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Well, what's it like to be this kind of creature? What's it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes?
当小孩子是什么样一种经历呢？像那些聪明的蝴蝶一样，在两分钟内测试五个假设？
Well, if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them have said that babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all.
如果你问心理学家和哲学家，他们大部分说了婴儿和小孩子几乎在他们的意识方面没有任何意识。
And I think just the opposite is true. I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults.
而我的看法确恰恰相反。我认为小孩子的意识事实上比我们大人的要强得多。
Now here's what we know about how adult consciousness works. And adults' attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight.
我们知道的一些关于大人的意识的事情。大人的注意力和意识就像一盏聚光灯。
So what happens for adults is we decide that something's relevant or important, we should pay attention to it.
但是大人会自己决定哪些事有关，哪些事重要，哪些事值得我们注意。
Our consciousness of that thing that we're attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark.
我们对所关注事情的意识变得非常明亮，非常清晰，其它事就反而比较暗淡。
And we even know something about the way the brain does this.
我们甚至大概知道我们的大脑为什么指挥我们这样做。
So what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains,
那当我们集中精力时前额的皮层，在我们大脑中起着执行的作用，
sends a signal that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains.
发出一个信号，让我们脑部的一小部分变得更灵活，更柔软，更会学习，让脑部的其它部分全部休息。
So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention.
我们的注意力非常集中，有目的。
If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different.
如果对婴儿和小孩注意力的进行观察，我们会发现他们完全和我们不一样。
I think babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness.
我觉得婴儿和小孩，他们意识更像一盏灯笼，而不像聚光灯。
So babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing.
所以他们不擅长将问题简化。但他们非常在行在同一时间里吸收不同来源提供的信息。
But they're very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once.
如果你研究他们的大脑，你就会看到里面有大量的神经传递素。
And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven't come on yet.
这些传递素对学习和柔软性方面都有很大帮助，而且我们尚未发现任何带阻止性的元素。
So when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention.
当我们说这些孩子注意力不够集中时，其实是说他们在分散注意力方面不擅长。
So they're bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell them something and just looking at the thing that's important.
那就意味着他们很难将注意力只集中在重要问题上而遗漏那些为他们提供线索的事情。
That's the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn.
这是一种注意力，一种知觉，我们从那些生来就会学习的蝴蝶身上见过的知觉。
