent is staringat, and check a parent's eyes when they are uncertain why the parent isdoing something. Between eighteen and twenty-four months, childrenbegin to separate the contents of other people's minds from their ownbeliefs. They show that ability off in a deceptively simple feat: pretending.When a toddler plays along with his mother who tells him the phoneis ringing and hands him a banana, he is separating the contents of theirpretense (the banana is a telephone) from the contents of his own belief(the banana is a banana). Two-year-olds use mental verbs like see andwant, and three-year-olds use verbs like think, know, and remember.They know that a looker generally wants what he is looking at. And theygrasp the idea of "idea." For example, they know that you can't eat thememory of an apple and that a person can tell what's in a box only bylooking into it.By four, children pass a very stringent test of knowledge about otherminds: they can attribute to others beliefs they themselves know to befalse. In a typical experiment, children open a Smarties box and are surprisedto find pencils inside. (Smarties, the British psychologists explainto American audiences, are like M&M's, only better.) Then the childrenare asked what a person coming into the room expects to find. Thoughthe children know that the box contains pencils, they sequester the