Alison Gopnik: belief

Transcript context

…How do you understand ADHD? I think that’s another example where you have a lot of variation, and a lot of the variation is just variation in individuals. Some of it is variation in what it is that the culture thinks is important. Sometimes that variation is just variation. Sometimes that variation gets to be dysfunctional or cause difficulties. I think one thing that’s interesting is, again, to go back to the consciousness point, we know and we just take for granted that little kids like two-year-olds — we say that they don’t pay attention, but what we really mean is that they don’t not pay attention. They’re paying attention to everything at once. That’s why two-year-olds are really distractible. Then, as we get older, we get this more and more focused kind of attention. People vary in how much they end up within that state of focused attention. I think there’re lots of reasons to believe that an industrial schooled society really pushes people in the direction of having very focused attention. We really want people to have very focused attention. What that means is that the kind of variation in what people are like becomes dysfunctional in a way that it might not have been in the past. I think that’s true in general, that we have to think about ways that there’re these interactions between the environment that you find yourself in and something like whatever the combination of genetics and development is that lets you have a particular phenotype, and you’re trying to figure out how those two things interact. Andy Warhol — overrated or underrated?…

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